Families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims have won a series of victories in their defamation suits against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that would open Jones’ business records to them and compel him to speak under oath.

Ten families are pursuing lawsuits against Jones over his role in spreading bogus claims about the shooting, including that the victims’ families were actors in a plot to confiscate firearms from Americans. The families have endured death threats, stalking and online abuse.

Jones, a far-right provocateur and owner of Infowars, a radio show and website on which he sells diet supplements, survivalist gear and gun paraphernalia, has come under growing scrutiny during the past year and has lost access to much of his online audience. Facebook, Twitter, Apple and YouTube have all banned him, and a recent deal for his show to stream on Roku was revoked last month after public outrage.

The suits by the Sandy Hook families have advanced on several fronts in recent weeks.

A Texas judge on Jan. 25 ordered Jones and representatives of his company to submit to questioning by lawyers for Scarlett Lewis, the mother of Jesse Lewis, one of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. The judge also granted access to Jones’ relevant business records and denied his lawyer’s motion to keep the records sealed.

In Connecticut, a judge ordered Infowars representatives and business partners to testify, and a ruling is expected as soon as mid-February on the families’ request to depose Jones and several Infowars “reporters” and associates.

They include Wolfgang Halbig, a former school administrator and Infowars contributor who for years has deluged Newtown officials with open records requests, demanding, among other things, records from the cleanup of “bodily fluids, brain matter, skull fragments and around 45-60 gallons of blood.”

Some families of the victims have been subjected to years of harassment from people who have embraced the bogus crisis-actor theory promoted by Jones.

Robbie and Alissa Parker’s eldest daughter, Emilie, 6, died in the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting that killed six adults as well as the 20 first-graders.

In October 2016 in Seattle, Parker was walking to meet his family at a hotel, he said, when a middle age man, dressed in khakis and a sport coat, approached him. The man, Parker said, asked if he had lost a child at Sandy Hook.

“Yes, my daughter,” Parker responded, offering his hand. The man ignored it, and instead spewed obscenities at him, Parker said.

The man trailed him, “jabbering in my ear,” Parker recalled in an interview, as he walked for blocks, trying to put distance between the harasser and his family.

“It was absolute venom,” said Parker, who is a plaintiff in one of three defamation suits against Jones. “He was absolutely disgusted with the person that he believed that I was.”

Jones did not respond to requests for comment. His lawyer, Marc Randazza, acknowledged the series of decisions in favour of the families, but said, “If you’re keeping score here, this is just the coin toss.”

Jones’ role in spreading baseless conspiracies about the families began within days of the shooting.

The night after the shooting, Parker had agreed to meet a news crew in front of a Newtown church to share a statement about Emilie. Surprised to find a sea of waiting reporters and cameras, he gasped out a nervous laugh before stepping forward to speak.

“This world is a better place because she has been in it,” he said, his voice cracking.

The footage ricocheted among conspiracy theorists, and Jones seized on it. “He’s laughing, and then he goes over and starts basically breaking down and crying,” Jones told his followers, according to court documents. “This needs to be investigated. They’re clearly using this to go after our guns.”

On another show, Jones mocked Parker’s emotions as “method acting.”

Randazza said the issue was not one of taste but of Jones’ First Amendment rights.

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“If we’re going to reset the rules about what you’re allowed to say, then let’s reset them for everyone,” Randazza said. “And I don’t think anybody would be happy with that.”

Jones, once an obscure radio personality, gained national visibility in 2015, when Donald Trump appeared on his show as a presidential candidate, praising his “amazing” reputation. Jones has invited a number of Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists on his show, shared video footage and some families’ photos and personal information.

Trump has echoed Jones’ claims that establishment media companies have conspired to silence conservative voices online, and in November, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders used a misleading Infowars video to bolster the administration’s claims that a CNN reporter had manhandled a White House aide.

As the lawsuits inch toward trial, Jones is fighting to shield his records and himself. Last week the Connecticut Supreme Court rejected his appeal, letting stand the lower court’s ruling granting access to his records. Also last week, Jones’ lawyers and Halbig, who is representing himself, filed a request to change the location of an eventual jury trial from Fairfield County, which encompasses Newtown, to a Connecticut county more distant from the scene of the shooting.

The families are asserting that the case is about preventing harmful falsehoods from proliferating in the “post-truth” ecosystem of the internet.

“This was not journalism. It was marketing; Jones used these lies to sell his Infowars brand products for profit,” the families’ Connecticut lawyers wrote in court documents. The families are represented by Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder in Connecticut, and by Farrar & Ball in Texas.

Though Infowars and its affiliates are private and do not report financial results, a 2018 New York Times investigation found that, in 2014, Infowars’ revenue was more than $20 million (U.S.) a year, according to testimony Jones provided in an unrelated court case. Jones recently claimed revenue of up to $50 million, saying on his show that it “all goes to lawyers.”

This past week, police arrested a man suspected of stalking Emilie Parker’s family sporadically for years, sending letters that terrified them, because they realized he knew where they lived.

Authorities said the man, Kevin Purfield, 51, of Portland, Oregon, was arrested on stalking charges after he repeatedly called and wrote the editor of The Oregonian, asserting that its reporting on Sandy Hook and other mass shootings was false, because they never happened. Purfield was imprisoned in 2013 for harassing victims’ families after the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. When his probation ended, he resumed harassing the Parkers, Parker said.

Parker and his family joined the legal effort against Jones only after speaking with a family whose daughter died in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 in Parkland, Florida.

“The mom said, ‘My husband did a media interview, and now he just gets attacked online by all these conspiracy theorists,’” Parker said.

“I thought, ‘These people aren’t going away,’” he said. “It’s time for us to see what we can do about it.”