New trouble for Alex Jones in court fight with Sandy Hook families

Alex Jones, of InfoWars, yells at protestors outside of Toyota Center before a Trump campaign rally, Monday, October 22, 2018, in Houston. Alex Jones, of InfoWars, yells at protestors outside of Toyota Center before a Trump campaign rally, Monday, October 22, 2018, in Houston. Photo: Houston Chronicle Photo: Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 6 Caption Close New trouble for Alex Jones in court fight with Sandy Hook families 1 / 6 Back to Gallery

NEWTOWN — Extremist Alex Jones’ latest court trouble involves more than routine pre-trial wrangling with the Sandy Hook families who are suing him for defamation.

The real fight is over the families’ claim that the conspiracies Jones promoted as the frontman of Infowars were calculated to drive business to his internet supplements business.

The heart of the court case came out in dueling motions filed over the last two weeks by the families, who accuse Jones of deliberately withholding information about his business strategy to hide his motives, and by Jones, who accuses the families of having no proof and of making him fish at his own expense for documents that don’t exist.

“The (families) proceed at their own peril by insisting that Jones defendants engage in sophisticated editorial content-making, targeting stories to products and seeking to stimulate sales by means of peddling known falsehoods likely to go viral,” wrote Jones’ attorney Norman Pattis. “Simply put, there is no evidence to support the claim that the Jones defendants knowingly market falsehoods for financial gain.”

The judge overseeing the case has sided with the family, ordering Jones under threat of punishment to turn over to the families the missing business records in question.

“[T]he court will consider appropriate sanctions for (Jones’) failure to fully comply should (he) not produce the data in one week,” state Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis ruled Monday.

If it seems as though Jones has been in trouble with this judge before, he has. In March, Bellis said she was fed up with Jones’ delays in turning over documents to the families, and threatened to throw out his motion to dismiss their case.

In response, Jones gave families a 35-page Google Analytics report of his online businesses. On Monday, Bellis ruled the report was “[S]imply not full and fair compliance,” with business records the families requested.

The families agreed.

“The (families) have already argued at length that this withholding is deliberate,” the families’ lawyers wrote. “It plainly is.”

Although Jones says he no longer believes that the 2012 shooting of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook School was “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax,” and “completely fake with actors” with “inside job written all over it,” families argue that he is nonetheless liable.

The judge’s order comes one week after YouTube announced it was banning hate speech and blatantly inaccurate content. Facebook adopted a similar ban earlier this year, and Twitter did so last year. The actions left Jones without a presence on major social media platforms.

The defamation suit against Jones filed by an FBI agent and seven families who lost loved ones in Sandy Hook is separate from two similar defamation suits in Texas filed by parents of children who died in the 2012 shooting.

The Texas cases made headlines in March when Jones was interviewed under oath by the parents’ lawyers and said his conspiracy extremism was “like a form of psychosis.”

Expect more headlines from Jones on July 1 and 2, when lawyers for the families in Connecticut depose him for a total of six hours.

As if his trouble in court and on social media was not enough, Jones was forced to pay $15,000 to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit involving a cartoon frog named Pepe.

The payment, agreed to on Monday, settled a complaint that Jones sold a poster of President Donald Trump and the frog without the permission of the frog’s creator.

rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342