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Yesterday Alex Jones threw a massive shitfit on the witness stand, prompting his own lawyer to put him in timeout, canceling today’s planned testimony in the second Sandy Hook defamation lawsuit.
“Robbie Parker’s sitting right here. He’s real, isn’t he?” demanded the Connecticut plaintiffs’ lawyer Chris Mattei, gesturing to the father of 6-year-old Emilie Parker, who was murdered in her classroom on December 14, 2012.
Jones, who called Parker an actor, aired edited versions on Infowars of a video in which Parker addressed the press, and mocked the grieving father’s tears, conceded that Parker was real.
“For years you put a target on his back, didn’t you?” shouted Mattei, as Jones’s lawyer repeatedly tried to object. “You put a target on his back like you did every single parent and loved one sitting here, didn’t you?”
“These are real people, you know that, Mr. Jones?” the lawyer pressed.
“Just like those Iraqis you liberals killed and loved,” Jones shot back. “You’re unbelievable. You switch on emotions on and off when you want. You’re just ambulance chasing.”
Which probably makes sense to the subset of Americans who think that Barack Obama was president on September 11, 2001. But to those of us who don’t mainline Infowars and Alex Jones’s particular brand of monetized conspiracy trucker speed, would appear to be at odds with both linear time and the professed political positions of both major American political parties.
“Show a little respect,” Mattei scolded, pointing to the families of the slain children and school staff assembled in the courtroom.
“Is this a struggle session? Are we in China?” Jones sneered.
I’ve already said I’m sorry hundreds of times, and I’m done saying I’m sorry. I didn’t progenerate [sic] this. I wasn’t the first person to say it. American gun owners didn’t like being blamed for this, as the left did, so we rejected it mentally and said it must not be true. But I legitimately thought it might have been staged, and I stand by that and I don’t apologize for it.
Well.
It’s an odd posture to take before a jury tasked with assessing monetary damages that resulted from Jones’s horrible lies about the twenty children and seven staffers murdered ten years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary. And indeed, deciding how big a check should be cut is the jurors’ only task, since Jones’s egregious refusal to comply with discovery earned him default judgments in three courtrooms. That he defamed these people is now a settled issue.
And yet, sitting just feet away from the families he’d called “crisis actors,” Jones showed no remorse and insisted that calling the massacre “staged” and a “hoax,” which he did within hours of the event, was a rational response to calls for gun control.
Outside the presence of the jury, Judge Barbara Bellis admonished the lawyers and Jones to knock it off. “You can expect a contempt hearing if anybody steps out of line,” she said of Jones’s anticipated return to the witness stand this Friday morning. But in the event, it never happened. His lawyer Norm Pattis said that he’ll call him as a defense witness later in the trial, and will forego cross examination today. This has the twin advantages of allowing Pattis a broader scope of questioning, not delimited by the plaintiffs’ cross, and keeps his lunatic client away from the jury today. And maybe if he gets really lucky, Pattis can convince Jones not to testify at all, since he has a bad habit of blowing shit up.
See above, and also, this video of Jones grandstanding on the courthouse steps this very morning.
“They’ve weaponized the judiciary! The Deep State is going after all their political enemies and opponents and trying with lawfare to bankrupt them or put them in prison,” he shouted in an extended monologue during which he lied about having complied with discovery, called the court “tyrannical,” and referenced his bankruptcy, as he has explicitly been barred from doing on the witness stand.
Not that Alex Jones would ever try to send a message to the jurors in his case. Perish the very thought! Although, he did instruct those jurors to “do your own research,” something which would blatantly illegal for them to do.
This prompted furious debate inside the courtroom, as the plaintiffs’ lawyers demanded that the judge instruct the jurors that they cannot do their own research. But perhaps sensing that Jones might have fatally damaged himself with the panel, they pointedly didn’t move for a mistrial.
The whole thing’s a filthy shitshow. And thanks to the bankruptcy proceedings, we know that the last trial caused sales at Infowars to go through the roof, with his many fans rushing to defend this free speech warrior by purchasing $40 vials of beet extract. Let’s control our gorge by envisioning that money going to the Sandy Hook families, lest we spend the entire weekend projectile vomiting in disgust.
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