InfoWars host Alex Jones filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, accusing The Young Turks–a progressive online news show–and Brianna Wu–a Massachusetts Democrat running for the House of Representatives–of libeling the plaintiff. The defamation lawsuit focuses on the false claim that Jones “sent child porn to Sandy Hook parents.”
“Once uncovered, the FBI cleared JONES and his employer, and JONES was the identified target victim. Defendants instead told the world it was JONES who sent child porn to the victims of school shootings,” the lawsuit said. “Jones, publicly, and through counsel, continually requested corrections from the offenders. These Defendants refused. This was libel. This suit follows.”
As Law&Crime reported before, lawyers representing families of Sandy Hook mass shooting victims in a defamation suit accused Jones of sending electronic files containing child pornography as part of the discovery process; the plaintiffs sued Jones for his “years-long campaign of abusive and outrageous false statements in which Jones and the other defendants have developed, amplified and perpetuated claims that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and that the 26 families who lost loved ones that day are paid actors who faked their relative’s deaths.”
Jones’s lawyer in the latest defamation suit, Robert Barnes (who has penned columns for Law&Crime before), addressed the child porn controversy, saying the FBI “cleared JONES and his employer,” and identified Jones as the “target victim”:
In May 23, 2018, Infowars, JONES’ employer, was sued by a range of people, including those related to victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. During the litigation period, Infowars’ corporate email accounts were attacked by online cybercriminals ideologically allied with the Defendants, with spyware and malware, claiming to be Sandy Hook related emails, by including Sandy Hook terms in the emails. Hidden and embedded in the emails the hackers sent to various Infowars email addresses were images and videos of child pornography. The emails were never opened by anyone at Infowars. The court in the Sandy Hook case required Infowars to turn over any and all emails that included any reference to Sandy Hook. It appears the hackers who tried to plant the emails on Infowars’ servers were aware of this discovery process, and deliberately used Sandy Hook terms in the emails to create a false controversy. By court order, all those emails were turned over, including unopened emails. In that process, the lawyers discovered that someone had been trying to plant child porn on Infowars computers under the guise of Sandy Hook emails. The FBI was contacted regarding the email exchange and subsequently discovered that these cybercriminals intentionally attacked Infowars, JONES’ employer. Importantly, the FBI concluded that the emails were archived and were found to have never been opened by any member of Infowars.com. No one at Infowars had any knowledge of the content; JONES was the intended victim.
A tweet sent from The Young Turks’ official account is still online. It contains a link that leads to a YouTube video that has apparently been removed, but the tweet saying “Alex Jones Sent Child Porn To Sandy Hook Parents” remains. So does Barnes’s retraction and apology demand.
Wu’s tweet is also still online, as is Barnes’s retraction demand.
“This is shocking, even by Alex Jones standards,” Wu tweeted. “He didn’t just send child porn to the #SandyHook families, he threatened to murder them on the air.”
The plaintiff said the defendants “launched a campaign of lies and libels against their media competitor and ideological opponent […] virally spread one of the worst smears that can be spread about anyone: accusing someone of one of the most infamous federal felony crimes, even though defendant knew JONES was actually the victim of that crime.”
The plaintiff seeks a jury trial and claims it will be shown that damages “far exceed $75,000.00” — “not including interest, court costs, and attorneys’ fees.”
Law&Crime has reached out to the defendants for comment and will update this space if there is one.
[Image via Drew Angerer/Getty Images]