Alex Jones trial: InfoWars producer, lawyer spar over Sandy Hook portrayals

InfoWars leader Alex Jones ignored plentiful evidence that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred, choosing instead to rely on a Sandy Hook denier despite warnings that the man exaggerated his credentials and harassed parents whose children had died in the attack, jurors heard Wednesday.

Day two of a trial pitting two Sandy Hook parents against Jones, a right-wing provocateur and conspiracy theorist, opened in an Austin courtroom Tuesday with a focus on Wolfgang Halbig, a Florida man whose campaign to portray the shooting as a hoax was given a substantial boost by Jones' InfoWars media system.

With InfoWars producer Daria Karpova on the stand, the parents' lawyer, Mark Bankston, questioned why Jones and others did not do a better job examining Halbig's claims, particularly after receiving emails questioning his qualifications and showing that Halbig had sent harassing emails to at least two parents of Sandy Hook victims.

"We get so many emails," Karpova said, adding that she and others at InfoWars did their best to verify claims made by guests on the show, which is broadcast online and on radio.

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"A beauty of the Alex Jones Show is it's not a scripted show," Karpova said, with Jones presenting information he believed was true at the time.

Bankston showed Karpova emails from Halbig — a self-styled "national school safety consultant" who spent about a year as a Florida state trooper — to two Sandy Hook parents that had been forwarded to InfoWars.

In one email, Halbig berated a mother for putting her child in danger and for passing herself off as a school security expert.

In the other email, Halbig told Scarlett Lewis — whose son Jesse Lewis, 6, was killed in the Newtown, Conn., grade school along with 19 other students and six educators — that her lies about the shooting would soon be exposed

"Do some serious soul searching," he wrote in the 2015 email.

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Lewis and Neil Heslin, Jesse's father, sued Jones in 2018 and were in the Austin courtroom Tuesday as part of a two-week trial that will determine how much money Jones will have to pay them for defamation and inflicting emotional distress. The parents are asking the jury to issue a $150 million judgment against Jones and his main company, Free Speech Systems.

Karpova, however, declined to acknowledge Halbig's emails as harassing.

"To me, this seems like a person who was very perturbed by the incident and horrified, in his mind, that the children were used for this tragedy," Karpova said. "I don't feel like he believes this is a person who has lost a child."

Later, Karpova added: "I don't believe he's mocking her. I think he's just appalled."

"So am I," Bankston said.

After playing an InfoWars clip showing Jones and Halbig actively questioning the truth about Sandy Hook more than two years after the shooting, Bankston took a step back to ask: "Do you believe Neil and Scarlett, right here, do you believe these two people are fake parents who inflicted emotional distress on America?"

"I don't believe that, and I believe their grief is being used," Karpova replied. "You're their enemy because you're lying to them. You're using their grief to make bank."

Karpova added that she expects jurors to see through that and side with Jones, saying he "did investigative research to the best of his ability."

Jones did not attend the trial's morning session, but he was in the courtroom after lunch.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Alex Jones trial: InfoWars producer, lawyer spar over Sandy Hook