Alex Jones trial: Sandy Hook parents have PTSD, live in terror, psychiatrist testifies

Criticized by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and confronted by some of his followers, the parents of 6-year-old Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis have developed post-traumatic stress disorder and live in constant anxiety and terror, a psychiatrist testified Monday.

Forensic psychiatrist Roy Lubit, a specialist in emotional trauma, said the parents' troubles were not caused by their son's violent death in the 2012 school shooting but by Jones' repeated portrayals of the attack as staged or faked on his InfoWars program.

"It's more than just interfering with healing, it has pushed them back ... into some of their earlier pain," Lubit said in a downtown Austin courtroom.

Later this week, a jury will be asked to determine how much Jones should pay to Jesse's parents, Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, for defamation and emotional distress after repeatedly portraying the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which killed 20 students and six educators, as a hoax meant to justify a government crackdown on gun rights,

Heslin has had bullets fired at his home and car, and people who deny that the Sandy Hook attack took place have made threatening phone calls and sent harassing emails to both parents, Lubit testified.

"On dozens of occasions, people came up to them to challenge that it actually occurred. This is all pretty frightening," Lubit said.

"It's more accurate, in some ways, to say they're terrified," he added, noting that Lewis sleeps with a gun, a knife and pepper spray nearby and doesn't use the air conditioner, despite the heat, for fear the noise will prevent her from hearing threats.

Both parents are "quite depressed" and have problems sleeping and concentrating, Lubit said, and both fear that their memories of Jesse are being destroyed by the controversy.

They also have hired bodyguards for the trial, Lubit said. "They are very, very frightened of someone, some follower of Jones, trying to kill them," he said.

Asked if that's an unreasonable reaction, Lubit said it was not. "I think there's a real threat," he said.

Lewis and Heslin were not in the courtroom during the testimony, at Lubit's suggestion. To hear more about their suffering would be a traumatic trigger and "for a little bit make things worse," he said.

Another witness, psychotherapist Michael Crouch — who has treated Heslin since 2013 and saw Lewis for 10 sessions in 2020 — said Jones' portrayals of Sandy Hook as a hoax and parents as lying actors began overwhelming their memories of Jesse as a hero who saved nine fellow students by yelling, "Run!" when the shooter was reloading.

Heslin in particular sees the lawsuit against Jones as a way to right wrongs and continue protecting his son's memory, Crouch said.

"The loss of Jesse, you can't make that OK. He is not going to recover from that," Crouch said. "The new injury is his own personal safety, and that there are people who believe Sandy Hook was a hoax, and he has to set that right."

Lawyers for the parents also played a videotaped deposition of Adan Salazar, an InfoWars writer who was the second employee to say there was no training at InfoWars about journalistic standards, fact checking, verifying sources and verifying reporting by other outlets.

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Asked if he thought about the impact that calling Sandy Hook a faked or staged event would have on the victims' families, Salazar replied, "I didn't think about that."

The trial is slated to end this week. The first week of trial closed Friday with Becca Lewis, who researches how disinformation and conspiracy theories travel online, testifying as an expert witness for the parents.

Lewis, no relation to Scarlett Lewis, said Jones and InfoWars elevated a group of Sandy Hook deniers who had "little to no reach online" and sent their ideas to millions. "It's really a rarified group of people who have the level of audience that Mr. Jones has," she said.

A 2013 Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that 24% of respondents believed the Sandy Hook shooting was faked or might have been, a response Becca Lewis attributed to Jones' portrayals.

"The 24% is directly due to the influence and amplification provided by Alex Jones and InfoWars," she told jurors.

The point is important to the parents' request for $75 million in damages for defamation and another $75 million for the intentional infliction of emotion distress — $1 for every Sandy Hook doubter identified in the poll.

Jurors also will be asked to assess punitive damages after hearing testimony on the net worth of Jones and his main company, Free Speech Systems, which filed for bankruptcy protection Friday.

Jones, who was not in the courtroom Monday and has attended sporadically, faces two more trials, one in Austin and another in Connecticut, to determine additional damage awards for Sandy Hook families.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Sandy Hook parents have PTSD, jurors told in Alex Jones trial