(Washington) The parents of a child killed in the worst school massacre in the United States asked jurors on Wednesday to sentence far-right conspirator Alex Jones to pay them $ 150 million for denying the reality of the carnage.
Posted at 6:22 p.m.
“We are here to make sure that Alex Jones and his company pay for the outright lies they have told,” said Kyle Farrar, lawyer for Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, after ten days of trial in a Texas court.
The couple lost their six-year-old son when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut in 2012, killing 20 children and six adults.
Alex Jones, a well-known figure on the far right and follower of conspiracy theories, had claimed on his Infowars site that the massacre was only a staged scene led by opponents of firearms.
According to the parents, his lies had energized his audiences, allowing him to pocket millions of dollars, while they became the target of harassment campaigns.
Several families had sued him for compensation.
He had finally publicly admitted the reality of the killing, while refusing to cooperate with the courts.
Judges in Texas and Connecticut had therefore condemned him by default to pay damages to the plaintiffs, while leaving it to jurors to set their amount.
The first of two trials, which stemmed from the complaint of Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, gave rise to a final battle between the parties on Wednesday in Austin.
The couple were ‘victims of an ongoing campaign of defamation, year after year, and suffered emotional stress’, which aggravated their pain, pleaded their lawyer, accusing Alex Jones of ‘taking advantage of their suffering “.
Alex Jones’ lawyer questioned the link between his client’s remarks and the harm suffered by the plaintiffs. “His platform wasn’t that big”, “he wasn’t the New York Timesbut a small talk show in Austin,” Andino Reynal said.
Just before this exchange, Alex Jones, called on the witness stand, again acknowledged that the massacre was “100% real”.
But another lawyer, Mark Bankston, questioned his good faith, showing excerpts from his show, taped last week, in which he said the jurors had been chosen from among people “who don’t know on which planet they live “.
The jury will begin its deliberations Thursday morning.