Right-wing Infowars broadcaster Alex Jones did not personally check or verify stories about the Sandy Hook school massacre, his defamation damages trial has heard.
The trial in Texas is being held to determine how much money the Infowars conspiracy theorist will have to pay to the parents of a child murdered in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Jones is being sued by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, was among the 20 children and six adults massacred by the gunman.
Infowars producer Daria Karpova was questioned at the trial on Wednesday about a 2014 Infowars video titled “Sandy Hook deaths missing from FBI report.”
“There are photos of kids that are still alive that they said died,” Jones said in the video that was played for the jury in Travis County District Court.
Mark Bankston, a lawyer for the parents, asked Ms Karpova: “Mr Jones should have verified that if he was going to say something that outrageous, right?”
“I can’t speak to what was going through his head at that time,” she reportedly told the jury.
And she later testified that Jones “was relying on the writers” and “lets the writers do their research.”
Mr Bankston also questioned Ms Karpova about videos produced in May 2014 that all included the phrase: “The front line of truth.”
“We want them to figure out themselves if it’s true, or not,” she told the court of Infowars’ viewers.
She then claimed that it was in fact the lawyers in the case who were “using their grief to make bank”, not Jones.
“Alex meant everything from his heart and he never claimed something for sure, it was his opinion, he stated it every time. He was trying to do honest investigative research to the best of his ability and that’s his job,” she claimed.
For years after the shooting, Jones used his website Infowars to claim that the shooting was faked, a “false flag” operation and that the parents had pretended to grieve.
Judge Maya Guerro Gamble previously ruled against Jones after he failed to produce documents for court-ordered discovery in the case. Jones and Infowars were held liable for all damages, and the jury will now rule on what he will pay Mr Heslin and Ms Lewis.
He has already lost three other Sandy Hook-related defamation cases through default judgements, and will face a jury in Connecticut that will decide on those damages in September.
