The grieving father of a victim of the Sandy Hook shooting has broken his silence about the 2012 press conference that made him the top target for Alex Jones’ lies about the massacre.
Robbie Parker’s six-year-old daughter Emilie was one of the 26 students and staff members murdered in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on 14 December 2012.
One day after the massacre, the devastated father gave a brief speech to the media where he paid tribute to his little girl who “made the world a better place” for being in it.
Unbeknownst to Mr Parker at the time, it was the first time any of the victims’ family members had spoken out publicly following their deaths.
As he walked up to the microphone, he briefly smiled – something that instantly made him a target of the conspiracy theorist’s lies.
Over the following years, Mr Jones repeatedly mocked Mr Parker’s heartbreaking moment of intense grief on his far-right conspiracy show Infowars and branded him “a soap opera actor”.
On the witness stand at Mr Jones’s defamation trial on Wednesday, Mr Parker told the court that he had been waiting years to set the record straight.
“I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time,” he said.
Mr Parker spoke of the moment he learned that there was a mass shooting at his daughter’s school.
He said he received a voicemail that the school was locked down because of a shooting.
His wife Alissa Parker then called him and he said he tried to make a plan about what they should do.
Mr Parker was at work at the hospital at the time and, initially, stayed at the facility so that he would be there if his daughter was brought in injured. He then decided to leave and go to meet his wife at the school.
A heartbreaking photo was previously shown in court of the griefstricken couple leaving the firehouse near the school, moments after learning Emilie was among the victims,
At the time, Mr Parker said he had never heard of Mr Jones before.
He said he decided to speak to the media because his friends and people he knew back in Utah were receiving calls from the media and he wanted his daughter’s memory to live on as the family knew her.
Mr Parker said that he “felt a strong urge to protect her in some way”.
“All I could remember was I didn’t have her anymore ... but I didn’t want anything coming out about Emilie that could be taken the wrong way,” he said.
“The reason I wanted it videotaped and sent back to Utah was so my words wouldn’t be misconstrued.”
Mr Parker said that the smile – which was seized upon by Mr Jones and conspiracy theorists – was a mix of shock, him trying to calm himself down to be able to speak and his father suddenly telling him to “go get ’em” as he stepped towards the microphone to speak to reporters.
Chris Mattei, the attorney for the families, told Mr Parker that the video clip had been played by Mr Jones “countless times” on his show – began pushing lies about him almost immediately after his daughter’s murder.
On 17 December 2012, Mr Jones published a video on Infowars sayig “they’re staging it, that’s what my gut tells me – it’s never been wrong”.
Two days later on 19 December, Mr Jones published a statement saying “Father of Sandy Hook victims says ‘read the card?’ seconds before tear-jerking press conference”, jurors were shown.
Mr Jones told his followers that members of the media or the government had given Mr Parker a card telling him what to say.
Exactly two years on from the massacre on 14 December 2014, Infowars host Rob Dew told viewers “we put this on the air almost immediately” saying “this looks odd” about Mr Parker’s press conference.
He claimed that Mr Parker’s “smile and the demeanour” looked “like someone getting into character”.
The court was also shown a clip of Mr Jones’s deposition this year where he said he “may have called him an actor” and claimed that “I said it looked fake to me”.
“When you called him an actor, what you meant by that was that he didn’t actually have a daughter called Emilie – correct?” asked Mr Mattei.
“Yes,” Mr Jones replied.
Mr Parker choked back tears as he said conspiracy theorists started leaving messages like “liar” and “why are you laughing” on Emilie’s Facebook memorial page just two days after the massacre – the same day Mr Jones said the shooting was “staged”.
At his daughter’s funeral, he said he found his wife hiding in a coat closet in tears saying: “I don’t know if I can do this.”
Mr Parker took the witness stand after his wife who gave emotional about the harassment their family faced from followers of Mr Jones’s lies – and the toll it has taken on her husband.
Ms Parker choked back tears as she told the court how he had become “hypervigilant” and “distrustful”.
“He doesn’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t trust people,” she said.
“It’s stolen so much of him. He is very withdrawn, doesn’t talk to people. He doesn’t look up or talk to people when we go to church. He sits in a corner and has his head down the entire time.”
She added: “He felt so much shame and felt like it was his fault that this happened and felt like it was because of him that our family got attacked and all the other families got attacked. He beat himself up for it and felt like he had to fix it.”
Mr Parker was seen wiping tears from his eyes as he listened to his wife’s testimony.
The Parker family left Newtown and moved to Washington state within a year of the massacre because of the harassment and death threats they were receiving. But, the conspiracy theorists and harassment followed them wherever they went.
Mr Parker was one of the last victims’ family members to join the Connecticut defamation lawsuit against Mr Jones for the lies he spread calling the mass shooting a “hoax”.
This marks the second defamation trial from a lawsuit that Mr Jones lost with Sandy Hook victims’ families.
Mr Jones began spouting false claims just hours after the 2012 massacre, claiming on his conspiracy site that the mass shooting was “a giant hoax” and that the victims were “actors”.
He continued to push the lies to his followers for years claiming it was a “false flag” operation.
While Mr Jones profited financially from spreading his lies, the victims’ families were subjected to years of in-person and online harassment and threats from his followers.
In a Texas trial last month, Mr Jones admitted that he knew the 2012 massacre was real – and not a “hoax” as he had previously claimed it was.
In that case, he was ordered to pay $4.11m in compensatory damages and $45.2m in punitive damages to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of six-year-old victim Jesse Lewis.
Now, jurors in Connecticut will decide how much Mr Jones must pay those families in damages.
