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Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones showed up to his recent defamation trial having taped over his own mouth to dramatic effect. Written on that tape was an appeal to the First Amendment.
“Save the 1st!” Jones’ tape proclaimed. But his performance in court was more like a rendition of “Who’s on First?”
And there should be little doubt that it was a performance. He sometimes skipped court proceedings to lambast the judge and jury on his show. He even may have opened the door to perjuring himself, and had a baffling exchange with opposing counsel after his legal team apparently sent a sizable chunk of Jones’ phone content to the other side by mistake.
Usually, Jones is able to direct things as he sees fit on air. But as a Texas judge reminded him, the courtroom is not his show, and he must tell the truth.
“It’s the most bizarre behavior I have ever seen at a trial,” Barry Covert, a First Amendment lawyer from Buffalo, New York, told the Associated Press. “In my opinion, Jones is a money-making juggernaut — crazy like a fox,” Covert said. “The bigger the spectacle, the better.”
It was a big verdict, to match. The jury found that Jones owed more than $4 million in compensatory damages and over $45 million in punitive damages to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son, 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting. Jones had for years claimed falsely that the school shooting was a hoax being used to enact gun control measures.
Under oath, Jones has now admitted that the Sandy Hook shooting massacre was “100 percent real.” He and any reasonable person should have figured that out years ago.
“You have the ability to stop this man from ever doing it again,” Wesley Ball, one of the parents’ lawyers, told the jury last week. “Send the message to those who desire to do the same: Speech is free. Lies, you pay for.”
As journalists, we don’t want to see situational application of the First Amendment. “My information is truth, and theirs is not only trash, but they should be sued for it,” can be a dangerous place for any journalist — or any strong supporter of free speech — to be. It’s a slippery slope, no doubt.
But sometimes, the trash is so rotten, so clearly and willfully noxious, so repeatedly flung, so damaging to others, that even the First Amendment doesn’t protect it. That is where defamation laws come into play.
“Alex Jones was attacking individuals,” Stephen D. Solomon, who teaches First Amendment law and is founding editor of New York University’s First Amendment Watch, told the Los Angeles Times. “And that’s important. A lot of disinformation does not attack individuals.”
Now, in Jones’ case, the jury never actually had a chance to weigh in on the substantive matter of whether Jones is liable for defaming Sandy Hook families. That is because Jones did not fully participate in the discovery phase of the trial by failing to produce certain information, leading to Judge Maya Guerra Gamble issuing a default judgment against him.
Unsurprisingly, Jones refused to fully participate in the process, but then turned around and called it a “show trial” when it wasn’t going his way. That phrase is en vogue for a lot of people right now who don’t seem to like finding out that there are, if fact, consequences for their words and actions.
