Alex Jones has made a personal calling card of the idea that the grieving parents of murdered children were actors and their children never existed, framing those grieving parents as evil gun-grabbers who deserve to be hounded and persecuted. Jones's followers have complied, forcing Sandy Hook parents Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner to move seven times in five years in fear for their safety. They can't even visit the grave of their murdered six-year-old son Noah. Now, they're taking Jones to court—but he says that his lies about them, his incitements to violence against them, are just exercise of his First Amendment rights. In fact, he's trying to get $100,000 in court costs from the family, because that's the kind of vile scum Alex Jones is.
This is what Jones is claiming as free speech:
The Pozner family’s story is recounted in the court filings: In 2015, after Mr. Pozner succeeded in having an Infowars video taken down from Mr. Jones’s YouTube channel, “Mr. Jones went on an angry rant about me for nearly an hour,” Mr. Pozner said in an affidavit. Mr. Jones “also hosted a call with an obsessed fellow conspiracy theorist who issued a threat to me.”
“Mr. Jones then showed his audience my personal information and maps to addresses associated with my family,” the affidavit says.
According to Jones's lawyers, Jones's real targets were the government and the media, not the parents of murdered children, and in this case the parents "isolate specific statements, take them out of context while ignoring other relevant portions, and misinterpret what was said." What context could possibly justify Jones doxxing them in front of his large audience? How is it targeting the government and the media to ... specifically target Leonard Pozner by revealing his personal information after ranting about him at length?
If Jones succeeds at convincing the court that Pozner and De La Rosa count as public figures—a title that could only be applied to them because their six-year-old was killed with an assault weapon—they will have to prove that he acted with actual malice. Not that that should be difficult, under the circumstances.
