© 2024 New England Public Media

FCC public inspection files:
WGBYWFCRWNNZWNNUWNNZ-FMWNNI

For assistance accessing our public files, please contact hello@nepm.org or call 413-781-2801.
PBS, NPR and local perspective for western Mass.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Sandy Hook Families File Suit Against InfoWars' Alex Jones

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, center right, is escorted by police out of a crowd of protesters outside the Republican convention in Cleveland in 2016.
John Minchillo
/
AP
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, center right, is escorted by police out of a crowd of protesters outside the Republican convention in Cleveland in 2016.

The parents of two children who died in the 2012 Newtown school shooting are suing Alex Jones for defamation. Jones is a right-wing talk show host and conspiracy theorist who has claimed the shooting didn’t happen. The defamation lawsuits were filed late Monday in Texas, the home state of Jones' media company, Infowars.

The plaintiffs are Neil Heslin, the father of Jesse Lewis, and Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of Noah Pozner. Jesse and Noah were among the 20 students and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School who died in the shooting.

The plaintiffs filed separate lawsuits seeking at least $1 million from Jones, who has repeatedly used his talk show on the InfoWars website to claim the shooting was staged. The lawsuits allege Jones’s misinformation led conspiracy theorists to make death threats against the families of shooting victims. Last year a Florida woman was sentenced to five months in prison for making threats against Leonard Pozner, one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Jones could not immediately be reached for comment.

Copyright 2018 WSHU

Davis Dunavin loves telling stories, whether on the radio or around the campfire. He fell in love with sound-rich radio storytelling while working as an assistant reporter at KBIA public radio in Columbia, Missouri. Before coming back to radio, he worked in digital journalism as the editor of Newtown Patch. As a freelance reporter, his work for WSHU aired nationally on NPR. Davis is a proud graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism; he started in Missouri and ended up in Connecticut, which, he'd like to point out, is the same geographic trajectory taken by Mark Twain.
The Associated Press is one of the largest and most trusted sources of independent newsgathering, supplying a steady stream of news to its members, international subscribers and commercial customers. AP is neither privately owned nor government-funded; instead, it's a not-for-profit news cooperative owned by its American newspaper and broadcast members.
Related Content