AUSTIN, Texas _ In court papers last week filed in Travis County, Houston attorney Mark Bankston wrote that his defamation lawsuit against Alex Jones was already a victory "in one important respect."
In the past, Noah Pozner, one of the 20 children killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was referred to by Jones as Leonard Pozner's and Veronique De La Rosa's "supposed son" or a child who "reportedly" died, Bankston said.
"Compelling Mr. Jones to admit in a legal pleading that Plaintiffs' son truly died was an important step towards safety and justice for this family," Bankston wrote. "But it is not the last."
It is one of five defamation lawsuits against Jones now working their way through the courts _ three brought by Bankston in Jones' home turf of Austin _ that collectively threaten Jones' long and enormously lucrative run as the nation's premier conspiracy theorist, a formerly outsider role that has made Jones, in this topsy-turvy political moment, one of President Donald Trump's most influential media allies and defenders.
If the Travis County Sandy Hook case makes it to trial, it could become an epic courtroom showdown, heading into Trump's re-election campaign, over where to draw the line between free speech and libel in an era of competing claims of "fake news."
Bankston and Dallas attorney Mark Enoch, representing Jones, will be in a Travis County courtroom Wednesday arguing over Enoch's motion to dismiss the defamation case under the Texas Citizens Participation Act _ a law unanimously passed by the Legislature in 2011 and signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry that was intended to protect citizens' First Amendment rights from meritless claims intended to silence them. Bankston said the law is being invoked in this case as nothing more than a stalling tactic.
Enoch argues that the suit is a "strategic device" to silence Jones "as well as anyone else who refuses to accept what the mainstream media and government tell them, and prevent them from expressing any doubt or raising questions."
"The purpose of this lawsuit is to create new Texas law that open Texas' citizens to civil liability should they openly question the government and/or craft any type of 'conspiracy theory' or differing view to that which is reported by the mainstream media," Enoch said.
The lawsuit, according to Enoch, is really intended to undermine the Second Amendment by going after Jones' First Amendment rights.
"His audience grew in large part because people agreed with his opinions about the Second Amendment and his opinion that corporate media and liberal elected and appointed officials had historically worked to limit gun owners' rights, sometimes deceptively, and could not be trusted to preserve the rights of gun owners under the Second Amendment," Enoch said. "As his audience grew, his voice became more powerful."
The suit, Enoch said, is about silencing that voice and is only the latest effort in what he contends is Pozner's and De La Rosa's public campaign against Jones, "all in their quest to outlaw conspiracy theories, assault rifles, high-capacity clips and to increase firearm registration requirements."
The plaintiffs, all of whose lives were turned upside down when they found themselves on the wrong side of Jones' reports, are determined to demonstrate, in painstaking detail, that Jones is a willful propagator of fake news and that he peddles stories promoted as fact, that he knows or should know are false, to an often credulous audience, at least a few of whom are all too willing to act on Jones' false information with sometimes perilous results.
The spine of Bankston's case is provided by an exhaustive analysis of Jones' brand of journalism by Fred Zipp, the former editor of the Austin American-Statesman, who since 2012 has been teaching at the University of Texas, where he supervises a digital media initiative known as Reporting Texas.
"I was aware of InfoWars' extremely poor reputation in the media industry with respect to the reliability of the information it publishes, and I also knew that Mr. Jones had alleged the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a government hoax involving actors," Zipp writes in his 26-page affidavit, which is accompanied by 172 pages of transcripts from Jones' broadcasts.
"While the site purports to be a news and information operation it is actually a propaganda site for Mr. Jones' theories about a global conspiracy to control and enslave the world's population," Zipp writes. "In Mr. Jones' view, communists are active participants in the conspiracy, and depriving citizens of access to firearms is a tactic used in enslaving the population."
Jones is broadcast on more than 160 radio stations, his YouTube channel has more than 2.4 million subscribers, and InfoWars had nearly 24 million page views in June, according to Alexa.com, which tracks website traffic.
