We know that Alex Jones lies and lies brazenly. In a surprising development, his lies have now been exposed in court during the trial to determine how much damages Alex Jones should pay Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Heslin who was murdered at Sandy Hook, the parents’s lawyer Mark Bankston dramatically revealed a lie that Jones has made. It was exposed because Jones’s lawyers had inadvertently sent copies of all the text messages on Jones’s phone to Bankston.
In a remarkable moment, Bankston disclosed to Jones and the court that he had recently acquired evidence proving Jones had lied when he claimed during the discovery process that he had never texted about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.
Bankston said that Jones’ attorney had, in an apparent mishap, sent him two years of cell phone records that included every text message Jones had sent.
The cell phone records, Bankston said, showed that Jones had in fact texted about the Sandy Hook shooting.
“That is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn’t have text messages about Sandy Hook,” Bankston said.
Bankston showed Jones a text message exchange he had about Sandy Hook. But Jones testified that he had “never seen these text messages.”
That was not all. Bankston also revealed how Jones had once alleged that the judge who is overseeing the trial was connected to a pedophilia ring.
In another moment, Jones was asked whether he had connected Maya Guerra Gamble, the judge overseeing the trial, to pedophilia and human trafficking.
When Jones denied having done so, Bankston played video for the court of an Infowars video which did just that.
In the video, Jones attacked Gamble’s prior work for Child Protective Services by claiming the agency had been “exposed” for “working for pedophiles.”
Gamble, whose office did not respond to an earlier request for comment about the fact Infowars has been attacking her in such terms, laughed when she saw a screengrab from the video in court on Wednesday.
“The person on the left of this image is our judge, correct?” Bankston asked Jones.
Jones replied that it was.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs said Tuesday that they intend to ask for sanctions against Jones for being dishonest on the stand. And Gamble on Tuesday had also admonished Jones for having violated his oath to tell the truth twice.
The judge seemed exasperated.
“You are already under oath to tell the truth,” Gamble said Tuesday. “You’ve already violated that oath twice today, in just those two examples. It seems absurd to instruct you again that you must tell the truth while you testify. Yet here I am again.”
“This is not your show,” Gamble added to him Wednesday.
Watch her scold him.
The cell phone records had other damaging information.
The data from the phone is going to be an enormous pain for Jones and his attorneys. While he has told the jury that he is “bankrupt,” the phone data reveals that Infowars was making up to $800,000 a day at one point; even after social-media sites stopped promoting his stuff, in 2018 the site was still raking in as much as $100,000 to $200,000 per day. Hours after the debacle was made public, Rolling Stone reported that the House committee investigating the Capitol riot intends to ask for the phone data. Last year, the committee subpoenaed Jones to hand over documents and sit for a deposition regarding his involvement in the “Stop the Steal” rally preceding the riot.
People like Jones and Trump are so used to lying and getting away with it that they think they will always get away with it. He now says that he believes that thew Sandy Hook deaths were real but you can be sure that if he thinks he can get away with it, he will revert to the old conspiracy theories. He has absolutely no compunction about putting the bereaved families through hell.
The closing arguments are over and the jury began deliberating on Wednesday evening.
It should be noted that Jones has already been found guilty by default because he did not comply with court orders to turn over documents to the Sandy Hook families. This trial is only about the amount of damages. The plaintiffs are asking for damages of $150 million while the defense says that it should be just $1. This trial is in Texas where jurors tend not to give large awards so it is possible that Jones gets off lightly, even though he is utter scum.
It should also be noted that Jones is facing two other trials and the revelations in this trial are not going to help him.
As well as scolding him, why not also drive the point home by laying perjury against him?
Terminology nitpick: civil trials like this determine liability. Guilt and innocence are only in criminal trials. So Jones has been found liable by default for breaking the rules, now the jury is just deliberating about how much.
Mark,
But surely one can’t be liable if one is not guilty.
@John Morales #3
Of course, one can. One just has to be responsible, not guilty.
Well, if you want to argue that being responsible (liable) for monetary or other loss is not guilty of causing that loss, go for it.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones#Sandy_Hook_school_shooting
Like, he did what he is accused of doing, according to the law.
(Not guilty!)
There is guilt as used in natural English, and guilt as professional jargon. In the natural language sense, yes he is guilty of harassment, defamation, and all sorts of things besides. In legal matters, no he is not guilty, because guilt is defined as a court’s determination that law has been breached. Civil courts don’t need a breach of law to determine responsibility warranting damages, so they use a different term of art.
Holms:
So, in your estimation, he is not guilty, though a court has issued a ruling that he defamed people and imposed penalties thereby. That he was lawfully found to have done what he was accused of doing implies no guilt.
(such innocence!)
Fine, according to jargon, he is not guilty. Judgment against him be dammed.
(such innocence!)
If you don’t want to use jargon accurately, that’s fine. If you want to criticise others for using it accurately, expect pushback, because that’s the action of an arsehole.
sonofrojblake, or, one could note that the claim should have been “not guilty in a criminal court case”. So, no, not an accurate use.
The whole concept I’m nitpicking is that, if a case is not a criminal case, the defendant cannot possibly be guilty, regardless of the case outcome.
“He now says that he believes that the Sandy Hook deaths were real but you can be sure that if he thinks he can get away with it, and it will make him some money he will revert to the old conspiracy theories.”
Fixed it for you.
Fixed what for whom, sonof?
(What, you’re going by what he says? Heh)
Correct, the proceedings did not find guilt in the legal sense. They couldn’t have, as that finding may only be reached if he had been accused of breaching a law and successfully tried in a criminal court. Liable is a civil finding, reached by a civil trial to a lower standard of evidence than in criminal trial.
Ahem, not guilty.
And one of the bits I heard on the radio this morning about this involved Jones saying that he had believed that Sandy Hook was real for years now but ‘the media’ found it to useful to keep smearing him with being a denier.
He really is just throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks, knowing that most of it will only stick to his own audience anyway.
Mr. Jones may find himself in need of gainful employment after these trials.
May I suggest he file an application with the United States Secret Service? It appears they will have a significant number of vacancies for sunglasses-wearing operatives in the near future, and they provide comprehensive training in erasing text messages.
@John Morale
Suppose there is a divorce case where the jury rules that ex-Spouse A must give X% of their wealth to ex-Spouse B (say spouse B gave up their job to get married) -- What is ex-Spouse A guilty of ?
OT.
In legal news, hell just froze over.
Merrick Garland announces civil rights cases against four officers that killed Breonna Taylor.
Within the American legal system, “liability” and “guilt” are terms of art with established meanings and applications.
According to the Legal Information Institute of Cornell University Law School:
“A party is liable when they are held legally responsible for something. Unlike in criminal cases, where a defendant could be found guilty, a defendant in a civil case risks only liability.”
“A tort [such as defamation] is an act or omission that gives rise to injury or harm to another and amounts to a civil wrong for which courts impose liability.”
@John Morales, 11:
Crikey, where to begin?
Well… this is something called a “blog”. It’s where a person can expound at a length that suits them on a subject of their choosing. Some people who have a blog open it for comments. Those comments are, initially, typically addressed to the person who originally posted the blog entry (and refer to “the OP”, as in “original post”). Indeed, it’s so typical for a response to a blog to be addressed to the original post that commenters NOT writing for a remedial-level-comprehension audience don’t bother to specify that they’re responding directly to the original post. If you are not responding to the original post, but rather responding to one of the comments below it, convention dictates that you indicate to whom you are responding by including perhaps their name after an @ (indicating your response is “at” that person) and the number of post you’re responding to (in case that person has made multiple posts and it otherwise wouldn’t be clear which of their responses you’re in turn responding to). Thus, there’s another clue if someone is responding to the original post -- their post lacks an “@” signifier.
In online culture generally, and in blog or forum posts in particular, there is an ever-evolving but quite well established culture of memes and common idioms. For example, if one agrees strongly with a point someone has already made, eloquently and articulately, it’s quite common to simply reproduce what they said and append the letters “QFT”. This stands for “quoted for truth”, which is taken to mean “I agree strongly with this true statement, and furthermore with the manner in which it was expressed, which I feel I cannot improve upon”.
Another example of such a meme is “FIFY”, which stands for “fixed it for you”. This is commonly appended to a quotation which has been edited. The implication in such a case is that the original quote was in fact false on its face, and the comedy conceit is that this “error” was accidental, and that the person who posts the edited version is doing the original poster (or the person who originally said it, if it’s a second-hand quote) a favour by “correcting” their “mistake”.
If you read a post that says “fixed it for you” or “FIFY” and you can’t remember far enough back to recognise where the quote came from, then you can usually copy a small portion of the quote and use your browser’s “find” function to locate the original text. This will allow you to see who originally posted it, and thus to whom the phrase “fixed it for you” is addressed.
So… in this case, I “fixed” a sentence in the paragraph just after the last quotation in the original post, written by Mano Singham, and thus did it “for” Mano Singham. The comedic idea is that he (Mano) simply forgot to include the line about Alex Jones requiring it to be to his financial advantage to change his tune, and that I was doing him a favour by repeating his sentence with this sentiment included.
And thus dieth another frog. Do let me know if there are any other blindingly obvious things you need explaining to you at condescending length.
Thanks for answering the question, though all the additional verbiage was wasted on me.
Dunno about a frog, but your keyboard sure took a pounding.
And sure, I will let you know whenever I get the opportunity, since that’s clearly a kink of yours I’m happy to indulge.
—
Deepak,
Not splitting their assets equitably upon the divorce, according to the judgement.
Such sulking!
It’s OK, Holms. You can’t help it.
(But it’s as well you recognise your sulking for what it is)
@John Morales
>Not splitting their assets equitably upon the divorce, according to the judgement.
But ex-spouse A may have offered N% and ex-spouse B wanted M% and the judge settled at X% where N<X<M. Is spouse B guilty too of asking too much ? If X is closer to N than M is ex-spouse A less guilty than ex-spouse B ?
Arbitration of a dispute does not imply guilt in any sense.
But sure the pro-choicers are guilty per the current Supreme court!
But this is not arbitration, is it? It’s a court case.
I quote you again: “the jury rules that ex-Spouse A must give X% of their wealth to ex-Spouse B”.
—
Leaving your spurious hypotheticals aside, original point here is that Jones was sued for defamation, and lost the court case. That is, found guilty of defaming people.
John, it was already funny to me that you became so sulky over such a small correction. Now that you have gone with the classic (read: schoolyard) ‘you must be talking about yourself!’ rebuttal, you only compound my enjoyment.
“That is, found guilty of defaming people.”
Nope, liable for damages due to defamation.
In the news, another not guilty party:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-05/kevin-spacey-to-pay-30-million-to-house-of-cards-makers/101305096
—
Holms, are we really gonna do the endless dance again? I could, but I shant.
So, no.
(But sure, get your last word in. You can’t help yourself, I know)
Yes, another verdict that does not involve a finding of guilt for a crime.
Shorter John Morales:
“I refuse to understand the difference between a civil and criminal court case.”
@John Morales, 19:
The “additional verbiage” was an explanation of something you obviously didn’t understand, in an effort to help you not look quite so fucking stupid in the future. Not entirely surprised you consider it wasted. Demonstrably most of your education, and indeed most of the information presented to you in all contexts over the course of your life, was wasted. But you keep doing you. It’s funny, in a way most people don’t need explaining to them.
<snicker>
Ostensibly, it was that.
Actually, it was an attempted dig, and hardly an honest one at that.
Mate! I have decades of experience at this game.
I have decades of experience at this game.
A life, well, spent.
Sorry, which of us was unable to help themselves in needing to have the last word?
@John morales
v/s
I thought you were arguing the concept. Are you now just nitpicking this case ? What would you say about OJ Simpson ?- Liable in the civil trial not guilty in the criminal trial -- is he Schrödinger’s defendant ?