The HBO documentary The Truth vs Alex Jones, which premiered last month, takes a devastating look at grifter Alex Jones and the very real damage he did to those poor Sandy Hook families who were suffering so badly already.
I know this has been out there for a little while now, but if you have access to HBO or another service that is streaming the documentary, go watch it, but be prepared for a gut wrenching reminder of the horror the families experienced when the shooting occurred and to be infuriated by the fact that Jones basically tortured them for over a decade.
I thought Trump was possibly the worst human being in the United States that's still alive right now, but after watching the documentary on Jones, he may very well have him topped.
There are a couple of really good reviews on the film out there, one from Vanity Fair:
Director Dan Reed developed an obsession with what he calls “the mass consumption of lies” when he started researching Terror at the Mall, his documentary about the Westgate shopping center attack of 2013. When Reed initially googled the mass slaying that killed at least 67 people, “the top results were that it was all a hoax, and the blood was fake, and all the people were actors.” At the time, it was more unusual than it is today to hear prominent voices denying the undeniable. Then, as now, one of the loudest such voices was conspiracy theorist, online personality, and vitamin salesman Alex Jones.
“I’ve watched more InfoWars than any human being should have to,” Reed says, referring to Jones’s public access turned online talk show, The Alex Jones Show (which many watch via Jones’s InfoWars website). That’s not because he’s a fan of Jones’s far-right, fringe-interest content, but because of Jones’s vociferous denial of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School attack, in which 26 people were fatally shot by a single man. The talk show host long insisted that the shooting, in which 20 children aged six and seven years old were killed, was a lie. That claim forms the foundation of Reed’s new documentary, The Truth vs. Alex Jones, which debuts on HBO March 26.
At the time of the Newtown, Connecticut shooting, mass slayings were far rarer in the US than they are now. (According to the National Institute of Health, there were 269 in 2013. There were 656 in 2023.) But according to Jones at the time, crimes like the one at Sandy Hook were a “false flag,” made-up events that would be used to strip patriotic Americans of their Second Amendment rights. On his show and his website, Jones and his staff took specific aim at the parents of the children slain at the school, breaking down interviews and footage with false explanations of how it was supposedly faked. Jones’s enormous, passionate audience turned against the grieving people, harassing them online and off.
And another from the Washington Post:
Robbie Parker’s 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, had been dead for less than 48 hours, gunned down alongside 19 of her classmates and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones went on Infowars and claimed Parker was “a soap opera actor” who’d made it all up.
All Parker had done was nervously laugh before giving a statement to the press about who his daughter was, the father says in the documentary, “The Truth vs. Alex Jones,” debuting March 26 on HBO. The movie premiered this month at South by Southwest in Austin, where Jones is based, stood trial and was once heckled at a chicken restaurant.
But Jones was on a roll. He’d called the massacre of 20 children “a false flag” hours after it happened in December 2012 — “before the bodies were even cold,” as a lawyer for the parents says in a deposition for one of two defamation trials featured in the film that were eventually brought against Jones. Soon he was urging his listeners to pick apart video of Parker for evidence that the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history had been staged as an elaborate ruse by liberals to take away Americans’ guns. Immediately, Parker says in the film, Emilie’s memorial Facebook page became inundated with people who called her “a whore” and threatened to show up at their home with guns demanding proof that she was still alive.
This went on for 10 years. It’s still going on. Every time Jones aired another hoaxer theory, these grieving families would be hit with a fresh wave of vicious harassment: rape threats, death threats, people confronting them on the street. In the film, another mother, Jacqueline Barden, testifies in court that she and her husband received letters from people who said they’d peed on their son Daniel’s grave, or promised to dig it up, because they were convinced no one was in it. Yet another, Francine Wheeler, tells of how she was in an elevator at a conference for mothers who’d lost their children to gun violence when a woman told her that the mass shooting that killed her son Ben never happened.
“It’s just a drip, drip, drip of constant undermining of your feeling of safety and security while you’re trying to grieve for your 6-year-old child who was murdered unexpectedly in the classroom,” says director Dan Reed. “The cumulative harm is really I hope what comes out of the film.”
The documentary takes a deep dive into the lives of the parents who Jones harassed on his show and the pain he inflicted on them that no parent who just lost a child should ever have to go through.
They showed old footage of Jones when he first got his start, and they spent a whole lot of time covering the two trials that led to him eventually owing the families $1.5 billion in damages, none of which he's paid yet.
They did a great job, with the combination of courtroom footage and Jones' depositions of painting him as the heartless and soulless grifter that he is, who only cares about money no matter how much damage is done to those he's willing to roll over while chasing the almighty dollar.
It's hard to understand how anyone could be so callous towards people who were already suffering so badly, but the one thing that's not hard to understand is how those juries arrived at the numbers they did.
Right now, it looks like there's a mediator in the case since he's filed bankruptcy. I hope those families see some money sooner and not later.
From yesterday's show with Madge.
