Alex Jones may have made Maya Guerra Gamble briefly internet-famous, but the Travis County district judge is a rookie at this game compared to her Connecticut counterpart Barbara Bellis, who has been losing brain cells dealing with Austin’s favorite homegrown conspiracist since 2018. By that point, Jones had spent more than five years calling the Sandy Hook massacre a hoax and false-flag attack (starting mere hours after the shooting), an endeavor that all evidence suggests made Jones and his InfoWars brand a great deal of money. He now owes some of that cash to Sandy Hook parents, who Bellis allowed to win their defamation suits against Jones by default due to his refusal to cooperate with discovery. The jury in Gamble’s courtroom this summer saddled Jones, who says he’s broke, with $49 million in damages; that amount may get capped because of past conservative Texas tort reforms, but the sky is not so limited in deep-blue Connecticut.
One focal point of testimony over the last week in Bellis’ courtroom in Waterbury has been just how closely Jones and InfoWars (and its titular holding company, Free Speech Systems) watched their numbers and tailored their Sandy Hook claims to drive traffic to his platforms and customers to the sketchy supplements and prepper kits that produce most of InfoWars’ revenue. Implausibly, Jones claims his team never looked at their broadcast ratings or Google Analytics, claims that were exposed as lies by InfoWars internal documents, such as a media kit to potential sponsors and partners that Jones claimed never existed but was shown in court Tuesday, Sept. 20. Bellis ruled last week that because InfoWars didn’t share this data with the plaintiffs, they could not argue in court that they didn’t profit from the coverage – although on the InfoWars show itself broadcast Tuesday, Jones once again made this argument. (He has not yet testified in Bellis’ courtroom, but he did show up outside the building Tuesday morning in his Hummer to yell about kangaroo courts and the Chinese empire, then drove off.) It’s almost inevitable that Jones will face further sanctions in both Texas and Connecticut for things he’s said on air during the trials. But as Vice’s Anna Merlan (one of several must-follows on this beat) wrote on Tuesday, Jones “continues to try to make a spectacle of his legal troubles, completely unchecked – and also keeps turning that inflammatory commentary into monetized content on InfoWars.”
Some of these emails and docs were on Jones’ personal cellphone, the entire contents of which were inadvertently shared with the plaintiffs by Jones’ Texas lawyer F. Andino Reynal, who described it as “the worst day of my legal career.” The lead counsel in Connecticut, Norm Pattis, is more competent but a different kind of clown, foreshadowing his plans in upcoming testimony to persuade the jury that the eight Sandy Hook families that filed the current suit are really just gun control activists punishing Jones for his truth-telling politics.
This article appears in Best of Austin: Restaurants 2022.