Alex Jones accused of destroying evidence in Sandy Hook lawsuit

Attorneys suing Alex Jones for defamation over his past remarks about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting told a Texas court Friday that the Infowars publisher destroyed evidence by deleting older Twitter posts prior to being suspended from the platform this week.

Lawyers suing the right-wing media personality on behalf of Neil Heslin, the father of a student killed at Sandy Hook, filed a motion in Travis County District Court seeking a “severe punitive sanction” for Mr. Jones in light of several social media posts about the shooting recently vanishing from his verified Twitter account, @RealAlexJones.

“These materials were unquestionably relevant to Plaintiff’s claim, and InfoWars had written notice of the obligation to preserve this evidence,” attorney Mark Bankston argued in the motion. “This evidence could have established key elements of plaintiffs’ defamation claim,” he added.

Mr. Jones, 44, admitted last week that he asked his staff to remove several social media posts after CNN published an article on Aug. 9 accusing him of violating Twitter’s policies prohibiting hateful conduct including targeted harassment, citing his past tweets about both the Sandy Hook shooting and this year’s massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

“I just said, ’Delete that stuff. They’re twisting what I said, but just to take the super high road, delete it’,” he said during an Aug. 10 broadcast of The Alex Jones Show, his syndicated radio program.

According to the motion for sanctions filed Friday, Mr. Jones intentionally destroyed evidence by deleting posts Mr. Bankston called “unquestionably relevant” to the litigation, including tweets that alleged the existence of a “cover-up” involving the Sandy Hook massacre that claimed the lives of 20 children, among them Mr. Heslin’s 6-year-old son, Jessie.

“As pressure mounted from pending defamation lawsuits and growing public indignation, Mr. Jones chose to destroy the evidence of his actual malice and defamatory conduct,” Mr. Bankston wrote in the motion.

Reached for comment Saturday, Mr. Jones said that the tweets were deleted because Twitter threatened to suspend his account otherwise, describing the court filing as “horse [expletive].”

“Obviously we took screenshots and saved the tweets. It’s ridiculous,” Mr. Jones told The Washington Times.

“The scandal is that we are bowing to pressure to stay on to Twitter,” Mr. Jones added. “It’s all a giant fictitious smokescreen. It’s a mirage.”

Denounced for over a decade for propagating baseless conspiracy theories through his Infowars website and broadcasts, Mr. Jones was abruptly banned or suspended from more than a dozen major tech companies this month for various violations, all but eradicating an online audience that until recently included 2.4 million YouTube subscribers and a vast social media following.

YouTube and Apple removed The Alex Jones Show from their respective video and podcast platforms last week, and Facebook and Spotify are among a group of several Silicon Valley companies that have similarly followed suit.

Twitter did not immediately discipline Mr. Jones following publication of the CNN report, but on Tuesday the company handed him a week-long suspension for tweeting a video urging supporters to get their “battle rifles” ready.

Mr. Heslin filed the defamation suit in April in response to claims made by Mr. Jones and Infowars reporter Owen Shroyer about the Sandy Hook shooting and his son’s death.

“I lost my son. I buried my son. I held my son with a bullet hole through his head,” Mr. Heslin said in a June 2017 interview with NBC News’s Megyn Kelly.

Replying the interview during The Alex Jones Show afterwards, Mr. Shroyer claimed Mr. Heslin’s comment “cannot be accurate.”

“He’s claiming that he held his son and saw the bullet hole in his head. That is his claim. Now, according to a timeline of events and a coroner’s testimony, that is not possible,” Mr. Shroyer said during a June 20 segment.

“The stuff I found was they never let them see their bodies,” Mr. Jones said during a subsequent broadcast, according to the lawsuit.

Mr. Jones faces at least three lawsuits in two states filed by the relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook rampage. He previously suggested the shooting was a “hoax,” but has since reversed course.

“I believe Sandy Hook happened,” Mr. Jones said in April. “I’ve been telling the parents for years I believe their children died, and quite frankly, they know that.”