More Legal Trouble for Alex Jones

Alex Jones' legal situation just got a whole lot worse. After one of the families who lost children in the Sandy Hook mass shooting filed suit against the performance artist or truth teller or delusional conspiracy nut or whatever Jones is calling himself these days, six more families have filed suit for the exact same reason - Jones' support of the "Sandy Hook Truthers" who argued on his show that the shooting never happened and no children died there because they had never existed in the first place.

The families of six victims of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School along with an FBI agent who was among the first to respond to the shooting sued InfoWars’ founder Alex Jones and several of his businesses on Wednesday, alleging the radio personality had defamed them by repeatedly claiming that the shooting was a hoax.

The new lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in Bridgeport, Connecticut, comes on the heels of two defamation suits filed in Texas last month by two other Sandy Hook families. Jones, who could not be reached for comment, responded to the Texas lawsuits on his show last month, acknowledging that he believes the massacre “really happened,” but that the families were being used by the Democratic Party.

The complaints from all eight families allege that Jones used his internet and radio platforms to push the conspiracy theory that the shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six adults at the school in Newtown, Connecticut, was a staged event. The lawsuits claim that Jones’ false narratives have brought him attention and money, while the families have suffered deep personal pain as well as abuse from fans of Jones.

While it's true that this and other shootings have been politicized by gun control advocates and minimized by the NRA in an all-too-familiar back and forth that gets played out over and over again, that isn't what was said on Jones' show. He gave air time to a group contending that none of the kids at Sandy Hook died, and may never have even existed. As a parent, I find this one of the most heinous and deplorable things Jones has ever done, and he deserves everything that's coming to him.

I can't even imagine how horrible it be to grieve the death of a child in the midst of hundreds of death threats from crazies telling me my kid never even existed - and Jones is media-savvy enough regarding his audience that he had to know this was precisely what would happen if he aired the story. If he never really believed that the shooting was imaginary - as he now claims - then this was simply a cynical attempt to get attention by cultivating awfulness. Now that same awfulness is coming back at him, and it's time for him to pay the check.