Alex Jones Trial Thrown Into Disarray Amid Child Porn Discovery
Lawyers for the right-wing conspiracy theorist accidentally sent child porn to the plaintiffs.
By Ryan Grenoble
In a court filing Monday, lawyers representing Sandy Hook parents in a suit against Infowars' Alex Jones say the conspiracy theorist's defense team sent them "numerous images of illegal child pornography," apparently by mistake.
The images were buried in a large volume of email documents the court ordered Jones' team to turn over in late May ― an order they followed through on by turning over the files in a non-searchable format.
A third party hired by the Sandy Hook lawyers to sort and organize the documents into a digitally searchable database discovered an image during that process.
"It is worth noting that if the Jones Defendants had engaged in even minimal due diligence and actually reviewed the materials before production, they would have found the images themselves," the motion filed Monday reads. "Because the Jones Defendants did not do that, they transmitted images to the plaintiffs that if they were knowingly possessed is a serious federal crime."
Christopher Mattei, an attorney for the plaintiffs, alerted the FBI immediately, and a subsequent investigation by law enforcement turned up 11 additional images "which had apparently been sent to Infowars email addresses."
Jones' lawyer Norman Pattis said Friday neither the emails nor the images contained therein were ever opened.
The version of events told Monday doesn't line up with Jones' telling of it. We know this because Jones used his show Friday to claim the child porn had been deliberately planted on Infowars servers via malware in an attempted setup.
With Pattis by his side Friday, Jones promised a $1 million bounty to anyone who could find the perpetrator, all while repeatedly blaming Democrats and punching a printed-out photo of Mattei.
"I'm not into kids like your Democratic party, you cocksuckers," he shouted at one point. "I don't like having sex with children, I would never have sex with children."
"I am so sick of their filth and living off the dead kids of Sandy Hook," he said.
The right-wing conspiracy-peddling host is being sued by nearly a dozenSandy Hook parents in four separate defamation cases for his repeated claims that the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 20 children and six adults dead was staged.
Ryan Grenoble Editor at The Huffington Post
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