Alex Jones’s Lawyers And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

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Alex Jones of InfoWars (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Alex Jones is not making life easy for his attorneys. In fact, the Tuesday hearing where they were dispatched to argue that he was too sick to sit for scheduled depositions in a lawsuit brought by families of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, whom Jones had described as “crisis actors,” could fairly be described as a slow motion car wreck.

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Here’s the point of impact:

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Plaintiffs’ Attorney CHRIS MATTEI: Your Honor, this whole thing to me, and I’m choosing my words carefully here, is extraordinarily disturbing. Mr. Jones appears to be on the air right now broadcasting his live show, the Alex Jones Show, as he does every day. I checked 15 minutes ago. He appeared to be on the air.

Mattei added that he had watched many hours of Jones’s show, and he appeared to be broadcasting from his studio, not his home. Which was extremely awkward for his attorney Kevin Smith, who was at that very moment in Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis’s courtroom trying to enter an ex parte letter from a doctor attesting that his client was at home under strict medical supervision. And lest we forget, this is one of the two Sandy Hook cases Jones already lost, after he simply refused to cooperate with discovery and the courts entered defaults against him. So he’s in no position to ask the court to assume that he’s acting in good faith here.

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Smith attempted to thread the needle by suggesting that Jones was broadcasting under the care of a doctor. Which was technically accurate, as the plaintiffs’ pointed out in a later brief, observing that Jones was on the air with a coronavirus quack named Dr. Marble during the time his doctor purportedly called the lawyer and said he was too ill to be deposed.

For much of the time between 2 and 3 PM, Mr. Jones was speaking on the air with Dr. Ben Marble. Dr. Marble is a Gulf Breeze, Florida physician who created a free telemedicine website during the Covid-19 pandemic called MyFreeDoctor.com. If Mr. Jones was in the “care” of any doctor yesterday afternoon, it appears to have been Dr. Marble, which makes the Jones defendants’ motion all the more cynical. If so, it appears that Dr. Marble has a very liberal interpretation of “care”: he was speaking to Mr. Jones as a guest on The Alex Jones Show. Id. At no point did they appear to discuss Mr. Jones’s medical condition. Instead, they discussed their belief that Dr. Anthony Fauci should “get the death penalty” for combining a “man-made Frankenstein virus . . . into Covid-19” and thereby becoming the “greatest mass-murderer in the history of the world.”

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In a later order, Judge Bellis confirmed that the note to the court was from the eminent Dr. Marble. Whether that made it more or less credible in the eyes of the court is unclear, but the motion to postpone the deposition was denied, with Jones ordered to show up on Thursday morning to be deposed unless he “develops escalating symptoms such that he is hospitalized.”

But back in the courtroom, Jones’s attorney Kevin Smith was in the unenviable position of making a representation to the court which their client was refuting live on air.

“If in fact the evidence that you submitted, the letter that says he is remaining at home is inaccurate, wouldn’t you have an obligation to correct that? That’s what I was trying to give you an opportunity to do,” Judge Bellis noted testily, adding a moment later, “If it does not need correction, then it doesn’t need correction. But I – you look at the rules of professional conduct and you’ll do I’m sure, I have no doubt, you’ll do what is appropriate and necessary in that regard.”

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And he did, too, filing a notice with the court admitting that “[t]he broadcast took place from Mr. Jones’ usual and customary studio in Austin, Texas” and “[t]he studio is not located in Mr. Jones’ home.”

His client was another matter, however.

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For a second day running, Jones defied the court and failed to appear for the scheduled deposition. And while the court denied the plaintiffs’ petition for a capias warrant yesterday, it seems a pretty safe bet that this generosity will not continue forever.

Openly defying the court is bold strategy, Cotton. Particularly when the only issue is how big a check the judge is going to order you to write to the plaintiffs. We’ll see if it pays off.

Lafferty v. Jones [Docket]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

Alex Jones, Courts, liz dye