[Bumped to discuss resulting legal actions] Elementary school shooting in Connecticut. (Edit/Update - 26 reported killed, many of them children)
AUSTIN — Robbie Parker’s 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, had been dead for less than 48 hours, gunned down alongside 19 of her classmates and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones went on Infowars and claimed Parker was “a soap opera actor” who’d made it all up.
All Parker had done was nervously laugh before giving a statement to the press about who his daughter was, the father says in the documentary, “The Truth vs. Alex Jones,” debuting March 26 on HBO.
The movie premiered this month at South by Southwest in Austin, where Jones is based, stood trial and was once heckled at a chicken restaurant.
But Jones was on a roll. He’d called the massacre of 20 children “a false flag” hours after it happened in December 2012 — “before the bodies were even cold,” as a lawyer for the parents says in a deposition for one of two defamation trials featured in the film that were eventually brought against Jones.
Soon he was urging his listeners to pick apart video of Parker for evidence that the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history had been staged as an elaborate ruse by liberals to take away Americans’ guns.
Immediately, Parker says in the film, Emilie’s memorial Facebook page became inundated with people who called her “a whore” and threatened to show up at their home with guns demanding proof that she was still alive.
This went on for 10 years. It’s still going on. Every time Jones aired another hoaxer theory, these grieving families would be hit with a fresh wave of vicious harassment: rape threats, death threats, people confronting them on the street.
In the film, another mother, Jacqueline Barden, testifies in court that she and her husband received letters from people who said they’d peed on their son Daniel’s grave, or promised to dig it up, because they were convinced no one was in it.
Yet another, Francine Wheeler, tells of how she was in an elevator at a conference for mothers who’d lost their children to gun violence when a woman told her that the mass shooting that killed her son Ben never happened…….