AUSTIN, Texas — Scarlett Lewis’ hands quivered Tuesday when she saw her tormentor of nearly a decade, Alex Jones, sitting in the courtroom as she prepared to confront the lies he had repeatedly spread about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and the death of her 6-year-old son, Jesse.
Neither Lewis nor anyone else had known whether Jones would even show up for her testimony, after he spent much of his two-week trial recording new shows at his Infowars studio. But he was there, and Lewis’ her confidence was suddenly shaken as she took a drink of water to steady herself.
On the stand she took a deep breath, and began to speak.
“Jesse stood up to Adam Lanza, who came into his first grade classroom. I have stood up to his bully of him. I mean, you know, like the ultimate bully,” Lewis recalled later. “I stood up to my bully, because Alex Jones is a bully… It was hard, but I found the courage like Jesse did.”
Lewis’ testimony, along with that of Jesse’s father, Neil Heslin, marked the first time that the family members of those lost in the Sandy Hook tragedy were able to take to the stand to confront Jones’ false claims that the shooting was a “hoax ,” and that their dead children were “actors.” In the coming months, more family members are expected to testify as Jones faces similar lawsuits in both Connecticut and Texas.
Mark Bankston, an attorney in the Texas case who is also representing Sandy Hook parents Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, predicted on Friday that the sum of damages in those cases — in each of which Jones has been found liable — would be enough to cripple Jones’ Infowars empire, which has already filed for bankruptcy.
This week a jury awarded Lewis and Heslin nearly $50 million in damages, less than the $150 million judgment that their attorneys had sought, but far more than the $2 million that Jones testified he would be able to withstand. An attorney for Jones said on Friday that he will seek to drastically lower that amount.
“We’ll be carving up the corpse of Infowars in bankruptcy,” Bankston said, referring to the families of 10 victims who are suing Jones.
For the parents, the constant whirl of attention following Jones provided an opportunity to broadcast their memories of their son, Jesse, as their testimony was aired live over the internet, shared widely on social media and captured by a documentary crew that has been filming the trial for HBO.
Heslin described his son as a “tornado” of a child who enjoyed collecting coins and bits of metal that he would take to a local scrapyard for money. Lewis added, “He was larger than life, he was loud, he was bouncing off the wall.”
Throughout the trial, Heslin appeared to struggle the most when attorneys played a clip of Infowars host Owen Shroyer publicly questioning Heslin’s account that he had held his son’s body in the hours after his death.
“When it’s stated that Jesse’s [death] is fake, it’s an indication that he didn’t exist,” Heslin said on the witness stand, fighting back tears. “He did live. I was blessed with him for six and a half years. He’s been gone one and a half times that.”
Confronting Jones
Once the case was set for a trial to determine damages earlier this year, Lewis said she began thinking about what she would say to Jones if he ever showed up to court, and purchased a notebook to keep track of her thoughts.
“It’s all I’ve been thinking about, obviously for the last couple of weeks, and asking for guidance from Jesse, really,” Lewis said in an interview with CT Insider this week.
After arriving in Austin in July for the two-week trial, Lewis said that her attorneys arranged a day trip to Fredericksburg, a historic town in the Texas Hill Country about two hours outside of the city in order to get the family’s focus off of the trial. Later, after a series of incidents around Austin forced Heslin and Lewis to isolate themselves under constant security, she said she took up swimming in the hotel pool to relax and “reflect” after spending all day in court.
After more than a week of watching the testimony of Infowars staffers and expert witnesses called by their attorneys, the parent’s chance to speak came on Tuesday.
Heslin took the stand first, speaking for roughly 90 minutes, though to his dismay Jones had chosen to take the morning off in order to record more content for Infowars — including one segment in which he repeatedly shot Heslin.
“I think Neil did want to face him and he wishes that he had,” Lewis said. “But I think in the end, Neil wanted to be heard, and he feels that he was and so there is relief in that.”
Heslin, who has rarely given interviews regarding his son’s death or Jones’ subsequent exploitation of the tragedy, declined to comment following the verdict on Friday.
Jones also missed the first part of Lewis’ testimony, before he and his entourage showed up at the courthouse following a break for lunch. Finally facing Jones, Lewis appeared to become energized — staring directly at the talk show host as she laid into the web of lies that he and other Infowars employees had concocted around Sandy Hook.
‘Do you think I’m an actress?’ Lewis asked at one point.
“No,” Jones began to reply from the defense table, before the judge cut him off to remind him that he was not the one on the stand.
‘A deep connection between love and truth’
Other families of Sandy Hook victims reached out to Lewis both before and after her testimony to offer her words of encouragement, she said, though she declined to share any individual messages out of respect to those families’ privacy.
“This is a huge victory for all of you,” Lewis said Friday evening. “I hope I did well for you and I look forward to supporting you through your part of this trial.”
At one point during her testimony, Lewis began to speak not about Jesse or the pain that Jones’ afflicted on her and her family, but on the larger consequences of his actions. “Truth is so vital to our world. Truth is what we base our reality on,” she said. “We have to agree on that to have a civil society.”
Speaking later to a reporter, Lewis was asked to reflect on the connection between her statement and the focus of her years-long “Choose Love” campaign through the foundation she established in Jesse’s honor.
“There is really a deep connection between love and truth,” Lewis said. “I don’t think that you can have one without the other.”
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism