In trial against Alex Jones, a Sandy Hook father finds his voice

Robbie Parker was sitting in the front row of spectators in a Connecticut courtroom when the jury reached a verdict in a defamation case against Infowars founder Alex Jones over his years of lies about the Sandy Hook shooting.

As the damages were read out – nearly $1 billion in total – Parker dropped his head into his hands, holding back tears. Later he began to weep.

For Parker, 40, it was a moment of vindication and catharsis.

After his daughter Emilie, 6, was killed on Dec. 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Parker became a prime target of Jones’s outlandish conspiracy theories.

Parker was the first parent to voice his grief in public after the massacre in which 20 children and six educators were killed. His anguished statement, full of love for Emilie, was broadcast across the country the day following the shooting.

Jones, too, was watching. He seized upon something Parker did – a brief laugh at a remark by his father as he faced an unexpectedly large throng of journalists – to advance the falsehood that the shooting was staged.

Parker was an actor, Jones said, part of a nefarious plot by the government to implement gun control. Jones repeatedly did mocking impressions of Parker, shifting from laughing to crying in an instant. He called Parker “disgusting” and “sick.”

For years, Parker remained silent despite a campaign of threats and harassment from conspiracy theorists that drove his family to leave Connecticut. He feared that anything he said would give them further ammunition. He blamed himself and believed the families of the other victims did, too.

“I started to feel like everybody viewed me like Alex Jones did,” he said in an interview after Wednesday’s verdict. “That’s what trauma does to you.”

The trial was a “chance to reclaim these things in my life that were taken from me,” he continued. “I got to reclaim my own story. I got to be who I was again and find my voice.”

Jones’s lies about Parker were part of an array of falsehoods he circulated about the massacre, claims that led to years of threatening letters, voice mails, emails and real-life encounters for families of the victims.

Wednesday’s verdict means Jones must pay damages to the families of eight of the victims as well as an FBI agent who responded to the scene. Parker received the largest single award of $120 million for defamation and emotional distress.

Standing outside the courthouse, Parker thanked his lawyers for giving him the strength to “fight and stand up to what had been happening to me for so long.” During the trial, the families had done just one thing, he said: They told the truth.

‘They stole that from me’

When Parker stepped up to a bank of microphones nearly a decade ago, his only thought was honoring and protecting his daughter’s memory.

But the torrent of abuse that followed, spurred on by Jones, led to feelings of shame and guilt and isolation. Parker couldn’t shake the idea that he had somehow “brought this on everybody,” he told the jury last month in Connecticut, his voice trembling. “I was the first person that said something.”

For Robbie and his wife Alissa, the harassment started even before they buried their daughter, a vivacious and empathetic first-grader who loved to draw and was a best friend to her two younger sisters.

At the trial, Robbie testified how he had found Alissa curled up in a closet at the funeral home as they prepared to memorialize their daughter, paralyzed with fear and worry. Only a week had passed since the massacre, but a Facebook page honoring Emilie was already inundated with threats and abuse. Commenters called Emilie a “whore” and Robbie a liar, Alissa testified.

“I hardly remember what was said on the day of the funeral,” she said. “They stole that from me.”

Parker said he had been taught that the best way to deal with bullies was to ignore them. He remembered telling a friend that the conspiracy theorists were “people taking a break from looking for Big Foot” and they would fade away after several weeks. That never happened.

In search of anonymity, the Parker family moved across the country to Washington state a little more than a year after the shooting. Months later, they bought a house, and soon after, its location and sale information were released online by conspiracy theorists. They endured years of threatening correspondence despite living thousands of miles from where their daughter was slaughtered.

Robbie described in court an incident in 2016 in Seattle, when a man confronted him on the street with an expletive-laden tirade. Robbie said the man cursed at him and demanded to know how much money he had been paid by the government. The man continued to taunt him: “Emilie’s alive, isn’t she? She’s alive, huh … she’s alive.”

The Sandy Hook families testified that the conspiracy theories and harassment continue. Alissa recounted how just last month, three people at her church in Washington told her that their relatives don’t believe the massacre was real.

Ian Hockley, whose son Dylan was killed at the school, told the jurors that when he returned to his car at a Costco in Connecticut last year, he found a card on the windshield. On one side, it had a photo of Parker’s smile on the day of his statement, with the words “Happy, laughing Robbie Parker one day after his little girl was shot.”

Parker blamed himself for that momentary smile. He was nervous and didn’t know how he was supposed to start talking to reporters. His father was standing near him and offered brief words of encouragement, using a childhood nickname, prompting the laugh. Parker became disgusted with himself, he said. He believed the other families blamed him, too.

Alissa wept as she described in court how the shame and fear had transformed her husband. She described him as wary, distrustful and hypervigilant. He hasn’t made a new friend since the shooting, she said. He always backs into parking spaces in case the family needs to drive away quickly and picks seats in restaurants where he can see the whole room.

After Alissa testified, Robbie said that several other parents came up to him and asked him if he had really felt responsible for the harassment the families had endured. He said yes. They hugged him and they all began to weep. “Please, don’t ever, ever feel that way,” one parent told him.

‘You put a target on his back’

Parker had hesitated at first to join the defamation case. That changed in mid-2018 after he and Alissa were introduced to the parents of one of the victims of the Parkland high school shooting. Hearing them speak took Parker back six years to the shock of Emilie’s death. The Parkland family, too, talked about how an interview the father gave was being circulated by conspiracy theorists.

“It broke open this gate that I had kept everything behind,” Parker said in court. It is “atrocious” that families “have to deal with this when all you want to do is grieve.” There was something he could do for them, he realized: fight back. He was the last plaintiff to sign onto the suit.

“I needed to do this for me,” he said in an interview. And “because it will also help other people.”

The trial began last month after four years of evasion and delay by Jones. The judge had already found him liable for defamation in a default judgment because of his failure to produce crucial documents as part of the discovery process. The jury’s task was to determine how much Jones would pay in damages.

As Jones sat in the witness chair, Christopher Mattei, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, played Robbie’s statement to the media from December 2012, in which the father spoke in tender detail about his murdered child.

Mattei pointed at Parker among the spectators in the courtroom. “He’s real, isn’t he?” Mattei asked Jones. “For years, you put a target on his back.”

Parker knew that Jones wouldn’t stay to hear his testimony, but the fact that the defendant had to listen to the full statement meant that Jones “finally got to see the person I was,” Parker said. “And that was very, very empowering for me.”

As he spent time with the other families at the trial, Parker said, his guilt began to lift. He had spent years at a geographic and emotional distance from the families still in Connecticut, assuming they blamed him for what had happened. Now they were eating lunch together and sharing details of their lives.

Francine Wheeler’s son Ben was killed at Sandy Hook. Over a meal, she told Parker she hadn’t realized he was so funny. Ian Hockley and Parker bonded over their shared enthusiasm for long-distance relay races and decided they would do one together.

When Parker took the stand in the trial, he carried in his pocket a tiny scroll of paper given to him by his daughter Samantha, who is now 13. On it was a handwritten message: “You are not just doing this for you. You are helping your family and lots of other people too. Keep going. You’ve got this. Love, Sam.”

After the verdict was announced Wednesday, Parker called Alissa, who was back home with their daughters in Washington. She told him she was proud of him.

Alissa is organizing a craft fair at their church this weekend and Robbie had promised to help prepare. He couldn’t wait to get home to see his wife and daughters. Before beginning the journey, he carefully packed the note from Samantha in his luggage.