6 Sandy Hook families, FBI agent sue Alex Jones for defamation

Alex Jones may start to learn that his actions as the conspiracy-minded host of Infowars have consequences.

Family members of of six victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against Jones, who for years has peddled the false conspiracy theory that the massacre never happened. FBI agent William Aldenburg, who was among those responding to the shooting in which 26 people were killed, joined the suit.

The suit also names Jones’ Infowars contributor Wolfgang Halbig and Halbig’s associate, Cory Sklanka, according to a statement released by attorney Josh Koskoff.

Part of Jones’ false narrative has been that parent interviews conducted by CNN were fake.

“Folks, we’ve got video of Anderson Cooper with clear blue-screen out there,” Jones said in a 2014 Infowars broadcast. “He’s not there in the town square. We got people clearly coming up and laughing and then doing the fake crying. We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts for different people ... covering up everything.”

Halbig has called the Sandy Hook victims “crisis actors” and has also questioned whether the Pulse nightclub and Parkland mass shootings in Florida took place, according to Koskoff.

In a 2015 Facebook post, Halbig floated a false claim that a father of a Sandy Hook victim and Aldenberg were the same person.

The suit joins a long list of others filed against Jones this year. The parents of two Sandy Hook children filed one in April alleging they have been harassed by conspiracy theorists because of Jones. Earlier that same month, Jones was hit with a defamation lawsuit for misidentifying the Parkland school shooter. And in March, he was hit with a defamation suit for promoting a conspiracy about a witness to the Charlottesville, Virginia, Unite the Right rally last year in which counterprotester Heather Heyer was killed by an alleged white supremacist.

Koskoff said in a statement that Jones “saw an opportunity” to profit off Sandy Hook tragedy.

“He went on a sustained attack that has lasted for years, accusing shattered family members of being actors, stating as fact that the shooting itself was a hoax and inciting others to act on these malicious lies,” Koskoff said. “He knew his claims were false but he made them anyway to further a simple but pathetic goal: to make money by tearing away at the families’ pain. This lawsuit seeks to hold Alex Jones and his financial network accountable for those disgraceful actions.”

• This article originally appeared on HuffPost.