Robbie Parker and other parents have spent more than a decade battling the lies of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting didn’t happen.
Robbie Parker is the author of A Father’s Fight: Taking on Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth. His six-year-old daughter Emilie died in the shooting in 2012.
WSHU: Tell us about Emilie. What was she like?
RP: She was always like, full go, and just a very gregarious, loving, giving person. And as I've been doing some of these interviews, the more I talk about her, the more I realize that's exactly what I miss about her. She knew how to feel deeply, and she knew how to express that with people. And that's something I really struggle with, and that's one of the things I miss about being around her the most.
WSHU: I do think that came out; having read your book, it seems like she had had friends in Sandy Hook among some of the other kids, and you have become part of the community of a lot of the families in Sandy Hook as well. You've really built community with them.
RP: The families, just going through the hardest thing you've ever been through, to be able to have a community that's also unfortunately initiated with you into that process was amazing. Because of that shared experience, we shared a closeness that I don't have with even my closest family members, on a level of being able to understand each other in that worst part of your life. And so one of the coolest things about the trial was the fact that I got to know some of those parents on a personal level, knew more about them and not just their kids.
WSHU: The trial, of course, being the trial of Alex Jones. One of the most difficult parts of the book is to read the things that he said and the things that his followers said. It seems like the first time you encountered these conspiracy theories was actually on Emilie's memorial page. Is that right?
RP: That's correct. The shooting happened on a Friday morning. By Sunday morning, I was already starting to receive messages, threats and harassment from conspiracy theorists. It's not like I had any clue who this guy was, but while all the families were in the firehouse waiting to hear the news of their child, whether our child was alive or dead, he was already on his show. He broadcasted to millions of people, and he was already telling them that this was fake, that this was a hoax, that they needed to watch out, and that we were coming for their guns. And he was starting to put a target on the Sandy Hook event before I even found out that Emilie was dead.
WSHU: They sort of latched on to a few moments that almost seemed like they don't didn't need to be explained, putting you in the position of having to explain these things like Madeline wearing Emilie's dress, like an offhand moment where you laugh just before a press conference.
RP: This was very disorienting. I mean, my world and my orbit were already blown apart … And so then to have this come on right on the heels of that, my compass was just spinning. And so at first it was just my sister-in-law was just like, you know, these are just the kind of crazy people that just say the moon landing didn't happen. And that was kind of helpful at first for me to just kind of be like, alright, I don't need to pay any attention to them and just focus on my family. But their noise got so loud and so bombastic, and we had just experienced, we knew what somebody was capable of doing to somebody else. Somebody went into Emilie's school and murdered children because he wanted to. Alex Jones and his followers painted me as somebody that they needed to go after, and had a hate, and they had a reason, so I had to take that very, very seriously, and it impacted my grief, and it just made it hard to do anything.
WSHU: You mentioned a few moments in the book that just were honestly shocking. I think any human reading some of the things said would find that appalling.
RP: Right? The thing I still can't wrap my head around is just knowing who Emilie was and then learning about who these other children were and their connections with their families, how innocent, how pure, how loving and giving they were. So, to have their names and memories defiled and raked through the mud. What they did was evil. They tarnish the names of just innocent, beautiful children, and that's something I still can't reconcile and get over. That took a lot of years and a lot of work and culminated in me joining this lawsuit, and that's how I personally took care of it. But getting Emilie's name and her memory back was paramount for me in this process.
WSHU: What led you to decide to join the lawsuit?
RP: It was a lot of things that had nothing to do with me, and then eventually everything to do with me. One of which was meeting families from another school shooting. Their daughter was killed in the Parkland School shooting, and this was six years after Sandy Hook, and they were experiencing the exact same thing that we were, and I recognized how their grief was being impacted, and how they weren't able to grieve. And felt like I had six years of experience. I was down that road. They needed somebody to help fight for them.
WSHU: What was it like going up against somebody like Alex Jones in court?
RP: I envisioned this day for a long, long time, and it didn't play out the way that I had anticipated. In fact, it kind of shook me to see him the way that he was. He was disheveled and just a shell of a person and I took a lot of pity on him. I could see the toll of the things that he does have had on him. And he has no love in his heart for himself or for anybody else. And that's just a sad, sad place to be. When he got on the stand, he quickly took all those feelings away by being who he is. And then I had my moment to take my power back from him. I got my chance to be on the stand and reclaim things for myself.
WSHU: So the conclusion of this, of course, is Jones loses everything, loses all his assets. How did you feel about seeing that play out?
RP: Honestly, I got everything that I was looking for. I was able to reclaim Emilee's memory. I was able to take back the things that I felt like I lost. I lost my voice and power in all of this, and I was able to reclaim those things. And that's what was at stake for me. As far as Jones losing everything, it just goes to show that when you involve yourself in this type of behavior and rhetoric, every lie you tell incurs a debt to the truth, and sooner or later, that debt gets paid. I'm finding that to be very true in my own life at this moment, and it also really highlights what Alex Jones is. He's spent 30 years building something, and it's all going to be taken away because of his own actions and inaction to do the right thing.
WSHU: Have you started to hear less from the conspiracy theorists? Is that going away, or are they still popping up from time to time?
RP: I mean, they're always going to be there, right? Over time, though, of course, I made it very hard for them to find me, and so I started to hear less and less from them. But now when I hear from them, it's just the same thing they have. They have no truth behind what they say, and there's only power in the truth, and whatever power they feel like they have is irrelevant. And so my feelings towards them are different. I look at many of Alex Jones' followers as a victim of Alex Jones himself. He uses them. He bilks them for their money, and they suffer because of it. Their relationships suffer because of it. They live in a world where all they see is hate and lies, and that's no place to be. So his followers enable him, and it's sad because they're victims of Alex Jones, and I wish that they could see that."
The state of Jones’s media company, Infowars, is still in flux. Last week, a federal judge rejected the results of an auction that put it in the hands of the satire site The Onion.
