Infowars host Alex Jones completed two days of depositions in a defamation lawsuit filed by victims’ families from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, court documents filed Wednesday show.
The appearances came after Connecticut judge Barbara Bellis last week found Jones in contempt for failing twice to attend depositions on March 23 and 24.
She ordered him to pay daily fines amounting to tens of thousands of dollars for each day he didn’t provide the sworn testimony. According to Wednesday’s filing, Jones paid $75,000 — $25,000 on Friday and $50,000 on Monday.
Jones sat for depositions on Tuesday and Wednesday, going “above and beyond” Bellis’ order by sitting “beyond normal hours for the deposition to afford the plaintiffs’ counsel a full and fair opportunity to question him,” according to the filing from Jones’ lawyer, Norm Pattis.
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Jones, in a video posted to the Infowars website Tuesday, said he sat with a plaintiff’s lawyer in Connecticut for 10 hours — a period he described as “next level, like a hallucination or something.”
Jones added that he was “demonized” but provided “every” document he was asked about.
“Here’s the big takeaway, and I’ll just admit it,” Jones said to the camera. “I could’ve done a better job on Sandy Hook. Some of the anomalies that we reported on were not accurate, and I admitted it years before I was sued.”
Pattis, who appeared in the video, noted that Jones was asked questions not related to the Sandy Hook shooting that struck him as a “broad wholesale attack” on the Infowars host and his site.
“From time to time, tempers flared in the room,” the attorney said Tuesday.
“Alex wasn’t perfect today, but he did a good job.”
Pattis did not respond to a request for comment.
Jones’ depositions — which he said he missed because of health problems — were for an upcoming trial to determine how much he should pay the eight victims’ families and an FBI agent who sued him over his claims that the Dec. 14, 2012, school shooting was a hoax.
Twenty first-graders and six educators were killed in the shooting.
The plaintiffs say they’ve been harassed and suffered death threats over Jones’ claims. Last year, Bellis found Jones liable for damages in the defamation suit.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
