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Crime Story Episode 28: Elizabeth Williamson

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Please take care while listening.

SOUNDCLIP

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: We saw this on January 6th. These were people who were propelled to attack the seat of our democracy by their belief in something that has been proven over and over, through more than 50 lawsuits, that is a lie. It's a lie. But protecting that lie has become the basis of a political movement, and that is what you see at Sandy Hook. It is a sort of nucleus of untruth around which people gather. And they don't want to be disturbed, and they will attack you if you do.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: About two weeks before I was scheduled to do this interview, a book called Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth appeared at my door. It took me about three or four days to actually decide to crack the book open, because I was so anxious about reading about what happened to those 20 children who were six and seven years old, who died in such a violent and horrific way. But I did eventually crack the book open, and those first few chapters were really hard to read. But then it got into what the book was really about, which was this incredible tragedy that followed what felt like an already unimaginable tragedy that Alex Jones, this ridiculous, horrible man, spent nearly a decade pushing this idea that Sandy Hook was a false flag, that it didn't happen, that those parents who lost their children were actors, and that they were lying about what happened to their babies, their grief. It was just unbelievable. And so I'm really glad that I cracked open that book. But I got to tell you, it's a very hard read, but it's a really important read. And so today, I'm really, really glad to be speaking to The New York Times reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, who took this story on and unpacked what is an even bigger American tragedy that we see the results of today. So Elizabeth, welcome to Crime Story, and I'm so looking forward to this conversation.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Thank you very much. Thank you for taking the time to read it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You know, some of the details were really tough.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It wasn't an easy read, but I'm guessing that you did that with care and purpose.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: It's interesting, Kathleen, because I did not cover the shooting itself as a reporter. So some of these details were new to me as well. But I felt like it was important to establish that baseline truth of what happened. I didn't want to go too far into, you know, the sort of grievous wounds that were suffered by these kids. But I did do it through the eyes of Bill Cario, who was a state police sergeant who was one of the first on the scene and who entered the room and saw the carnage left behind. So I thought this would be a good way to do it because he was struggling with the same thing, trying to preserve an original record, trying to make a record that he knew would last and be permanent, and at the same time, tell the truth of what happened and what he encountered that morning. So I did it through sort of his eyes and his voice. And I also made it the prologue of the book because I wanted people who really like yourself, who really were nervous about reading that again, who were so devastated by, you know, the news of the shooting itself that they could skip that section and still understand what had happened to, you know, the aftermath, which is really what the book is about, is about how lies about the shooting, you know, spread and metastasized and actually were a foundational story of how disinformation spreads in our society and in our democracy. And just as, you know, as an aside, a lot of the people who were some of the original Sandy Hook deniers were parents, especially moms with children around the same age. And they really had a hard time grappling with the actual facts of what happened, and really were kind of there for anyone who could tell them that these babies didn't die in this way. So I understand that impulse. I have had many people tell me, you know, I'm sorry, I just cannot pick up this book. But the families themselves have said, including at book events with me, really encouraged people to try and grapple with this, because it's the avoidance of what actually happened that helped fuel the conspiracy theories in the first place.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And it's knowing what actually happened that actually makes you even more upset about the conspiracy theories.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You know, and so let's get to that, because what I didn't realize, and maybe it's because we were naively here in Canada and we were less attuned to what was happening there, but those conspiracy theories started so quickly.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And it wasn't Alex Jones. Alex Jones has become obviously the most famous conspiracy theorist in this, but it started before him. Tell me where those first ideas came from that this was a hoax and when they started. Yeah.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Really, within hours of the shooting, there started to be theories spread that this was a so-called false flag, meaning that it was an event staged by the government as a pretext for confiscating America's firearms and for limiting people's Second Amendment freedoms. So Alex Jones did espouse this within hours of the shooting on his show, but he was initially somewhat reluctant to do that until he heard the death toll. And when that emerged, he seemed to have realized, and I don't know to what degree he consciously strategized here, or if it was just a kind of reptilian response, but what he basically knew was what both sides in the gun debate in America knew, was that this would be a watershed moment in that debate, that it would prompt a very loud, very long emotional and sustained push for a change in gun policy in the U.S.

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX JONES: And I said, they are going to come after our guns, look for mass shootings. And then magically, it happens. They are coming, they are coming, they are coming.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: And so he was a Second Amendment proponent. He was against any, you know, additional gun laws. And so this became a tool in the toolkit of himself and others who were pushing back against the changes in gun policy that some of the family members and many Americans were pushing for.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What were they pointing to? What were the hoaxers, what were the Alex Joneses pointing to to suggest that it was a hoax? Can you talk to me about that?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. So initially, they would pick apart sort of what they were seeing on TV, you know, what was playing out in the coverage of the shooting. So there was an enormous first responder response. And so they were seeing FBI officers come. They were seeing people in what looked like military, you know, gear coming on to the scene, police. And so they were starting to pick apart the response. Who are these people? Why weren't there helicopters flying victims to the hospital? Who were these people running? They were pointing to individual, you know, footage of people evacuating and running that on a loop and saying that this was a drill, that people were filing in and out of the school building. There were porta potties delivered to the scene for the media. I mean, there were hundreds of people who converged on this little school, and someone I guess got it in their head that they would supply something for the people who had come to the scene, including porta potties for people milling around in the parking lot, because there were scores of people doing that, including victims’ relatives. And so what were those porta potties doing there? Weren't they delivered in advance because they were preparing for this staged event? So the whole upshot was that this was the government staging this phony shooting in order to implement stricter gun controls, and the town of Newtown and everyone in the school and even the victims themselves colluding with the Obama administration to do this.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And we mentioned Alex Jones now a couple of times. For those people who don't know who Alex Jones is, can you tell me more about who he is and where he came from?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Sure. So he grew up in a suburb of Dallas. Later moved to Austin, where he became a fixture on Austin Public Access TV.

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX JONES: I come on Public Access and hang out. I'm on 24 hours a day, they say.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: And Austin Public Access TV back in the 90s, which is when Alex came up in the broadcasting business, was a kind of no holds barred. Any citizen can, you know, sit in the studio, speak to the camera and record their own show. And that was kind of how he got his start. You know, people would go out in Austin, go out to the bars, get stoned, come back at night, watch, you know, Alex like theorize. And so he picked on, you know, different things, you know, usually stuff that happened in the news. One of the earliest things was the Ruby Ridge and the Waco confrontation with the FBI back in the 90s. And he felt like this was, you know, a government plot, that, you know, that the Branch Davidians in Waco were rather than a kind of dangerously led cult, were, in fact, just people practicing a religion, and they were persecuted by the FBI and killed for their beliefs. And he waged a big fundraising campaign in an effort to rebuild the church on the property, and that was one of his earliest crusades. He raised a lot of money. A lot of people kind of, you know, dialed into that effort. And that was where, you know, we could first see how powerful he could be when it came to, you know, bringing on hordes of people to listen to his message and to buy in.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I mean, he was quite, I don't want to say charismatic, but he had a way of communicating that set him apart from a lot of people.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Even some of the families have said he can be really mesmerizing to watch. He's theatrical. He shouts, he cries, he whispers. He really knows how to rivet an audience. And, you know, while some of these conspiracy theories, as he, you know, whines on and on about them can get a little dull, he as a presenter and as a showman is extremely riveting and interesting to watch. And so the next phase of his, you know, development was that he could use these conspiracy broadcasts to sell things, chiefly products that people would buy, you know, that appealed to his audience. So if you were paranoid about, you know, fluoride in the water, that this was being put into the water to damage people's brains and to turn them into robots, an effort by the government, you could buy fluoride free toothpaste. You could buy iodine because there was radiation leaking into the atmosphere. You could buy supplies, dried food and supplies for your doomsday shelter. All of those sorts of products. And whenever Alex was on the air pushing the products, sales of them skyrocketed. And so this was, you know, around the time of Sandy Hook, he had newly discovered that he could sell these products, you know, millions of dollars worth of merchandise really tailored to the fears and paranoia of his audience.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, millions of dollars. I mean, he became a millionaire.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes, a multimillionaire. Yeah, absolutely. His operation really took off around the time of Sandy Hook, because that's when he went into the supplements business, you know, all of these diet supplements that he was selling. And then it kind of went absolutely viral during the Trump administration because he had Donald Trump on his show when he was campaigning for president.

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX JONES: Donald Trump is our guest, ladies and gentlemen, for the next 30 minutes or so. And obviously, he is a maverick.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: And then, you know, found that, you know, Donald Trump had… a slice of the electorate was Alex Jones's audience who supported him. You know, conspiracy minded individuals supporting a conspiracy minded politician. And so that kind of brought Alex Jones and his views sort of centre stage in the Republican Party.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And as an aside, and maybe not, I mean, you say he’s mesmerizing, but he's also gross. Like you talk about it, and I went and looked at videos of him. He walked around the office shirtless. That's awful. Yeah.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. People who I interviewed, you know, who worked for him both currently and in the past, talked about, you know, that he would, you know, come in, take off his shirt. He was really strange about being sweaty. He sweats a lot. And under hot TV lights, you know, anyone does, but he did more so. So he would walk around. He kept the office, you know, AC dial down to 60 degrees. Other people were working in coats and hats, and, you know, he's walking around shirtless because he had such a higher body temperature. And, you know, they painted this portrait of him as someone sitting at, you know, a card table in his office chowing down on, you know, takeout food with his shirt off and drinking vodka out of, you know, a cabinet in his office. So it was quite an operation. And yeah, they painted quite a vivid picture of what that was like.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Gross.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: He didn't work alone. Like you bring up a couple, maybe three particularly sort of offensive and prolific hoaxers that work with and alongside Jones, right?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So tell me about the, I think it's three that you really kind of introduce us to who are quite vicious human beings.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. So it is interesting and it's not always noted that, you know, Alex Jones, yes, he found it efficacious to promote this Sandy Hook conspiracy theory, but he needed content. And so while his claims in the beginning were quite general, what happened was he started using people who were calling in and appealing to him, you know, by email or what have you, members of his audience who had specific theories. And so some of these people were really, they came out of nowhere. They had no, you know, real broadcast experience certainly. They were just conspiracy minded individuals who then use the internet and the Infowars show and their appearances on the show to really boost themselves as, you know, sort of chief content providers to Infowars. And so one of them in particular, Wolfgang Halbig, was a former Florida educator who actually offered himself up as a consultant. He had been a school safety officer, and he offered himself up to the city or the town of Newtown as an investigator to figure out what really happened. They actually gave him a meeting, I found out later, and then they rejected him as a possible contractor. This would have been a moneymaking venture for him. But when they rejected him, he got offended and started to promulgate all of these conspiracy theories, including the one about the porta potties, the rescue helicopters. How come there were no helicopters? And over and over and over again, he issued public records requests. So he used the public records laws to get hundreds of pages of documents released to him, but it was never enough. There was always one more thing he needed, one more meeting he had to have. And the city tried to shut him down. And when that happened, he asked for hearings. And then he would bring more conspiracy theorists to the hearings. He went to school board meetings. He wanted to see kids who had sung at the Super Bowl after the shooting, kids from the school who were invited to be part of the halftime program just as a salute to the victims. He wanted their names because he was convinced that some of the children who were killed were actually singing at the Super Bowl and so on. So he has to this day never given up, and he became a regular on Alex Jones's program. Another person is James Fetzer, who is a former University of Minnesota professor, unbelievably, a man with a PhD who is a serial conspiracy theorist and developed his own conspiracy theory that this was a drill, that this was staged by the government and that no one actually died. A third person was a grandmother from Oklahoma named Kelley Watt, who had the email handle, great mom, who said that she also had a cleaning business in Tulsa. And as part of the cleaning business, you know, she developed, because that was her line of work, she developed this theory that no one had ever been contracted to clean up the terrible, like gore and carnage after the shooting, and that she wanted to see the contract and she wanted to know who cleaned up the blood. And if they couldn't tell her or they wouldn't tell her that, that was the cover up that proved that this was a false event, even though those records exist. So.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you tell one story that really threw me was she was… so one of the parents, Lenny, who you speak about, Lenny Pozner, who was sort of the main character, who was quite savvy with social media and the internet, was trying to deal with her just by giving her the answer she wanted. And she says something to him that I couldn't believe that a human being would say to another human being. Do you want to tell us what she said to him? Like basically, she said, I'm not going to believe you until…

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes. So early on, Lenny, who really stands at the centre of this story as someone who not only tried to combat these hoaxers early on, but also tried to raise alarms that this was just one story, and that these conspiracy theories were going to grow and spread on social media, and that they would begin to affect every aspect of American life. And he was absolutely right in that and completely prescient. So he wanted to do his part. So he produced records of Noah, his son's life and death, and he wanted to share them with these conspiracy theorists, hoping to beat back their theories with the truth. Well, they were resisting this, and they started to act like he was terrorizing them rather than, you know, actually trying to give them the information they said they were seeking. And in one exchange, Kelley Watt tells him, Wolfgang doesn't want to see you or talk to you until you exhume Noah's body and prove to the world you lost your son. And that, you know, Kathleen, it strikes, that phrase strikes you the way it struck me. And in fact, I wanted to make that the title of the book, Prove to the World You Lost Your Son, because that to me just really encapsulates the outrageousness and the entitlement, actually, of these people, that you would go to someone who had lost a six-year-old in such a violent way and say, now prove to me, a nobody from somewhere, that by digging up your child, that you actually lost him. I mean, to me, it just boggles the mind. And the idea that someone would actually approach someone who's grieving and say that, and someone who had children and grandchildren of their own, just shows you how pernicious these lies are and what a grip they have on people.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I just want to pick up on that word entitlement that you used, because it didn't occur to me while I was reading, but I think that was part of what I was feeling so angry about is where does that sense of entitlement come from? What was going on in their head that they thought they had a right to even suggest that they had a right to ask for any of these things, to engage in this conversation? I guess I'm curious about that. Where does that sense of entitlement come from?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: It's a great question, and I probably don't have a full answer because I think it depends on some of these individuals.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Of course.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: I think it comes from different places. But I think this, all of this, you know, if you speak generally about it, is a kind of distortion of what people do when they are seeking truth. If you're a voter, you research the backgrounds of the candidates. If you're a good, you know, educated voter, you want to research the backgrounds of the candidates that, you know, who are running for a given office. If you're a reporter, you want to look into the facts of the case and find out, you know, what actually happened and interview as many people as possible, and sometimes make a nuisance of yourself in trying to get to the truth of an event. And these individuals are self-styled reporters, investigators, police. You know, they sort of take on all of those roles, but in a very distorted way because they come at everything, assuming that everyone involved is lying. And that leads to that sense of everybody who doesn't believe their theory is somehow an enemy to them, or someone to be interrogated or questioned or doubted. And I think that's where that comes from.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And just for a minute, let's bring it back to the families of the victims. What was coming to them? What kind of messaging and vitriol were they having to sort of deal with as it was being ramped up on this side, and then especially once Trump gets involved and the message just goes wider?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. So Trump never espoused the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory. It was just that people who did were part of his base. But again, that sort of entitled sense of give us answers that people had, it made them confront the Sandy Hook families. It is interesting to me to this day that the people who sort of embrace these conspiracy theories never really saw the families as equal victims of this. Rather, they saw them as colluders with the government. It could have gone the other way. And it's really hard to understand, you know, why did they single them out as being part of this plot rather than, you know, victims like the rest of America? But they did. They saw them as being complicit in this game somehow. And so they flooded on to their social media pages, onto fundraising sites they had set up to raise money to bury their children. They accosted them on the street. They looked in their windows, they came to their homes, they hung in the trees. They did everything they could to try and confront these families and ask questions. Or later, when they resisted and tried to push back on them, especially Lenny Pozner, then they attacked them because then those family members became even more of an enemy to them. Because it's important to remember that embracing this conspiracy theory is one thing, but the community that it brought to these individuals was really important to them. And so I say in the book that, you know, they were sort of in this fortress, you know, this sort of Facebook fortress of falsehoods, and they were defending it against intrusions of truth. And so anyone who came to them with facts that they didn't want to hear became an enemy and a threat to them, not only to the theory that they were building or, you know, this theory of the case that they were espousing, but a real enemy to the sense of community and the sort of group that they had formed around each other.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Speaking of the Facebook fortress and all the other social media, you go into a lot of detail in the book about their response to Lenny Pozner and some of the others who were asking them to start be responsible citizens, and that did not happen. I mean, it was really, really shocking. Can you tell us a bit about sort of the way the big social media conglomerates responded to what was clearly like just devastating?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Compounding grief upon grief. Like really, it just seemed like it was like not one human being that wasn't locked up in the conspiracy, wouldn't say there needs to be some effort to even just save these people, let alone worry about your First Amendment rights.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah. So at the root of this is a U.S. policy, a provision called section 230 in U.S. law that protects social media platforms. It treats them like, you know, kind of the wire over which this information travels or the news print that it's printed on. So they're not seen as active participants in the spreading of defamatory material. And it was done that way at the dawn of the internet in order to protect the free flow of information, that there should be as much information flowing as freely as possible. We're uniting the world. We're building communities. We're doing all these good things. But then when bad things started to happen, the same policy protected these channels, you know, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, from taking action against this. It was an incentive for them. It was a reason for them to do nothing. So they did not in the very beginning. They did not respond because there was no law that would force them. There was no stick there. You know, it was just, okay, maybe we want to help. But there were so many of these complaints by that time that they probably didn't even see some of this.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And it made them more money, right? We know that the negative crap makes them more money.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. So enragement is engagement. So the more inflammatory the content, the longer it keeps someone on social media. And that is the goal of these companies. It's not building communities, as Mark Zuckerberg likes to say. It really is keeping you on line for as long as possible so that all your preferences, all your personal information, all of your interactions can be used to sell you more products. So to develop a profile of you as a consumer and to sell you more things. In a way, it's a little bit like Alex Jones's business model. You know, it's just get people online, feed them enough stuff that's going to get them on there fighting for hours, you know, researching for hours, talking with people, you know, gathering. And then in the meantime, you're scarfing up all of their data and you're selling them more stuff.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. And the other thing that these social media companies are hiding behind is this free speech argument. So can you explain where they're coming from and if there's any validity to that argument?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Absolutely. So the First Amendment protects individual Americans from infringement on their speech, their right to gather, there right to express their opinions by the government. These social media platforms are not the government. So if they take down, they are private companies. If they take down speech that is patently false, that is not a violation of the First Amendment. But they like to promote themselves as a kind of public square where people can gather and express their opinions and debate. And in a sense, they are, but they are not governed by the same rules. And that is the First Amendment. You know, free speech does not mean hate speech. It does not mean speech that damages people's individual lives. And that’s where they cross the line.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And if they're a private company, they can take down truth too, can't they? They can take down whatever they want. They own the platform.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: They can take down whatever they want. Exactly. Exactly. They can establish whatever rules they want. And I think, you know, ironically, Elon Musk at Twitter is showing that. He takes down anybody who doesn't agree with him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: But yet, he likes to position himself as a chief defender of free speech, but that's just sort of talking out two sides of the same amendment.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You had obviously developed quite a lovely relationship with the parents, a lot of them. I know in the book, you go back to them. You talk to them a lot. And you do such a good job of showing just how devastating, obviously, the deaths of their children are one thing, but the level of this was devastating. There were divorces and people had to move. Can you talk a bit about that, about what you sort of observed in terms of the hurt that this did cause?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: So some of these parents, and I tell the story through Lenny, but also to other families. And the reason I do that is because they had, well, a, they were willing to cooperate and they felt very strongly about the message of the book that they wanted to raise the alarm about the spread of disinformation in the U.S. and the downsides, you know, many, many downsides that it has. But they also represented three different approaches to it. You know, Robbie Parker, you know, whose daughter Emily died at Sandy Hook, initially did not want to engage with the hoaxers at all. He wanted to avoid them. He thought it might be dangerous to engage them. He wanted to stay away. And he was one of the people who was targeted by name because he gave a statement. He didn't realize it at the time, but he was the first Sandy Hook family member to speak about the tragedy after the fact, and his sort of demeanour during the press conference became fodder for the hoaxers. So he was repeatedly for years singled out by name. And this small slice of video was played over and over. So he was very identifiable to the point where four years later, someone accosted him on the street and started spewing these lies to his face. So. But he still didn't want to get engaged until he realized that after the Parkland shooting in 2018, that, you know, parents that he and his wife were speaking with relayed the same kind of phenomenon. And he thought, this is never going to go away. So he joined the lawsuits against Alex Jones. So, you know, two other families, you know, initially, and Lenny who knew from the very beginning that, you know, this was a societal problem. But then there were other parents that really didn't want to talk about this at all, that didn't want it to be revisited in a book, that felt like that would poke the bear and, you know, wake up the trolls again. And then there were others who just, you know, just never went online and didn't engage with the content at all, or who did not speak publicly and therefore were not targeted by the hoaxers. So many different experiences and many different responses. But the families as a whole were definitely targeted as being complicit in this hoax. No one was singled out as, oh, no, that that family member or, you know, that that individual was not involved in this imagined plot. They were taken as a whole that they were all complicit.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What was it like for you? I mean, it was hard for me to read your first three chapters. What was it like for you to have to do this? It must have been a lot.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: I mean, I always say when people ask me that, you know, anything that I experienced, of course, you know, can never, ever and should never, ever be compared to what the people I wrote about experienced. You know, it just pales. You know, I was honoured that they told their story. It was not easy for them to, you know, revisit these events and talk about, you know, how this whole thing got underway and the things that were said about them and done to them, in some cases, extremely terrifying. You know, the Pozner family moved a dozen times to avoid hoaxers that kept putting their address online. So they relived all that because they had a purpose in mind, and that was to warn all of us about, you know, the dangers of this disinformation. So that was kind of where I kept my focus. And, you know, I was just incredibly, and I think we all should be incredibly grateful to these family members that they do share their experience in the name of warning the rest of us about how dangerous this phenomenon is.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But you don't hide your irritation with the hoaxers. So you met a lot of them, even Alex Jones. I want to ask you all about that, but I think one of the scenes that I nearly laughed was in the car with, was it…

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Fetzer.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Fetzer. They did sound exhausting.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: They are exhausting. Yes. I mean, it's that sort of put the phone in the drawer kind of exhausting. You've heard it all before after, you know, years reporting the book. You'd heard every, you know, iteration of the conspiracy theory. And, you know, the most frustrating thing was, and I talked with Kelley Watt about her whole theory. I said, but you realize that, you know, and I described this in the book. You realize that there actually is a report that's filed, that's part of the public record that describes exactly what was taken out of the school. It names the company that did the work to clean up the site after the murders. It talks about how things were disposed of that were contaminated by the carnage there. So what more answer do you need? And so she stopped for a second. She was flummoxed. And then she said, well, where are the receipts? And, you know, I mean, that's what's exhausting, yeah, and irritating, because you realize that protecting this lie is so much more important than actually understanding. It's not about understanding. It's not about truth. It's about a phenomenon. It's about being supported in your views. It's about finding other people who support your views. It's about living in a bubble of belief and sort of political outlook that is so important to people. And that's what's really frightening and dangerous, that, you know, and we saw this on January 6th. These are people who were propelled to attack, you know, the seat of our democracy by their belief in something that has been proven over and over, through more than 50 lawsuits, that is a lie. It's a lie. But protecting that lie has become the basis of a political movement, and that is what you see at Sandy Hook. You know, it is a sort of nucleus of untruth around which people gather, and they don't want to be disturbed. They want to be fenced off. They want to have their hoaxer party, as Lenny calls it. They don't want you to bother them, and they will attack you if you do.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And so there's your direct line to what we're seeing today.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did it start with Sandy Hook? Like what's the genesis of that? Because the line is very clear.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But I'm curious. You know, you talk a lot about Sandy Hook, and it's very clear in your book how you do such a good job showing the seeds in the swamp, good word for it, I guess, that came out of that. But is that word started or did it start a little bit before? Like what…

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: So yeah, I put forward the idea that, yes, it did. And there are a couple reasons for that. One is that, you know, it is this sort of confluence of politics and conspiracy theorizing. You know, you saw in, for example, the 2008 election in the U.S., John McCain was speaking at a town hall when he, you know, running against Barack Obama. And a woman stood up and said, I don't trust Barack Obama.

SOUNDCLIP

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I can't trust Obama. I have read about him, and he's not… he's not… he's a… he's an Arab.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: And started the conspiracy theory, helped along by Donald Trump at the time, by the way, that he was not born in this country and shouldn't be running. And John McCain shut her down. He said, no, no. He literally took the microphone from her and said…

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JOHN MCCAIN: No, ma'am. No, ma'am. He's a… he's a… he's a decent family man citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that's what this campaign is all about.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: What we saw in the aftermath of Sandy Hook was a willingness by political actors to embrace these theories and these theorists, and to see in them political utility. So that's one thing. But really, one of the main places you can, you know, on whose doorstep we should lay this is the social media channels, because before, I talked in the book to a woman whose daughter was injured at the Virginia Tech shooting, which remains to this day the most deadly school shooting in American history. And in the aftermath of that, there was so little uptake on social media because people didn't have it. So I asked her, can you check your Facebook page and tell me? Because she became very active in, you know, in the gun control movement. So she would have been targeted by these individuals. And she wasn't, because at that time, there were very few individual Facebook users. And by the time of Sandy Hook, there were a billion. On Twitter, there were maybe 5000 tweets a day. And at the time of Sandy Hook, there were 5000 tweets every second. You know, YouTube videos had gathered by the time of Sandy Hook, a billion views for a single video. So the uptake in social media use was enormous from the time of those two shootings. And you saw the theories spread, and social media was what allowed this to spread at the pace and the rate and just the enormity that it did.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Famously, some of the family members sued Alex Jones and won, and he's now officially bankrupt. Why didn't they sue social media companies?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Because they are protected by this section 230, yeah, that treats them not as, you know, participants in these theories, but as just the means through which they travel.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay. Let's talk a little bit about those trials. I mean, they were huge news. I remember it happening. And Alex Jones basically sunk himself. Can you talk a little bit about what happened there?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. There were a couple of really pivotal moments in those trials. The first was the trials in Texas. Well, trial in Texas. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son, Jesse Lewis, died at Sandy Hook, sued Alex Jones. He, along with Lenny Pozner and Veronique Delarosa, who are the parents of Noah Pozner, also sued Jones in Texas. They have not had a trial, but the Scarlett and Neil trial was the first. And so in that, you saw Scarlett Lewis actually confront Alex Jones in the courtroom and ask him over and over, why?

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SCARLETT LEWIS: I am a real mom, and there's nothing that you could have found because it doesn't exist that I'm deep state. It's just not true. I know you know that. That's the problem. I know you know that, and you keep saying it. Why? Why?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: And he was squirming. He was shaking his head. He was sweating. It was really one of the most powerful things I think I've ever witnessed as a reporter, and I've been in this business for 30 years. Just to see someone who had withstood so much in their life, had lost their child, just confronting the person who was the source of so much harassment and fear and pain and just saying why.

SOUNDCLIP

SCARLETT LEWIS: Truth, truth is so vital to our world. Truth is what we base our reality on, and we have to agree on that to have a civil society. Sandy Hook is a hard truth. Hard truth. Nobody would ever believe that 26 kids could be murdered. Nobody would ever want to believe that. I understand people not wanting to believe that actually. I don't want to believe it. But having a quarter of Americans doubt that Sandy Hook happened, or doubt the facts around Sandy Hook is not conducive to keeping our kids safe. It's not.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: And that person having absolutely no explanation. And that was just incredible. And she is a person who was determined always to rise above this. She runs an organization called the Choose Love Movement, where she teaches empathy and compassion in schools, because she feels that the gunman, one of the reasons he carried out this act was that he was bullied and misunderstood. He had definite mental health challenges that, you know, were not adequately addressed. So she's made that her cause. And, you know, so to see this person who is by nature and approach kind, asking plaintively, why are you doing this and why won't you stop, you will go back to your studio and say this again, I don't understand why, was enormously powerful. So that was one thing. Where Alex Jones really kind of helped to, I mean, he went into the trials already having been found liable for defaming the families, but where he really sort of ran up the score against himself was in denying that he had any text messages on his phone which had been called for discovery, and then his own lawyer had mistakenly sent the entire volume of text messages from his phone to opposing counsel, so to the family's lawyers. And they brought that up in court.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And just to be clear, those text messages basically showed his contradictions and his vitriol and all that stuff.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: And also, importantly, they showed that he was tracking how much money he was making when he spread these theories. So his organization was aware that when he talked about Sandy Hook, sales of his products went through the roof. And that was very important to the jury, as you can imagine. So yeah. Then during the Connecticut trial, he did take the stand for a short time. He exploded and showed such a lack of empathy toward the families who were all sitting there, you know, a couple dozen people, when you count all the friends and families who were in the gallery at the time, and just saying, is this a struggle session? No, I'm not sorry. You know, he was attacking the lawyer who was questioning him. But of course, the families are in the front rows, and he's basically just saying, you know, before a jury, I don't care about this. I'm the victim here. I'm the one who's being attacked. You know, basically expressing absolutely zero empathy to the faces of these families who were all watching this, and importantly, to the jury that then delivered an enormous verdict against him.

SOUNDCLIP

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: A Connecticut jury ordered far right Infowars host Alex Jones to pay nearly $1 billion in damages for spreading lies about the elementary school shooting.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Have you got any sense of what's wrong with Alex Jones?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: I'm not a psychiatrist, and I don't even play one on TV or on the radio.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But you do talk a little bit in the book about narcissism and like where he came from. And I mean, what were you able to gather about what might be motivating and driving him to behave this way? Because it is scary and strange.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah. So more broadly, I mean, psychologists, people who are in that business of putting these individuals on the couch actually have come up with a profile of, you know, the sort of negative conspiracy theorists, because we are all conspiracy theorists to some degree. You know, there are reasons to believe that the government lies to us. The government has lied to us. You know, there are reasons to question the official version of events. But the people who spread these sort of antisocial conspiracy theories do tend to be narcissistic. They want to have, you know, the inside track. They want to have information that you or I don't have, that the general public doesn't have. They find real value in that. They tend to be Machiavellian, that, you know, in promoting these theories, the end justifies the means. We see that, you know, with the notes to the families and all of that. He has a lot of those traits. He sees himself as the victim of people who criticize him. So all of that. But I think also, I got the sense that Alex Jones did not really catch up with who Alex Jones was, meaning that, you know, at the beginning of when he spread the theory and at the end. So when he got involved with the Trump administration and sort of entered the mainstream of conservative far right politics, he came under a type of scrutiny that he had never, ever had in his career. In 2013, he was interviewed in the aftermath of the shooting on CNN, on network news, and no one asked him about that theory because they don't watch his show. He was only brought on to those shows as a Second Amendment advocate, as a particularly wild Second Amendment advocate who made great TV. But when he, you know, became kind of mainstreamed in Republican politics was when people really started to look at him. And it was in 2018 that the family sued him. You know, at that time, he had become already emblematic of this sort of post-truth world that we were living in and that it was affecting our politics. And I don't think Alex Jones, to this day, understands fully what hit him. I think he just, you know, still sort of part of him still sees himself as a kid bloviating on Austin Public Access TV. And who, you know, who's listening to me? Only the people who either think I'm entertaining or the people who believe, you know, what I'm saying. And he didn't understand, I think even now, although now, he's definitely gotten a full taste of, you know, the consequences, but I think he just didn't understand that spreading these kinds of lies, and particularly something about him changed in that he was no longer questioning things like the 911 attacks or even the coronavirus epidemic. He was attacking individual grieving family members, and that was an important distinction. And when you start to do that, you have walked onto the playing field of defamation law. And so he was sued for defamation, and he just never really got exactly what the difference was between what he'd been doing all those years and what he did to those individual family members.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So did the lawsuits help mute the conspiracy theorists and the Alex Joneses? Like what was the result of those things?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: That's a great question, and that is a subject of debate. So there have been a number of high profile defamation suits that have been filed in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, including, you know, the Dominion settlement, the $787 million against Fox News, the Eugene Carroll defamation case against Donald Trump where she won $83 million, both of the Sandy Hook verdicts, of course, the Rudy Giuliani $140 million judgement in favour of two Georgia election workers who, you know, were targeted by him in lies about the 2020 election. So I think all of those are starting to have a deterrent effect on people who are thinking twice about spreading those sorts of inflammatory claims. I think Fox News has toned down, is certainly more careful about bringing, you know, overt conspiracy theorists on to their opinion shows. I think that the size of those judgements does pull people up short. But the other thing, you know, on the other side of it, there's a lot of money to be made and there's a lot of political capital to be had by spreading these theories. And so one has to outweigh the other in order for it to stop. If people are rewarded either through money or power, political power, by spreading these theories, they have an absolute incentive to continue.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Where is Alex Jones today? Does he still have Infowars? I actually don't know very much about where he is now.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah, he's been let back on Twitter by Elon Musk. So he was taken down in 2018. And in early 2019, he was taken down from every social media platform in the advent of this lawsuit. That was not the reason that they gave, but they did nonetheless take him down using their own, you know, sort of amalgam of reasons for taking him off. But he's been restored to Twitter. I see that he's on there all the time broadcasting his show. He still broadcasts Infowars four hours a day. And he is still in bankruptcy court and working towards some kind of accommodation of the families. He has nowhere near the amount of money that they've been awarded by juries. So this is probably headed towards some kind of settlement, but what that will look like, whether that will be the liquidation of his entire empire or whether he will manage to pay something that will satisfy the families remains to be seen, and that will all be hammered out in the coming months.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And he never quite admitted to lying, right? He sort of tries to obfuscate all the time about what he did.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: He says he was repeating what others were saying, that he was just reporting what other people were speculating about, that he was just asking questions. He says now that he knows the shooting actually happened. He tries to say that he has apologized to the families, but in fact, he has not. He's basically apologized for … he's the guy who got caught. You know, he's very, very sorry that all of this has brought a world of pain to Alex Jones and Infowars. That's what he's sorry about.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, he’s sorry he got caught.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So what do we do now? What are your feelings about how to make sure that the next group of parents are protected or, you know, these conspiracies is… you're not going to be able to do it. I appreciate that, but you've spent enough time looking at this. And like where is a fix, or at least, an effect to sort of make this a little bit of a safer place?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah. There is some work, and I describe some of it in the book.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: There is some work being done to try and inoculate people against being so susceptible to these conspiracy theorists.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, I found that fascinating. Yeah.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah, it was really interesting. And, you know, it would be…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It’s like allergy tests of giving you little bits of peanut butter until you're not allergic.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes, exactly. It's exactly right. Like exposing people to conspiracies. Because that way, you know, that need to have an inside track, if you can convince people like we're showing you how the sausage is made, don't be fooled, that sort of appeals to the personality type that tends to embrace conspiracy theories. So there's that kind of work being done at the sort of psychological, psychosocial level. But then there are some policy changes being considered, ways to rein in the spread of this. That's highly controversial. People don't want to see the government getting involved in, you know, choking off information, even if it's bad information. We've seen a backlash to that. There's, you know, people are more aware just generally, and I think this is where you can really congratulate and we can all be grateful to the Sandy Hook families. No one talked about this before. You know, when this first began to gain steam, nobody talked about this. No one was aware that this happened. It was insidious. It was sort of happening in, you know, the fever swamps, but maybe not reaching, you know, the sort of ears of people who would actually recognize this as a problem. And the Sandy Hook families really did put it on the radar. Lenny Pozner in particular, first and foremost, you know, really said this is a coming issue. And boy, was he ever right.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How are they? I mean, like you said, they're all different. As I mentioned, there's been divorces. And sadly, there was one suicide you write about in the book. The ones that are around, is there… it's been many years now. How are they doing? I mean, at its core, they lost a child.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In the most violent of ways. So I know they'll never be fine, but how are they otherwise?

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Again, I cannot speak for all of them, and I never, ever would presume to do that. The parents that and the family members that I'm in regular touch with, I think they tend to describe good days and bad days. There are two things that happen that has been described to me. One is that they really do, people who experience loss generally, again, I’m not speaking for the whole group of survivors, but people who experienced loss over and over describe how important it is to have their fellow citizens, their neighbourhood, their community, their country gather around them and tell them that they are thinking about them and that they care and that they're lifting them up at such a terrible time. One of the terrible effects of this was that it tore a part of that away for them, and that was extraordinarily painful for them. So they still experience that. But on the flip side, the fact that they have been able to bring this phenomenon to, you know, the forefront and have the upwelling of support for doing that, that they've experienced I think has been very healing for the ones that I know and have described that for me. So yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, you have those letters that the lawyer has, right? You showed us the letters of support that were really touching and poignant.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes. Yes. And every time I write about this or every time I do some kind of, you know, appearance related to this phenomenon, the comments of people, you know, just being completely in the family's court and, you know, you know, pretty condemnatory of, you know, the purveyors of this disinformation, you know, that's an uplift. That helps to restore some of what was taken away when these theories got started in the first place.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I mean, one of the thoughts that I had reading was like, what happens on social media is that the few loud ones, you start to feel like that's everyone.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes. Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But then you hear from people who are quieter and supportive, and there are still more. It's just that social media just… it has this way of making those negative things so much louder, and you can't ignore them. But it's too bad because there is so much more of the good, I still think.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's what the families were feeling, you know, just the amount of interest and coverage and supportive commentary that surrounded these lawsuits, again, helped to restore for them that faith in humanity that really they needed so much, because, you know, it was an element of humanity that took everything from them. And so to have people around them saying, no, no, you know, most of the world is with you is just so important to them. And so I'm so happy for them that, you know, the response to their filing these suits and their victory in these lawsuits has been so resonant. So that's been I think, as much as anything they'll get from Alex Jones, I think that's much more important to them.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So on an uplifting note, I think we're going to say goodbye.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Thank you for having me on.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Likewise.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And really, your book is like incredible.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Thank you so much.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 28

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