The father of a victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre has won a defamation lawsuit against the authors of a book that claimed the shooting never happened — the latest victory for victims’ relatives who have been taking a more aggressive stance against conspiracy theorists.
The book, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, has also been pulled from the shelves to settle claims against its publisher filed by Lenny Pozner, a man whose six-year-old son, Noah, was killed in the shooting.
“My face-to-face interactions with Mr Pozner have led me to believe that Mr Pozner is telling the truth about the death of his son,” Dave Gahary, the principal officer at publisher Moon Rock Books, said on Monday. “I extend my most heartfelt and sincere apology to the Pozner family.”
The same day, a judge in Wisconsin issued a summary judgment against authors James Fetzer and Mike Palacek.
Pozner has been pushing back for years against hoaxers who have harassed him, threatened his life and claimed that he was an actor and his son never existed.
He has spent years making Facebook and others remove conspiracy videos and set up a Web site to debunk conspiracy theories.
Lately, the fight has been joined by others who lost relatives in the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting.
After quietly enduring harassment and ridiculous assertions for years, some have changed their approach, deciding the only way to stop it is to confront it.
Their efforts have turned the tables on the hoaxers, including Alex Jones, host of the conspiracy-driven Infowars Web site.
Robbie Parker, whose six-year-old daughter Emilie was among 20 first-graders and six educators killed at Sandy Hook, spent years ignoring people who called him a crisis actor.
His family moved to the West Coast, but still the harassment did not stop. He would receive letters from people who found his address.
He was once stopped in a parking garage by a man who berated him and said the shooting never happened.
“You are taught when you are young that you ignore bullies and eventually they will leave you alone, but as time went on, and my other girls were getting older, I realized they weren’t stopping and some of this was getting worse and getting more personal,” Parker said.
Parker is now part of a lawsuit against Jones, has testified before the US Congress and pushed for changes on social media platforms, such as YouTube, which announced this month it would prohibit videos that deny the Sandy Hook shooting and other “well-documented events.”
“It wasn’t until the lawsuits and until it became a mainstream news story that people realized they were being complicit in this and started to moderate the content,” Parker said.
Pozner is the lead plaintiff in several of the at least nine cases that have been filed against Sandy Hook deniers in federal and state courts in Connecticut, Florida, Texas and Wisconsin.
In the case against Jones, the families of eight victims and a first responder say they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers.
A Connecticut judge ruled in the defamation case that Jones must undergo a sworn deposition, which is scheduled for July in Texas.
Wisconsin’s Dane County Circuit Court Judge Frank Remington on Monday ruled that Pozner had been defamed by Fetzer and Palacek, who claimed in their book, among other things, that Noah’s death certificate had been faked, Pozner’s lawyer, Jake Zimmerman said.
A trial to decide damages has been set for October.
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