Right-wing agitator Alex Jones shook his head repeatedly as his lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting massacre were read out to a Texas jury on the first day of his defamation trial.
The trial in Austin, Texas, which began on Tuesday, will determine how much money the Infowars conspiracy theorist will have to pay to the parents of a child murdered in the 2012 mass shooting at an elementary school.
Jones is being sued by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, was among the 20 children and six adults massacred by a gunman in Newtown, Connecticut.
For years after the shooting, Jones used his website Infowars to claim that the shooting was faked and a “false flag” operation and that the parents had pretended to grieve.
Judge Maya Guerro Gamble previously ruled against Jones after he failed to produce documents for court-ordered discovery in the case.
Jones and Infowars were held liable for all damages, and the jury will now rule on what he will pay Mr Heslin and Ms Lewis.
He has already lost three other Sandy Hook-related defamation cases through default judgements, and will face a jury in Connecticut that will decide on those damages in September.
In his opening statement on Tuesday, Mark Bankston, a lawyer for the family, told the court how Jones had profited from his lies about the Sandy Hook families by increasing his audience and selling them products.
Jones stared ahead and shook his head as his lies were read out and debunked by Mr Bankston, according to HuffPost.
“Jones told his audience that (Barack) Obama staged Sandy Hook, and not that Obama ordered the murder of those children, but that there were never even children at all,” said Mr Bankston.
“Jones said the school was fake, the parents liars, paid actors. The funerals fake, their tears fake.”
The jury was also shown a video of an Infowars broadcast from 25 September 2014, in which Jones mocked crying parents who had lost children.
Jones told his audience that the killing of the youngsters had been faked and that photos existed that proved they were in fact still alive.
“Jones said there were photos of victims still alive. This is so disgusting, so repulsive, that I feel silly standing here and telling you that’s false,” added Mr Bankston.
In June 201, Mr Heslin did an interview with Megyn Kelly in which he described holding his dead son, in the hope that it would bring an end to the harassment being aimed at the grieving families.
The court heard that Jones went on the air the next day and branded Mr Heslin a liar “to retaliate against Neil for daring to speak out against years of cruelty.”
“Now, every single time Neil Heslin has to think about the last moments he spent with Jesse, he also has to think about this horrible man,” Mr Bankston said.
Despite being there for the opening of the trial, a lawyer for Jones has said that his client may miss some of it due to unspecified “medical issues.”
