Alex Jones’ Custody Trial: 10 WTF Moments
InfoWars host Alex Jones lost primary custody of his children just before midnight Thursday after a nine-day trial in Texas. For the past two weeks, the 43-year-old, Austin-based talk-radio host was battling his ex-wife, Kelly Jones, for parental rights of their three kids, ages nine, 12 and 14. But this was no ordinary custody case. Instead, it was an on-the-record view into the mind of someone famed for ranting about how 9/11 and Sandy Hook were inside jobs, and how the Syrian government’s recent chemical attack on civilians was a “false flag.”
In front of a jury in Travis County, Texas, Kelly’s lawyers argued that Alex is unstable both on-and-off camera. Earlier this month, Kelly told the court during a pretrial hearing that their children watch Alex broadcast from home, according to the Austin American-Statesman. “He’s not a stable person,” she said. “He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped.” For his part, Jones’s lawyers argued that he was a sensitive father, a different man at work and at home.
As Jones reevaluates his parental options, here are 10 WTF moments from Alex Jones’s recent turn in the spotlight.
Jones contradicted his lawyers by defending his conspiracy theories
On April 17th, the first day of the trial, Jones’s lawyers defined him as a “performance artist” akin to Jon Stewart and Rush Limbaugh. Jonathan Tilove, an American-Statesman reporter covering the trial, tweeted that the lawyers described their client’s on-air persona as having the ability to combine “humor, bombasity, sarcasm, wit.”
That night, Jones posted an InfoWars video contradicting his lawyer’s statement. “They’ve got articles out today that say I’m fake, all of this other crap. Total bull,” Jones said, according to Tilove. “The media is deceiving everywhere. I 110-percent believe what I stand for.”
There were multiple pieces of evidence that included Jones in various states of undress
On the second day of trial, Jones sat in the courtroom and watched a “shirtless, pantsless version of himself hawk male vitality supplements,” according to BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel. Another video of him removing his clothes and yelling about the FBI was introduced into evidence. The images prompted Kelly Jones’s lawyer, Bobby Newman, to tell the court, “He just takes his clothes off.”
When a witness said that Jones also liked to take his shirt off during therapy
Jones’s lawyers painted Kelly Jones as the family conspiracy theorist. Dr. Alissa Sherry, the children’s case manager during the divorce, said Kelly Jones suffered from “emotional dysregulation.” And Allison Wilcox, the guardian ad litem, said she filed a report with Child Protection Agency recommending limited visitations after seeing a video of the mother’s alleged abuse against her children. Though Kelly Jones endured most of the character strikes, Wilcox told the court that Jones displayed narcissistic and paranoid “tendencies.” Sherry added that a therapist had diagnosed him with narcissistic personality disorder and he sought help. Sherry, who witnessed Alex remove his shirt in front of his children during the therapy session, told Newman she did not “remember the context” of the strip, but that it was a “rare thing to happen in a therapy session.”
Jones got sued by a yogurt company mid-trial
Meanwhile, Jones is being sued by the Chobani yogurt company for claiming that its practices of hiring refugees in Idaho attracted “migrant rapists” involved in a 2016 child sexual assault case in Twin Falls, as well as a regional spread of tuberculosis. The report was published on the InfoWars website and YouTube on April 11th.
On Monday, Chobani filed a defamation lawsuit in Idaho that named Jones, InfoWars and Free Speech Systems as defendants. The following day, Jones posted a video arguing that his reports came from information that “has been all over mainstream news.” “We will defeat these people,” Jones said. “This is my fight, this is your fight, this is our fight against a bunch of authoritarian, globalist, third-world populations allied with the global elite, who are totally coldblooded.”
Kelly Jones accused her ex-husband of molding their son into a conspiracy theorist
Kelly’s lawyers argued that Jones is unstable both on and off camera, and that he “intends to enmesh the children” into his profession. “That’s his plan for them,” Newman said, according to the Huffington Post. Jones told the court that his 14-year-old son is interested in working for InfoWars and has “done some great reports for us.”
Stephen Colbert got involved
The Late Show host Stephen Colbert kept tabs on the trial’s ongoings and introduced his audience to a Jones-esque character named Tuck Bradford Colbert couldn’t get enough of the trial, even showing footage of Jones grunting on InfoWars, “I want to fight!” “Clips like that make Alex Jones seem less like a fit parent and more like a coked-out football coach in a police standoff,” Colbert quipped.
Sitting on the witness stand, Jones told his lawyer, Randall Wilhite, that he did not bring his intensity home. “No. None of the bombasity, when I rage,” Jones said. “Stephen Colbert made fun of me the other day. I’m sure his kids see him get angry on TV.”
Jones blamed a memory failure on a large bowl of chili
Sitting on the witness stand, his ex-wife’s lawyers had him read from a deposition transcript in which he claimed he could not remember the names of his children’s teachers or the details of their school work because he ate too much chili. In the transcript, Newman asked Jones if chili affected his memory. “Big old bowl of chili. Sure does, yeah,” Jones responded.
Jones also blamed George Soros for strong marijuana
During cross-examination, Jones told Newman that he smokes marijuana roughly once a year to “monitor its strength.” He apparently finds pot too strong nowadays, and blames this on billionaire George Soros – who funds some marijuana legalization efforts – saying that Soros has “brain damaged a lot of people.” Newman, fed up with Jones’s eye-rolling, sighing and hand-throwing, asked, “If you’re not high, why can’t you just answer my questions?” Afterwards, Colbert revived his Buckford character and once again mocked his new favorite punching bag: “Tuck’s a bit mellow today, because for your safety, I have been testing the strength of some of George Soros’ patented mind-control marijuana.”
Jones claimed he slept with 150 women as a teenager
During the trial, Jones posted a video on InfoWars: LIVE, called Alex Jones Responds to Sandy Hook Vampire. But instead of ranting about “unanswered questions” around the mass shooting, he showed scenes from the 1973 American science fiction movie Soylent Green and talked about his teenage sex life. At 16, Alex said, he was “already a man” who “had over 150 women” and been in “fights with full-grown men.”
Kelly Jones’s lawyers accused Alex Jones of paying off therapists
In closing arguments, Kelly Jones’s lawyer Robert Hoffman told the court that Jones had manipulated 27 therapists involved in the case to take his side. “I don’t know whether to call it an ‘army’ or a’ ‘battalion,'” Hoffman said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”