Alex Jones is Sued in a Child Custody case

Sadly, many people who don’t know me or my neighborhood cling to an absurd lie: that I and political figures including Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, run a child-slavery ring out of Comet’s basement.

Last month, one of those people, Edgar Maddison Welch, pleaded guilty to local and federal charges stemming from the day last year when he showed up at my pizza shop wielding an assault rifle and a .38-caliber handgun. He was following calls by conspiracy theorists for a “self-investigation” of the concocted sex ring.


Comet Ping Pong owner, James Alefantis, addresses reporters during the reopening of his restaurant days after a gunman entered with an assault rifle, firing it at least once. (Photo: Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)
What he discovered was happy families eating lunch. While my brave staff swiftly evacuated customers, Welch walked through the building undeterred, shot a computer closet, then laid down his weapons and surrendered to the police in the middle of Connecticut Avenue. He will remain in prison for years.

I’m often asked how this happened. It started in October when WikiLeaks released Podesta’s hacked emails. Podesta and his brother, Tony, are Comet fans, and in these emails I was invited to cook for a Clinton fundraiser.

Anti-Clinton conspiracy theorists and online trolls congregating on Reddit and 4chan, decided that the words “pizza” and “cheese” in these emails were code for pedophilia.

They ultimately pushed the lie that my pizza restaurant was being used to abduct children and commit heinous crimes.

These lies ricocheted from shadowy chat rooms to various social-media platforms, encouraged by fake news articles and deliberately amplified by provocateurs such as Alex Jones, who broadcast these smears to his audience of millions.

Suddenly, the lives of everyone in Comet’s orbit were thrown into chaos.

I was inundated with death threats, sometimes many a day. Comet’s Facebook and Yelp pages were flooded with obscene “reviews.” The restaurant’s phone rang off the hook, with people calling and screaming at the hosts. First, we answered only local area codes, then unplugged the phones.

Online, we were labeled as criminals — or worse. They posted our pictures, links to personal social media, even our home addresses. Our community of food runners, hosts, bussers, waiters, customers, artists we display, bands that performed, my godchildren, surrounding businesses and my mother all were harassed by self-proclaimed “investigators.”

After Welch surrendered to the D.C. police with a declaration that “the intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” we thought truth would prevail. But some online trolls labeled the incident a “false flag,” insisting Welch had been hired by Clinton to distract from her crimes. A few weeks ago, when my best friend and former partner suffered a heart attack, these same trolls said it was retribution.

Jones attempted to apologize with a belated and half-hearted retraction, but the online community of “investigators” labeled Jones a shill. Unsurprisingly, Jones’s platform, InfoWars, continues to broadcast lies about me and Comet.

Ten years ago, we opened Comet to be a place for people to gather, eat, drink and play. And I sometimes wondered what would happen if something bad happened to us. Where would my community be?

I now know where they are.

They are seating the guests, tending the bar, playing ping-pong with their families. They are eating our pizza, drinking a beer and catching up with their neighbors. They are sending notes saying, “Have a drink on me,” or “Keep your doors open, do not let fake news win.”

This is our community.

Hours after the gunman was arrested, they called to ask if they could come for dinner. “We’re closed,” I said. “Crime scene.” Their response? “Okay, we’ll come tomorrow.”

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It leads to a very perplexing video he recorded over the weekend, all the more perplexing because it comes at the midpoint of his two-week child custody trial at the Travis County Courthouse, which resumes today.

The video is entitled, LIVE: Alex Jones Responds to Sandy Hook Vampire

And, it promises, New Sandy Hook/Newtown Information Released.

It seemed an odd choice of topic.

Jones’ assertion that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was, or may have been, a hoax, is probably the most off-putting conspiracy theory he has put forward in a career of conspiracy theorizing – the one that more than any other a lot of people can’t forgive him for.

But the weekend video was way odder and more perplexing than that.

It promised new information about Sandy Hook, but never provided any.

Nothing.

Instead, it is a discursive, hour-and-six-minute report – beginning with scenes from the science fiction movie Soylent Green – in which Jones talks about startling and what seemed to be previously undisclosed elements of his biography.

Most provocatively, there is this:

When I was 16, I didn’t want to party any more. I didn’t want to play games any more.

I grew up. I’d already been in the fights, all the big rituals. I’d already had probably – I hate to brag, but I’m not bragging, it’s actually shameful – probably 150 women, or more, that’s conservative. I’d already had over 150 women. I’d already been in fights with full-grown men. I was already dating college girls by the time I was 15-years-old. I was already a man at 16.

When he was 16, Alex Jones, who was born in Dallas in 1974, would have still been living in Rockwall, outside Dallas. He moved to Austin in 1991. He turned 17 in February of that year.

For a young lad growing up in Rockwall to have had sex with 150 women – conservatively – by the time he was 16 seems extraordinary.

But, if it’s not true, why would he say it?

And yet, if it is true, why would he say it now?

A lot has been written about Jones. I haven’t read all of it, but I don’t recall seeing any mention of anything like this.

From a March 2010 Nate Blakeslee profile in Texas Monthly.

Jones, the son of a dentist and a homemaker, grew up in the Dallas exurb of Rockwall and moved to Austin in 1991, where he attended Anderson High School. Jones describes himself as a “socially oblivious” teenager who was more of a reader than a TV watcher.

And from a March 20111 profile by Alexander Zaitchk in Rolling Stone:

Jones was born in Dallas in 1974, the descendant of two lines of Texas frontiersmen. He describes a childhood that will disappoint those searching for the Freudian roots of his crusade. His parents, a dentist and a homemaker, raised him with love in the manicured suburb of Rockwall. “I was the all-American kid with a great family,” he says. “I read Time-Life books, played football, was friends with everybody.”

Home life was intellectual, but not overtly political. “My parents were careful not to give me political views almost as an experiment to see what I’d turn into,” he says. “The closest thing to a childhood political training was some neighbors who were members of the John Birch Society. They’d come over for dinner and I’d be exposed to those ideas, starting at around age two.”

It was in high school that Jones discovered a corrupt, Blue Velvet underbelly to his town. At weekend parties, he watched as off-duty cops dealt pot, Ecstasy and cocaine to his friends. “A truck would appear, sometimes with a guy still in uniform inside,” Jones recalls. “Then, on Monday, they’d have D.A.R.E. and drug-test us for football.” Jones, a young var*sity lineman, did not appreciate the irony. “I was like, ‘You want to drug-test me, when I know you’re selling the stuff?’ I called them the mafia to their face. At the time, I didn’t know anything about CIA drug-dealing.”

Things came to a head during Jones’ sophomore year, when he was pulled over while driving without a license, a six-pack of beer under the passenger seat. Jones told the cop he was corrupt and had no right to enforce laws. “They brought me to jail,” Jones says. “Afterward, one of the cops told me to wise up, or they’d frame me and send me away.” The following week, his father was so spooked that he sold his dental practice and moved the family to Austin. A few months later, Rockwall County’s sheriff was indicted on organized-crime charges.

For Jones, the encounter with state hypocrisy was transformative. “The Rockwall cops were lowbrow thugs, and Alex was a hell-raiser,” says Buckley Hamman, a cousin who grew up with Jones. “The conflict with the cops started Alex down the road of his current pursuit.”

In Austin, Jones quit football and smoking pot (“It made me paranoid”), and began consuming history: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. “I started understanding that governments have been staging terror and dealing drugs throughout history,” he says. “The whole program was there.”

Well, if what Jones said over the weekend is true, Blue Velvet is about right, and he may have had more reasons than some police corruption for leaving town.

From the sound of it, Jones experience in Rockwall wasn’t The Last Picture Show. It was the Adult Megaplex.

If what Jones says is true, and Alex, a minor, had sex with more than 150 women, many of them apparently over 18, there might have come a point when it was prudent to get out of town and head o Austin.

If what Jones says is true, it also make me rethink this from his appearance on the stand last week.

There was also one other, what appeared to me to be new piece of the known Jones biography revealed in the video.

While talking about how he had grown up appropriately fast, Jones says that unlike his arrested-development friends:

By 24, I had a son.

Jones turned 24 in 1998. That would that make that son 18 or 19 now. But the son who he is seeking to retain custody of in court is 14. So, if Jones had a son when he was 24, that was another son. That’s completely possible. And, he is, of course, under no obligation to tell writers when they are doing profiles of him that he has another son. It’s just that it’s not something that’s been mentioned in anything I’ve read about Jones.

It’s just all very perplexing, all the more so because on Friday, Jones issued this statement, about the trial.

Above all this is a private matter. This is about my family and only my family. I have endeavored very faithfully for three years to keep this circumstance confidential for the sake of my children to protect their innocence. I urge the press to be respectful and responsible and to show due deference to the process of the law and respect the boundaries defined for this case so that a fair result can be found. As there is a gag/protective order on the trial of the safety, welfare and protection for our children’s private rights and what is in their best interests, I am holding my responses until the end of the trial.

And yet, here I am writing this, not based on any prying or probing. All I am doing is repeating what Alex Jones, for whatever reason, decided to put out the day after he issued the above statement.

That does not mean that what he says in the video is a violation of gag order. He does not talk about the details of the child custody case per se – except to say how the media is attempting to use the case against him but only succeeding in driving more traffic to his site than at any time except Election Week 2016.

But I can’t help but feel that when his lawyers told him to have a nice weekend when they parted company with Jones Friday afternoon, they weren’t expecting this.

Below is an illustrated transcript of the key passages. In all cases, it is Alex Jones speaking.

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Noon update: In his closing argument to the jury, the attorney for Kelly Jones likened Alex Jones to a “cult leader” who had brainwashed their children against her in what he described as a “straight up child abuse case” of parental alienation.

“Mr. Jones is like a cult leader,” Hoffman said. “The children appear to be cult followers, doing what daddy wants them to do.”

As Hoffman spoke, Alex Jones’ eyes narrowed and he shook his head.

“Somehow, this man has gotten away with murder,” Hoffman said. “It’s the equivalent of that and it’s wrong.”

Hoffman described Jones’ relationship with his wife during their marriage as “emotionally, sexually, physically abusive,” and yet, he said, in that and in his behavior since the divorce two years ago, “Mr. Jones has escaped detection.”

“Is it Mr. Jones’ celebrity, is it his vast wealth? How and why has Mr. Jones escaped detection?” Hoffman asked. “Please don’t let him escape detection in the jury room.”

Hoffman said that despite the fact that Jones is guilty of “spewing vile hatred” on the air, none of the health care professionals involved in the case said a word about that.

“Nobody knows how to stop this man,” said Hoffman, including, he said, Judge Orlinda Naranjo who repeatedly told Jones to stop making faces and nodding and shaking his head in reaction to testimony.

“Nobody can stop this man except the 12 of you,” Hoffman said. “You have an unbelievable amount of power.”

Earlier: Attorney Randall Wilhite said Thursday that Alex Jones’ three children are thriving living with their father and pleaded with a Travis County jury to let them stay with him.

“They are doing well, they are thriving at their father’s house,” Wilhite said in his closing argument to the jury. “Should we rip them out of that and see how they would do at their mother’s home?”

The answer he said is “no”, depicting Kelly Jones as a self-absorbed and emotionally unstable mother who has come to view every lawyer, judge and mental health professional in the case as “corrupt liars … conspiring against her.”

“Is that possible?”

Rather, he said, she was guided by “inverted logic, inverted reality.”

“It’s everybody’s fault but Ms. Jones,” Wilhite said.

Earlier: The Travis County jury in the Alex Jones-Kelly Jones child custody trial will hear closing arguments in the case this morning and then begin its deliberations.

At issue is whether to change the current arrangement in which the three children, aged 9, 12 and 14, live with their father, the Austin broadcaster with a vast Infowars radio and online following, and their mother has only very limited, supervised visitation that in the last year has amounted to as little as four hours a month.

At the trial, which enters its ninth day Thursday, Alex Jones’ lawyers have contended that the children have blossomed in the two years since the 2015 divorce settlement and to uproot them now would be counterproductive and against their wishes. They have argued that Kelly Jones has, in essence, earned her limited visitation because of her emotional instability — which they have identified as episodic “emotional dysregulation.”

But Kelly Jones’ lawyers have argued that their client has been a victim of a phenomenon known as “parental alienation,” in which one parent — in this case Alex Jones — effectively undermines the other parent by brainwashing the children into disliking and not wanting to be with the other parent. In this scenario, Kelly Jones’ emotional dysregulation is a perfectly natural response to a mother seeing her children unnaturally turned against her.

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A Texas jury has stripped right-wing radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of primary custody of his children and awarded joint custody to his ex-wife.

A Travis County jury returned the decision shortly before midnight Thursday after nine hours of deliberation. The verdict means Jones will have visitation rights with the children, ages 9, 12 and 14, but that ex-wife Kelly Jones will establish their primary residence.

State District Judge Orlinda Naranjo also announced Kelly Jones will decide where the children will live,

As the judge read the verdict, Kelly Jones quietly dabbed her eyes with a tissue, while Alex Jones — famous for his emotional eruptions on-air as host of Infowars — simply stared at Naranjo. The newspaper said his mien was "serious but he otherwise betrayed no emotion."

In closing arguments, Alex Jones’ attorney told the jury that the children were thriving under his client's care and that he should remain the sole caregiver. His attorney referred to Jones as a "performance artist," whose explosive outbursts on air were part of an act. The lawyer portrayed Kelly Jones as self-absorbed and emotionally unstable.

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b-turner said:

Please understand that many Christian formatted stations have selected that format to carve out their niche in the market. In other words, many are not ministries but rather commercial businesses. Even if owned by 'Christians' that does not mean the radio station reflects anyone's particular 'brand' of Christianity or so called Christianity to some. I believe in the FW Robbert case, they are commercial broadcasters running businesses that have chosen a Christian format and whatever they can sell in hours that are low demand among Christian clients (I could barely sell anything on Saturday to a ministry but the foreign language programmers sure wanted the time). In fact the station I worked that sold time chose a Christian format but we evolved to block time sales to mostly foreign language programmers. We would have sold to Alex Jones and at one point Bro. Stair was on about an hour a day at a rate that was pretty low (ie: nobody else will take it so what will you give me for that hour?).

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