Infowars host Alex Jones completed two days of depositions in a defamation lawsuit filed by families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, court documents filed Wednesday show.
Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis last week found Jones in contempt for failing twice to attend depositions on March 23 and 24.
She ordered him to pay daily fines amounting to tens of thousands of dollars for every day he didn't provide the sworn testimony. According to Wednesday's filing, Jones paid $75,000 — $25,000 on Friday and $50,000 on Monday.
Jones sat for depositions on Tuesday and Wednesday, going "above and beyond" Bellis' order by sitting "beyond normal hours for the deposition to afford the plaintiffs’ counsel a full and fair opportunity to question him,” according to the filing from Jones' lawyer, Norm Pattis.
Jones, in a video posted on the Infowars website Tuesday, said he sat with a plaintiff's lawyer in Connecticut for 10 hours — a period he described as "next level, like a hallucination or something."
Jones added that he was “demonized” but provided “every" document he was asked about.
“Here’s the big takeaway, and I’ll just admit it,” Jones said to the camera. “I could’ve done a better job on Sandy Hook. Some of the anomalies that we reported on were not accurate, and I admitted it years before I was sued.”
Pattis, who appeared in the video, noted that Jones was asked questions not related to the Sandy Hook shooting that struck him as a “broad, wholesale attack” on Jones and his site.
“From time to time, tempers flared in the room,” Pattis said Tuesday.
“Alex wasn’t perfect today, but he did a good job.”
Pattis didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families, said he could not comment further about the deposition because he said Jones insisted on declaring “his entire deposition confidential even while he and his attorney conduct media interviews discussing the details.”
“Mr. Jones has now been deposed by attorneys representing the Sandy Hook families that he has so deeply and repeatedly harmed over the years,” Mattei added in a statement. “We appreciate that the Court took firm measures to compel this deposition, which likely would not have happened otherwise.”
Jones' depositions — which he said he missed because of health problems — were for a coming trial to determine how much he should pay the eight victims' families and an FBI agent who sued him over his claims that the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012, was a hoax. Twenty first graders and six educators were killed in the shooting.
The plaintiffs say they've been harassed and suffered death threats over Jones' claims. Last year, Bellis found Jones liable for damages in the defamation suit.
