"We are here to make sure Alex Jones and his company pay for the outright lies they told": these are the words spoken by lawyer Kyle Farrar after ten days of trial in a court of the Texas.
The man defends Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of a child killed in the worst massacre in a school in the United States.
They asked jurors on Wednesday to order far-right conspirator Alex Jones to pay them $150 million for denying the reality of the carnage.
The couple lost their six-year-old son in 2012 when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, killing 20 children and six adults.
He claimed the killing was staged
Alex Jones, a well-known figure on the far right and follower of conspiracy theories, had claimed on his Infowars site that the massacre was only a staged scene led by opponents of firearms.
According to the parents, his lies had energized his audiences, allowing him to pocket millions of dollars, while they became the target of harassment campaigns.
Several families had sued him for compensation.
He had finally publicly admitted the reality of the killing, while refusing to cooperate with the courts.
Judges in Texas and Connecticut had therefore condemned him by default to pay damages to the plaintiffs, while leaving it to jurors to set their amount.
Accused of having “taken advantage of their suffering”
The first of two trials, which stemmed from the complaint of Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, gave rise this Wednesday in Austin to a final pass of arms between the parties.
The couple were 'victims of an ongoing campaign of defamation, year after year, and suffered emotional stress', which aggravated their pain, pleaded their lawyer, accusing Alex Jones of 'taking advantage of their suffering ".
The conspirator's lawyer questioned the link between his client's remarks and the harm suffered by the plaintiffs.
"It wasn't The New York Times but a little talk show in Austin," Andino Reynal said.
Just before this exchange, Alex Jones, called on the witness stand, again acknowledged that the massacre was "100% real".
But another lawyer questioned his good faith, showing excerpts from his show, recorded last week, in which he said the jurors had been chosen from among people "who don't know what planet they live on".
The jury was to begin its deliberations on Thursday morning.
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