The day after Robbie Parker’s 6-year-old daughter Emilie was shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Alex Jones told his followers that her murder never happened.
It was a lie — one of many the far-right conspiracy theorist pushed on his Infowars show, where he called the shooting a hoax and accused the parents of being crisis actors to drum up support for gun control.
Parker, author of “A Father’s Fight: Taking on Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook,” recalled how Jones’ lies followed him years after the shooting. While staying at a hotel in Seattle with his wife Alissa and their two children — Emilie’s younger sisters Madeline and Samantha — a man confronted them.
“He just started yelling at me and reiterating all these things that Alex Jones had been saying to his audience for years and years and years, that the government was paying me off, that Emilie was still alive and just how could I live with myself?” Parker said.
Parker, and the parents of other children who died in the Sandy Hook shooting, decided to take back their story. They sued and in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation verdict against Jones. Parker was awarded $120 million.
He, and other parents, are now backing the purchase of Infowars by the satirical news media outlet The Onion, even as Jones challenges the sale in bankruptcy court.
Jones 'put a target on my back'
Parker was not the only one to be harassed by Jones’ followers.
He wrote in his book that two other Sandy Hook parents, Mark and Jackie Barden, even received a letter from someone who told them that they had urinated on their son Daniel’s tombstone. And Francine Wheeler, mother of Ben, met a woman who told her that her grief was manufactured — and that none of the children had died at Sandy Hook.
The toll of living in constant fear of being found by a follower of Jones who might harm his family amplified his distress, said Parker, a physician assistant in the neonatal intensive care unit for Oregon Health & Science University.
“When somebody entered Emilie’s school and murdered her, that person didn't know who Emilie was, and he didn't know who I was, and he didn't hate Emilie, and he didn't hate me personally,” Parker said. “Jones, by spreading these lies, put a target on my back for people to hate me, and he showed my face on his program so people knew exactly who I was, and these people proved that they knew how to find me.”
Parker said the depth of his grief and the damage caused to him as a result of Jones’ lies led him to confront past trauma. In his book, he wrote that he was sexually abused as a child by a friend of the family — a Mormon bishop, who he said also sexually abused his three brothers, and none of them told each other.
Parker’s father, he wrote, had also sexually abused his sister. As a child, silence became his coping mechanism, and the means to keep what he believed was peace in the family.
“It's ironic that Emilie being killed when she was 6 years old eventually led me to find healing for a 6-year-old boy that had been abused as a child,” he said. “And this book, and as an adult, being able to process these things allowed me to open up doors that had been shut, I thought forever.”
A cost to telling lies
Parker said he hasn’t seen any of the $120 million he was awarded as part of the verdict against Jones. But during the trial, he did see Jones in court.
“That day in court, Jones proved that he was nothing more than a caged tiger, lashing out at the world because of his own fears and insecurities,” Parker wrote in his book. “He may have had legions of loyal followers and tens of millions of dollars, but he possessed no love in his heart for himself — or for anyone else. He no longer had any power over me, as I recognized with pity that he was just a bitter, angry, scared and lonely, worn-out man.”
Parker said there was a cost to telling lies. As Jones walked into the courtroom, “with a limp, bow legged, disheveled and worn out,” it became clear to him what the lies had cost Jones.
“He's still on the hook for the entire amount of the debt that he owes, and it'll be our responsibility to continue to chase him and to make him be accountable,” Parker said.
The Onion sale is one piece that the families hope to find closure with and they remain hopeful it will be approved, Parker said.
But writing the book has brought its own sense of healing, allowing him to find his voice and reclaim the memory of his daughter, a lover of art, books and dandelions.
“She loved really, really hard,” Parker said of Emilie. “[I] learned so much from being her dad.”
