‘Lies You Gotta Pay For’

Heslin v. Jones ruined Bill Ogden as a lawyer, he says.

It’s one of three defamation suits brought against Alex Jones by parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre over Jones’ false claims that the shooting was a hoax. Ogden served on the four-man team that won a $49.3 million verdict at trial in July 2022.

“This case ruined me because, on the defense side, I ran into so many problems—from an ethical and moral standpoint—to the point that now, any case that I go forward with, I’ve seen worse,” he says. “I think I am softer toward other lawyers now because they could never be what I encountered here.”

On the road to trial, Ogden says he and Kyle Farrar, Wes Ball, and first chair Mark Bankston amassed more than $1 million from the other side due to one penalty sanction after another. “Evidence tampering, document tampering—we saw it all,” Ogden says. “On top of that million, we got to start the trial by saying, ‘Yes, there’s no question that Alex Jones defamed our clients.’”

Prior to the case, Ogden’s firm, Farrar & Ball, was mostly working in automobile products liability. “We didn’t have tons of defamation background going in,” he says. “But if you can take a product like an automobile … if you can unwind all of that engineering into something that a jury can understand, we felt that we could do pretty much any type of case outside of bankruptcy or family law.”

“Every single day, something crazy happened.”

So, in 2018, when Marcel Fontaine called the firm after Jones’ site InfoWars falsely identified him as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter, they took the case. But they underestimated one thing. “The media coverage,” Ogden says. “Because it exploded and we had zero media training at the time, we did all the wrong things. Luckily, we were never going to be the guys on the wrong side.”

The day after the firm filed Fontaine, Sandy Hook parent Neil Heslin called; then Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa; and finally Scarlett Lewis. Of the three suits, only Heslin has gone to trial, a two-week period Ogden describes as “the most action-packed highlight reel trial of all time. Every single day, something crazy happened.”

One day after proceedings, Jones went on air and called the jurors “extremely blue-collar folks … who don’t know what planet they’re on.” Another day, mid-trial, InfoWars posted a photo of the judge on fire and accused her of being a pedophile.

“There was a narrative his side kept pushing, which was, ‘Y’all are blaming me for killing kids,’ and my partner, Kyle Farrar, was finally like, ‘No one is saying that.’ Then Jones starts coming out of his chair to go after Kyle, and security had to physically restrain him,” Ogden says. “These were the less crazy things.”

Ogden’s skills were put to the test in exhaustive depositions. His 4.5-hour marathon with Jones’ co-host Owen Shroyer helped Farrar “obliterate” the witness, says Ogden. “I also dug into all the expert-intensive stuff, which is usually my bread and butter.”

Expert witnesses included forensic psychiatrist Dr. Roy Lubit and journalist Fred Zipp. And Ogden had another assigned trial task—the direct examination of Heslin, Lewis, and their surviving son. “I couldn’t do it without crying,” he says. “When I came on this case, my son was 5, the age some of these children were. I carried that with me. We have one rule: If our clients don’t cry, we can’t cry. Only Wes Ball could make it through.”

When Ogden was in college, he used to listen to Jones. “It was all pure entertainment—JFK shooting and lunar landings, nothing serious. It was not a place anyone went for news. What I believed then was that Alex Jones found an audience whom he figured out how to monetize and take advantage of with all his nonsense,” Ogden says. “But we got two or three questions into his deposition, and he’s going off about Jeffrey Epstein and Jussie Smollett. I’m thinking, ‘Your financial livelihood is on the line, and you can’t stop.’ In my opinion, Alex Jones believes every word he says.”

Ogden feels good about the work his team did. “Texas’ anti-SLAPP statute, the Texas Citizens Participation Act, was broad and not heavily litigated,” he says. “Now we firmly have an appellate opinion that establishes that intentional infliction of emotional distress is very much a valid cause of action in the state. So, we made some good law, and I think we made some change in the media as much as we could. Outside of getting our clients their day in court, that’s what we were looking for.”

All of which means the firm has no choice but to be involved in the defamation space now. “At any given moment, we have one or two defamation cases going,” Ogden says. “It’s fulfilling to be able to actually see somebody have to eat the false, damaging words that came out of their mouth. As Wes Ball said in his closing argument, ‘Speech is free, but lies you gotta pay for.’”

Streaming Soon

HBO followed the Farrar & Ball team leading up to, and throughout, the trial; the documentary is scheduled to be released 2024.