From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernici. This is the Daily.

On Friday, in a landmark ruling, a jury in Texas ordered Alex Jones, America's most

prominent conspiracy theorist, to pay millions of dollars to a set of parents for the damages

caused by his lies about the Sandy Hook match. I spoke with my colleague, Elizabeth

Williamson, as the jury was deliberating that punishment. It's Monday, August 8.

So, Elizabeth, where are we catching you today? Where are you speaking from?

So, I am in the Travis County Courthouse in Austin for the trial of Alex Jones, who is on

trial here for defaming Scarlett Lewis and Neil Haslin, whose son Jesse, a six-year-old,

was killed at Sandy Hook.

And Elizabeth, remind us of Alex Jones' backstory and how this trial came about.

Alex Jones is a kind of ur conspiracy broadcaster. He got his start in the 90s here in Austin,

where he was a sort of oddball on community access TV and later on a radio show, but he

started broadcasting more and more dark theories around the Oklahoma City bombing in the mid-90s,

saying that that was planned by the government the same for 9-11, but he took a particularly

dark turn in 2012 when he said that the Sandy Hook shooting was a conspiracy, a plot by

the government as a pretext to confiscate American's firearms. And he named individual

family members as so-called crisis actors who were complicit in the plot.

Right, and that has had real consequences for those parents as you've told us in the

past on the show.

Absolutely. Alex Jones has an enormous audience and that audience increased exponentially

after he began talking about Sandy Hook. And in that audience of tens of millions of people,

there were inevitably some people who truly believed what he was saying and targeted the

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