AUSTIN, Texas – Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones blamed the various claims he's made over the years, including that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax, on "psychosis," according to a deposition the "Infowars" host has given as part of a Texas lawsuit.
Jones described his conspiracy thinking as a kind of mental disorder during the deposition taken earlier this month for the lawsuit filed against him by the family of a 6-year-old who was among the 20 children and six adults killed in the Newtown, Connecticut, attack, the Austin American-Statesman reported .
Jones said during the deposition that he "almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I'm now learning a lot of times things aren't staged."
Jones blamed his mental state on "the trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much, then everything begins — you don't trust anything anymore, kind of like a child whose parents lie to them over and over again, well, pretty soon they don't know what reality is."
The defamation lawsuit was filed in Travis County, Texas, where Jones' media company is based. In August, the judge presiding over the lawsuit denied Jones' request to dismiss the case .
Jones' attorneys have defended his speech in court as "rhetorical hyperbole," but denied it was defamation.
During the deposition, Jones continued to voice conspiratorial suspicions about the shooting.
"I still think that there was a man in the woods in camo ... and just a lot of experts I've talked to, including retired FBI agents and other people and people high up in the Central Intelligence Agency, have told me that there is a cover-up in Sandy Hook," Jones said.
A similar lawsuit against Jones has also been filed in Connecticut. Several families in that suit say that Jones' comments on Infowars have tormented them and subjected them to harassment and death threats by his followers, some of whom have accused them of being actors.
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Information from: Austin American-Statesman, http://www.statesman.com
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