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Good Evening. How one father determined to reclaim his daughter's memory brought down Alex Jones. On December fourteenth, twenty twelve, Robbie Parker's daughter Emily was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, a tragedy that changed Robbie's life and the country forever. By the next day, Alex Jones was on air claiming the shooting was a hoax. So begins Parker's David and Goliath's story, a tale of hope and resilience amid hatred
and division. While Robbie and his family spent the next decade attempting to grieve, Jones's fans harassed them, calling them crisis actors. The hatred pushed Robbie inward, disconnecting him from the world and his family. Four years after Sandy Hook, an Infra War's listener accosted Robbie three thousand miles away from Newtown, Connecticut, repeating the same lies Alex Jones had
spread for years. Soon after seventeen students were murdered at Florida's Marjorie Stonemason Douglas High School, Robbie and his wife spoke with one of the victim's parents and learned when they were also being bombarded with hateful messages. He realized he could no longer avoid this terrifying reality, and with the help of Sandy hook parents, lawyers, and supporters, Robbie stood up to Alex Jones in court to heal and reclaim his daughter's memory. A father's Fight is more than
a memoir. It's a stirring portrait of an unbreakable human spirit. It's a testament to a father's love and perseverance in the face of insurmountable grief. The book that were featuring this evening is a father's fight, taking on Alex Jones and reclaiming the truth about Sandy Hook with my special guest author, Robbie Parker. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Robbie Parker, thank you Dan for reaching out and for having on. It's really a pleasure.
Well, thank you so much, and congratulations on this extraordinary book. You say. It came out late last year. A Father's Fight.
It came out late last year. It's obviously been a work in progress for a while, and that's just my own personal journey and then getting to the point where I felt like I actually wanted to share something I'd been writing for a long time just for my own healing and cathartic process and just trying to understand who I was through this brief process and what I was experiencing with the conspiracy theory people and all of that.
Some very kind people were really encouraging for me to put it more out there and to share it, and so it finally made it into people's hands and yours, and so here we are.
Yes, thank you. Let's talk about your family's move to a new town, Connecticut in twenty twelve, and just tell us about your family, Alissa, Emily, Madeline, and Samantha, and also about you write about. In spring twenty twelve, Alissa's father qualified for the Boston Marathon and he was also very helpful with remodeling your new home. So just tell us where you were at in twenty and twelve and your moved to Newtown, Connecticut and your professional life at that time, and also your wife.
Yeah, no's that's a loaded question. There was a lot happening for our family in twenty twelve, even just even just briefly moving up towards that, like I mean a listen and I we don't ever really remember meeting each other. We know we met in middle school at some point, but we started dating like after high school. And so all this build up to twenty twelve was just this culmination of us going to school, working, putting ourselves through college, and starting a family at the same time. So it
was just really really busy. In twenty ten, I had graduated as a physician assistant and my passion is in the newborn intensive care unit, and so we had taken a job in New Mexico right out of school, where I got some wonderful training, and then we took this job opportunity in Connecticut, which seemed really just bizarre and out there for us because we grew up on the
west side of the country. I grew up in Texas and Utah, Alyssa grew up in California and Utah, and I went to school in the Pacific Northwest, so it was a brand new area. Our family was small, but we had like accomplished all of this stuff, right. This was like what all that hard work was for, was to be able to be done with school, launch into my career. I could support this young family of ours
with our three young girls. Emily was turning six, matt Aline was four, Samantha was three, and it was just a really exciting time with a lot of new growth and a lot of new places and new people, and we were just happy to be there and lo and behold too. Like you mentioned Elissa's dad, Doug, he had
qualified to run the Boston Marathon. So we moved to Connecticut end of December twenty eleven beginning of the new year twenty twelve, and then he came out in April, right after we had closed out on this new house that we had bought that needed a lot of updating and a lot of work. And he was really handy. He had helped us with some other projects on other houses that we had owned previously, and so he came out and was able to help us with some work.
We were just a few hours away from Boston, so we could go and support him in the Boston Marathon. I'm a huge Texas Ranger baseball fan. The Rangers were in town that same week. So there's just a lot of fun things happening throughout that whole year, and that's
kind of like what set us up. We were just finally living the life that we had worked so hard to live with the people we wanted to be with, and we had our nuclear family that we were ready to start kind of putting down roots and get to finally experience all this stuff that we had been working towards.
You're right though, that the disaster arrives. Five months later, Alyssa's dad was involved in a horrible bicycling accident while in a race and passed away.
Right, So they run the Boston Marathon in April, and then in September. The second weekend in September, every year, there's a bike race that starts in Logan, Utah, in northern Utah that goes all the way to Jackson, Howayoming. It's a one day, two hundred and ten mile race that goes up and over three different mountain divides. And this was going to be my father in law's tenth year doing that race, or eleventh year. Alyssa and I had participated driving cars and stuff for a few years.
This is something that he loved doing and we loved supporting him with it, and we were actually really sad that we weren't going to be able to be there with him as he was going to accomplish this milestone again. Shortly they it cressed over the first pass and he was coming down, probably going somewhere between thirty five and forty miles an hour, and somebody came alongside of him and accident just clipped handlebars and he he hit his head really hard. He had a pretty traumatic brain injury.
He didn't have a big, large brain bleed, but he was suffering from a traumatic brain injury, and it really just shook us up. We were on the other side of the country at this point, and we spent the whole next month flying back and forth from Connecticut to Utah to support and be there. And when he got discharged from the hospital, he was sent to this kind of nursing and rehab center. They weren't equipped to handle
somebody in his case. He was supposed to go to the VA, but they didn't have rooms, so there's this little mix up. He was just confused and he needed somebody with him at night, and this place couldn't do that. So with my medical training and I had been a nurse assistant early on in my career and stuff, and so I actually flew out and was going to take night shifts and be with him. One of the knights that I was there, he was trying to get out
of bed. I went to get the bedside commode for him, and then this two second time period where I just had my back turn on for a second, he stood up and I wasn't expecting him to be able to do that. He stood up and he lost his balance and I lunged for him and he fell right through
my hands. He ended up hitting his head on the ground again, and from that experience with a fresh traumatic brain injury that he was already suffering from and then having another head injury, he ended up developing a massive brain bleed and then he passed away just a few days later. And so this idea of tragedy and heartbreak and grief and death came to us first through Alissa's dad in September, and he died on September twenty ninth.
That was a blow because he obviously what he meant to all of us, he was the father figure for me in my life. I had never felt so personally, just so accepted by somebody, especially like a father figure like that, accepted and loved the way that he brought me into his family, And so was that was hard to go through and experience. And then again being away from family as we were processing all of that, that was Yeah, my words are lost describing how that felt alone by itself.
Yes, And and what was interesting or interesting later in retrospect was that the information that was in an article in a newspaper provided a lot of misinformation. So later when it was important to consider what would be in a newspaper article, that misinformation became important. Let's talk about Emily and her sister's relationship. But just the character of this six year old, this precocious Emily. You talked about this in that run up to Christmas, she had been
inspired to get a family toy box together. Just tell us about this little initiative that indicates sort of the character of Emily.
Right, No, it's a yeah, that's a great question because it highlights so much of who she was, even as this very talkative, very bidable, pleasant six year old girl, constantly thinking of other people. And it was Christmas time
there was like these Christmas shows on. She got inspired to start like a toy drive, and there was this during our remodel process, we went to this like thrift store a lot just to kind of pick up things that we could refurbish and different stuff like that, and she loved this store, and so she wanted to do this toy drive so we could donate it to this store so that she knew that other kids could get it, and she wanted to incorporate her sisters in the project,
and that in and of itself is a just show so much of who she was. Her sisters didn't really loved the idea of giving some of their toys away or participating that very much with it, And so to watch her use her negotiation skills and talk to them, even willing to bribe one of them with her own money at one point, turned out to be a huge success. And the box that she got and put together was filled to the brim and for like a special bow, she even put in some of her own artwork. Emily
was a like a ferocious artist. She would go through stacks and stacks of papers and projects and stuff that she would work on.
And she.
Knew that giving something of herself in this made it special. And that's just how she viewed people. That's how she viewed the ones that she loved and people that she didn't know. And that's just what exuded from her.
Now, what just to give us the situation where this Sandy Hook Elementary where that Emily attended. You talk about sandy Hook being a village, So is that tell us the just a situation where Sandy Hook is a small village within Newtown?
Right? Yeah. It was kind of bizarre to us when we moved out there because we were in an incorporated town of Newtown, but this little car about part of Newtown and Sandy Hook, and I don't I never really
learned the full history of how how that happened. And I'm just assuming just before there were incorporated towns, you know, this is this area with Sandy Hook and so, but it was so quaint and so just you know what you think about when you think of colonial Northeast United States era, It was a place that felt like it
was back in time. The geography and the houses and the roads, and the and the stone walls and the lush, lush trees like it was just I mean, it was a postcard, It was a it was a it was a storybook place to live. So it was a place that still felt I mean, we had been moving all across the country from my schooling and different jobs and stuff, and this was a place that finally you felt like your neighbors had your back. And even though we were new to the town and trying to establish things, we
hadn't really got to know a lot of people. Yet it felt very homelike right away for us, and we were starting to incorporate ourselves into this beautiful tapestry of what Newtown and Sandy Hooker like.
You take us to December fourteenth, twenty twelve, and you are working and you get a disturbing voicemail that morning from Pat Laudra, Newtown first Selectman, calling you to inform that all Newtown public schools have been placed in lockdown do to a we reported shooting at one of our schools. Now, what do you do as a result? You call a us. What's the conversation, like, what do you know? What do you find out from that voicemail, tell us what happens after that voicemail is received by you.
Yeah. Sure, I'll even take you back to just even that morning because that Friday was the Friday for the box. So waking up in the house that morning, there was just a ton of excitement because that was going to kick off the Christmas break. I was going to be working a twenty four hour shift, so I wasn't going to be able to participate in this. But the plan was that for school that day, the girls were going to take the box. They were going to take it
to the donation center. They were going to start doing all of our start our Christmas traditions and stuff like that. So there was just in our house that morning, just a lot of excitement and a lot of love. As I was getting ready to leave, and everybody was in Samantha's room, my youngest, because she was the last person
to donate things, so that's where the box was. Everybody was in there, just excited, and that's where I went and gave everybody hugs and kisses and was saying goodbye to them and noticed the box off to the corner, just kind of pushed up against the wall underneath the window seals. So that was the feeling that I had
leaving the house this morning. That morning, as I was starting to go to work, going through my normal work stuff, rounding on patients, getting ready to do our rounds, talking to parents who had babies in the nick you and I get that voicemail that you're talking about because we had just started rounds, and so I dismissed the phone call.
Then in between patients listening to that, and then Alyssa's phone call coming to me directly, and she's nervous and she's scared, And unfortunately I met Alyssa in that moment in like my work brain. You know, working in the NICKU has a lot of challenges. It can be very high stress. A big part of my job is remaining hopeful and calm and handling stressful situations as you would with patients, in these situations that I find myself in.
And I mean I mentioned this and I talk about it because I just I didn't meet alissas as like a loving husband right then. I met her with kind of like my work brain and trying to convince her, but not convince her, but just let's just be calm, let's be patient, let's think about this, let's not jump to conclusions, you know. And she was scared, and she was kind of able to snap me out of my work brain. And when she was like, because I was like,
these shootings don't happen at an elementary school. It's got to be at the high school. You know, we don't know what's going on. Don't drive to the school, whatever you do like that kind of stuff, she just kind of was done hearing me talk for a little bit like that, and she just said, Robbie, if it was at the elementary school, Emily's room is in that front hallway. If it was there, she would be in real danger. I need to know and I need to do something.
And so that's kind of how our process started. And so she was with Samantha doing some Christmas shopping. She had dropped Madaline off at preschool. I was at work, So we just started trying to find out information and communicate, and very quickly Alysa ended up going and getting Maddline from preschool. She went to the elementary school, and I unfortunately was stuck at the hospital because the hospital had gone into lockdown for as they do for a community disaster,
so nobody's allowed in or out. As reports were starting to kind of come through, and we did learn that there were children that were wounded and taken to the hospital. I stayed for a little longer to see if what I could find out because at that point Alyssa hadn't been reunited with Emily and had Emily been hurt and taken in the hospital, and I was where she needed to be. So this is just kind of where our mind's that's where. And as the minutes passed and as
the hours passed. During this time, just the stress and the tension of not knowing was just building and building and building, and there wasn't anything you could do except for just wait and wait and wait.
You're right that there's a conference room set up and for people waiting, and you say, waiting and waiting for an update from state police. But it is confirmed that twenty children had been killed. So there was no more details, no more names. So everyone is sitting around a bunch of different people, first responders and then people that are inquiring about their children. But people are waiting there for hours with no updates. Tell us about that wait for information exactly.
Yeah, Yeah, So like, eventually I was able to leave the hospital and I made it to the the schools located down the street from the school, on the corner was this firehouse, and in the firehouse was this conference room. So they started. I can't even describe the scene there. It was so chaotic and none of that made sense, right, I mean, nothing about this, it's logical, nothing about this
as something that you'd ever encountered before. I didn't even notice that there was TV cameras and crews and this podium of microphone set up. And when you think about it, when you do look into what happened in the school and the shooting, the first victims were the principal and some of the leaders of the school. So immediately the whole the chain of command was taken out. And so it makes so much sense why there it was so much chaos. There wasn't somebody in charge and leading from
the very first moments of that whole ordeal. And so it had been hours and finally they decided, if you still hadn't encountered your child, you still haven't been reunited, then we're going to put bringing you over to this conference room. And that's where do unification processes, and that's kind of what we were told. So Alissa was in there. I finally make it into that room, and when I walked into the room, emotionally, it was like just running into a brick wall. I mean it was it was hot,
and there it was thick. And Alissa sees me, and I go over to her, and you could just I could just feel her her angst and her worry and her love and her concern just pouring out of her. And she had been holding all that in so much. She had been watching the girls. Luckily, she had found a neighbor to take the girls home that lived next to us. And that was the feeling in the room. Everybody now knew right before I got there is what
you talked about. A state police spokesperson came in and said that they were able to confirm that twenty children had died, but they weren't going to release any more information or details because they hadnt accounted for all the children in the school yet, and that he would be back in an hour with another update, and then he just left it like that, like the absolute worst cliffhanger ever.
And so we don't know if our child is one of the twenty that are dead, or one of the children that hadn't been accounted for that could be hiding somewhere. And so this idea of hope, and I had never thought in my entire life before of the emotion and the idea of hope being a dangerous thing, started away heavy on us. And again as the minutes ticked away, and they would come back in an hour and say, we have nothing to update you on. We'll be back in an hour, and they do that a number of times.
It that tension and that thickness just it's really hard to know what to do with that.
Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Now to you.
It's a very vivid scene in this book. Governor Danel molloy enters the conference room. You write that it's packed with first responders, social workers and clergy and lots of nuns, and somebody, a mother interrupts his speech and says, so are you trying to tell us that all of our kids are dead? And the governor is stunned, but he says yes. And then your wife Melissa spoke up, what about the children that went to the hospital, what is
their status? And what did he have to say? What was his response?
Yeah, I've spent a lot of time processing Governor Malloy's response. Obviously isn't an impossible situation, but it was as if nobody updated him that we had not been updated, And the fact that the governor was there talking to us
was just really confusing. I didn't understand what the point of that was, Like, what did he have to why was he even here, And so as he's trying to just fumble his way through it, ye had this this mom, who I grew later to love for her directness, kind of just called them out on that and just like give it to us, tell us that if our kids
are dead. And when he confirmed that, that flicker of hope that we had all been kind of huddled around and just trying to keep this little flame ali have just expired and just left this but used to be so much emotion and so much tension and now just
felt like a vacuum. When Alyssa asked about the children that had been taking in the hospital because that there that was the last shot up hope available, he said that those children had also expired, and then it was like just smoke from like a blown out candle, just like the flame was gone and there was nothing left to hold on to. And that that was how the news was bird to all of the families and for everybody else that was in there.
Yeah, and you write that you and your wife saw a back door to the conference room and you ran out. You just wanted to go home. Your wife, Alyssa, said there's nothing here for us, and so you went home and then became that living nightmare from that day on. Your church, your church leadership, you write, was immediately comforting and came to the home and alleviated you both of
the funeral arrangements for Emily. So right away you had the support of the church in that community and understanding, understanding better than anyone the processes that you needed to go through after this, the confirmation of the death of your daughter.
What wonderful people that we did have on our corner. Like I said, we hadn't been there very long, so the church that we had been attending, those were people that we knew, and they stepped up and they were there immediately. Just so grateful for them and that role, because I mean, you can't think, you can't make decisions, you can't do anything and so, and there was a
lot that needed to be done. You know, we weren't going to bury Emily in Connecticut where there was no family, there was no history of us being there really, and so planning a funeral that was going to take place
in Utah, how to they even go about that? We had other family coming into town and they were able just to take so much off of our shoulders in those first few hours and days, and will be tremendously grateful and loved those people for how they stepped up in those moments, and as the years went on, showed me exactly ways in which I can help other people in unimaginable citys. You know, people always ask you in those scenarios like what do you need? What can I
do to help you? And you don't even know what that is? And it being asked that question over time starts to kind of become a burden because it's not like I was being prideful and wanted to do everything on my own, but it's just you don't know and you don't know what to ask for. You don't know what your needs are, You don't know who you are as a person, You don't know who you are as
a father, you don't know anything about yourself anymore. Nothing in your life makes sense, and so to have people that could come in and alleviate some of that stuff for us was amazing. And being able to then now and years later be able to pay that for it in other situations for other people is great.
You were inundated with requests from media for interviews. At some point, you have an idea that you think that will stop the media from pestering you. So what is the idea that you expressed to your family? What's their response to your idea? And tell us about this idea?
Right, So it was you know, this is happening to us, and then we knew that there was other families involved. But this is so insular. There is no comprehension of what's going on in the outside world other than trying to get like our parents into town or family and stuff like that. The media presence that was growing in town. I was the only way I even knew about it was one of our church leaders just warned us it would be best if we probably didn't go out into
town because of how much media was out there. But you know how this was in the early years of social media. So as friends and family were starting to post things on sites like Facebook and Twitter and stuff like that about losing Emily and their memories of Emily and who Emily was. And we had friends that started this Facebook page, a memorial page for Emily because their thought, their brilliant idea was they just wanted to a little bit of money to help cover the cost of transporting
Emily's body back to Utah. Right, So as these breadcrumbs were starting to be laid out online, then media was able to kind of triangulate who I was, and who our family was and where we were. So even that first night of the shooting Friday night, I started getting
phone calls from reporters. Saturday morning, started to have reporters come to our door, starting to bring our phones, and it was so invasive because again, like we're just faced with trying to figure something out that we had no idea what to do where our hearts are broken, and
to be pestered like this was awful. And like you mentioned the experience that we had with the Lyssa's dad, I mean, there was this little article that was written in our local newspaper in northern Utah, right, and they didn't get some of the facts right, which led to some assumptions and online comments. We were saying things about
my father in law that were really hurtful. And so I'm sitting there looking at all of this, looking at this family that I feel like I failed to protect and that I need to protect, and needing to do something, because like this was just it was very obvious it wasn't going to go away, and so what I wanted to do was I wanted to try and get ahead
of it. And I didn't want anybody because as we stayed silent and I wasn't talking to the media, they were reaching out to, you know, the next level of family and then further family and then friends, and eventually somebody was going to say something, right, and I didn't want to see anybody to say something about Emily that was going to get out there and be erroneous and hurtful, And so I thought the best thing would be for me to make a statement, something that came from our parents,
to make a statement about who Emily was and what we were going through. And really all I wanted to do was just communicate that to the people that cared about us, you know, most of our family was back in Utah out on the west coast, just kind of tell them that we were okay. So I set up
this what I wanted to be this recorded statement. I only contacted one news outlet and let them know that they could meet me at the church at this time, that I would provide the statement, they could record it, and I actually just wanted them just to send that back to Utah and they could play it there because that's where I thought the only people that cared about
anything that I'd have to say lived in Utah. That was the idea, and my thought was if we throw the media bone, they'll go and chew on that for a while and they can leave us alone. That was what the plan was. And I'm sure your follow up question will be along the lines of how well that worked out for us.
But what you did include in there worked with very very interesting and I think would be interesting to very many people, was that you had made a statement about the shooter's family and what they must be going through, and that you had some empathy for the shooters family at this time.
Yeah, I mean, we put a lot of thought into what we even wanted to include in that statement, and that was one thing. Like Alyssa and I sat there even in the firehouse, and we said, could you imagine if this is one of your kids that did this,
Like I can't imagine. Like we knew nothing about the shooter or their family or what the situation was, but just being a parent and thinking about what was going on, and there was some compassion just for another parent, Like we knew what we were dealing with, but we kind of immediately recognized that there was another side of this story as well. So that was just something that was
on our minds. And you know, I know this is going to sound cliche, but that's also I was giving this statement and I included it in the statement because that is also how Emily viewed people and what she thought about people. So it encompassed who she was as a person too, that thoughtfulness and just compact for people where they're at in life at that moment in time.
Let's Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now as a result of the press conference that you put forth that you organized, and you say that your relatives, your family members thought that you did real well. Your brother congratulated you, but the back to the memorial page. You looked at the memorial page and saw some disgusting, deplorable comments. The next day, tell us what happened from this event of hope that you thought might make a change.
Tell us about some of the comments and the fire that was ignited.
Right, So, my beautiful idea of throwing the media bone just showed my ignorance and how the media actually worked. Somehow, the one reporter that we had set up to do the the recording with blossomed into every reporter, it seemed like. So when I came out to give the statement, I was expecting to just talk to one person, but instead, by that time, it was dark, and I came outside of the church and there's all these floodlights, and I
could tell that there was lots of people there. There had been this podium that had been set up, and I had no idea that this was being recorded live. I had no idea that it was being broadcast on every station that you can think of. I didn't know any of that, and so I gave the statement and did what I needed to do. And so I was very unaware of the reach that that statement had and who was watching, and so they're on that Facebook page that you talked about that in the short amount of
time that they my friends, had created it. I'd gone on after they had told me about it. I was surprised to feel some solace when I had gone on there before, because these were people who knew our family, they had known Emily. They were sharing stories about Emily, a lot of which I had never heard because these were one on one interaction with that Emily had with these people. So as a place where I could just
feel some love and feel some solace. Immediately, as you talked about some people that had been watching the press conference that prescribed to these conspiratorial thoughts and notions and listen to people who can invent a different narrative from reality, they had also been watching and they had also found the Facebook page, and they were inundating Emily's a memorial page for a six year old loving girl, with threats and harassment and saying awful things you know about me
as a person, about Emily, and just vile, vile, vile, evil stuff. And that really shook me again because this is a place where I had gone to before that was that was beautiful and full of love, and now it was mixed with just the most evil things I'd ever really come across being shared from one person or another like that.
You're right that previous to this, you were not aware of Alex Jones, and then you saw that Alex Jones on this Info Wars broadcast was saying that, and others were commenting the followers were saying that the shooting was all fake. They said that you were a crisis actor getting into character and you were playing a role in cahoots with government to stage this fake shooting. How shocking were those statements to you?
So the things that were really mean and really you know, all the all the like the you and your fucking daughter bitch, like all that kind of stuff, Those things were shocking because I don't understand why you would talk to anybody that's grieving in that way.
Right.
The conspiracy stuff took some time to make sense. It was just really bizarre and really confusing. You know. It wasn't like I knew that there was people out there that denied nine to eleven, thought nine to eleven was an inside job. I grew up in the nineties and for a while was even convinced that Kurt Cobaine didn't commit suicide but was actually killed by Courtney Love. You know, like it's not like I wasn't aware of conspiracy things, but the way they were talking just didn't make any sense.
Like calling me a crisis actor that I mean, that sounds like I'm in an improv group or something, you know. But over time you start to learn that crisis actor is this code word for somebody that is part of the cabal or whatever term they have, all these terms that they use for it. It's a code word that says you were in cahoots with the government and at that time and age the Obama administration because you want to make away our guns. Like that's really what it means. Yeah,
I had no idea who Alex Jones was. People were linking videos to Alex Jones's website and clips of Alex Jones on air. I had no idea who this guy was. Things that he was saying, in the way he was saying it just just made me think that it wasn't hurtful, but it scared me because at that moment, I wo now was fully aware of what one person was capable
of doing to another person. This guy from our own community, this loving Sandy Hook community, walked into the elementary school and accomplished what he set out to accomplish, which was to do as much harm and kill as many people as possible, including Emily. But he had no idea who I was. He had no idea who Emily was. And so these people now I know exist and what they
are capable of. And now I have people that have expressed their hatred towards me for what they think that I'm a part of, and they obviously know how to reach me. And just like I had been getting phone calls and stuff from media people, now that still continued because the media never went away like I thought they were going to. But now also on top of that, conspiracy people reaching out either online, on the phone, on
my own personal email, like they were finding me. And so the threat of what they who they were, and what they were was very very real.
What did you do in response to the Facebook pages and the other social media what did you attempt to do to try to get them to stop proliferation of these messages and these comments.
I mean, initially you think logic might work. My friends that had set up the page, they allowed some other friends to be administrators and they were just on there trying to just clean the page up. Whenever something would come up, they would, you know, they would report the comment, they would delete it. I told people not to engage there.
There was a few people that try to engage with them, and it turned into this like battleground and it was really ugly and that definitely was not who Emily was. Emily was not contentious. Emily was not somebody who would bicker and argue, and so that was totally taking away from everything. And so at first we just tried to just engage in a way that we felt like was safe, that wouldn't put fuel on the fire. But it became so hard, and even I was spending a tremendous amount
of time that I really shouldn't have been spending. I needed to be supporting my wife and my kids, and I was spending time on this Facebook page trying to defend Emily, who I felt like I had failed and get this filth off of there, and eventually we just needed to take the page down, and so we just removed the page from Facebook for a long period of time. And even then, my thought was, you know, these conspiracy people, you know, they're just this is the hot thing right now.
Eventually they're going to move on and go start looking for Bigfoot again. That was one thing that actually told my friend Brad, who was one of the people that started a Facebook page. And again just my ignorance of just the age that we were coming into between this crossroads of media, social media, proliferation of disinformation, all of that was very brand new, and Sandy Hook was just an ignition point for all of these places to come in collide with each other.
You write about your family's plan to focus on your grief and to deal with the grief of losing your daughter. Your wife had a blog that she was encouraged to go public with it and it dealt with her dealing with grief. You have alluded that you felt guilty for not protecting your family in the first place somehow from this school shooter. But now with the assault coming from Alex Jones and his supporters at Info War, you again felt this guilt and this need to protect your family.
In terms of dealing with your own grief and protecting your family. What did your wife do to deal with grief and what, unfortunately did how did you deal with your grief?
Yeah, so we're living this really fragmented life where on one hand, we had a very clear understanding and we were getting help from wonderful people right away, And it became obvious that our first concern was how do we approach this in a way that's going to be the best outcome for our girls. And what we learned was, you know, the girls are going to mimic how you guys handle grief, right, so they're going to look to you to be the examples of how to process this
in a very healthy way. So that became our first priority was we are going to learn and focus on what healthy grief means and what that looks like for us. And so, but like you said, I mean, at the same time, I'm dealing with all those things that are accompanied from that. I felt like I failed Emily as a father. Elyssa felt like she failed Emily as a mother.
Like he made promises to our kids that we would always protect them, that we wouldn't ever let anything bad happen to them, and that now was shown that we were incapable of really being able to fulfill that promise, and so you carry a lot of guilt and shame for doing that, even though you know there wasn't anything you could really do or do anything wrong. But I'm looking at my girls and I know that I can't
make that same promise to them. And so when you have conspiracy people like I said, who are a real threat, and that's no joke. And the letters that got sent to my home and the phone calls and voice messages that were left on my phone prove exactly that they not only are they capable of doing something, they wanted to do something if they ever had an opportunity to. And so I'm split in this now. I'm doubling down on wanting to be this father that protects his family
and try and grieve. And I learned painfully that those two things at that point in my life couldn't exist in the same place at the same time. If I could focus on grief, I could set time around and I could go to my counseling and I could help with issues that were coming up at home, and I could learn good ways and bad ways about what healthy
grief was and just learn those processes. But then I would have to shift gears and focus on conspiracy theory people and what was going on, what was being said, where were they, And that was just so debilitating to try and keep that up for a long period of time, and it leaves you constantly feeling like you're not doing enough.
And growing up, I grew up in a very high demand religion that constantly always makes you feel like you're not good enough and you're not doing enough, and so it was kind of just wired into me as a
young child to feel this way. And you just keep plowing through, and you just keep plowing through, and your tank gets empty and you're burning through your own personal resources and you are just totally unaware that that you're just burning out and that it's having severe negative impacts on your emotional, mental, physical help, your relationships with your family and with your kids, and that there wasn't any other way that I knew how to go about it.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now, what do you find out? You say, you watched a program with Piers Morgan and interviewing Alex Jones, and you realize that this what he was ranting about was the Second Amendment and people's gun rights, and he was appealing to their sense that they're coming for your guns coming from your guns. This is a false flag event. No one got shot at this school. The FBI claims that
there was no shooting. So these followers blindly believe Alex Jones that all of it is a false flag, a shooting that never occurred. To your horror, after this shooting in Newtown, the shootings don't go away. The shootings persist.
Don't they exactly? And that became clear. I talk about it kind of like the worst fraternity that you could be initiated into. So right after our shooting, it was surprising that all these other shootings that you heard about, these communities were reaching out places like Virginia Tech and Aurora, Colorado, and in August of twenty twelve there was a shooting
in Wisconsin at a Sikh temple. These people and these families were reaching out to us in solidarity and to provide their hindsight things that we needed to look out for. And then so you get made part of this community again you'd only ever read about before, and now now you're receiving this intuition that they were providing us. There were things that they were warning us about what was
going to happen. They had experienced in their own version of these things, and so and also people raising money for nefarious purposes, like the United Way and stuff like that. They're really big on warning us against letting the United Way get involved. And it was already too late that the United Way had already raised tens of millions of
dollars that they just wanted to keep. And so, so that that adds another layer of something that you have to deal with and something that you have to focus on to protect because I did not want to be revictimized. And then you see the Boston bombing the next year at the marathon, and then you see other shootings start to take place, and you start to see the repetitive patterns that come along with these, and I get so
irritated when these events happened. And you hear somebody say, you know, there's no playbook for this, and there absolutely has been a playbook written and nobody wants to look at it. So again, every one of these things just adds another layer on top of you, on top of you with something that's just weighing you down. They feel like you either have to fight or that you have to deal with or you have to problem solve and at the end of the day, all I really really
wanted to do was just grieve. I just I missed my daughter so much, and I didn't even have time to really focus on what I was feeling about her loss or seeing my girls and what it was that they were actually really going through. I was trying my best to do it, and then again just felt like I was failing all the time. I just felt like I was failing.
You say that your attempt to deal with your grief made you more and more insular and altered your character and your behavior to something that you didn't really recognize. Even at one point you got word that some of the Sandy Hook families had filed the lawsuit against Alex Jones and Info Wars, and they had asked you if you wanted to join tell us about that conversation and that contemplation that you might join in such a.
Thing, right, I mean, so years and years go by with this, and yeah, in that timeframe, I became very isolated, very self terron and developed severe social anxiety. You know, my wife's grief process was heard juggling her own emotions, looking out for the kids and looking out for me, and I didn't even realize that was part of her how I was interrupting her grief process. And so it's all concluded, and so I get contacted. So there was
two lawsuits some families. There were two families that sued Alex Jones in Texas and then there was a group of families that sued him in Connecticut. So I was first approached by one of the families that sued him in Texas asking if I wanted to join them because of that press conference. I didn't know it at the time,
but I was the first person that spoke out. So I kind of became for a short period of time like the face of Sandy Hook and so and that's what the conspiracy people really like, lashed onto and I became. So I became their target when conspiracy people talk about they and you know that I all of that became me and I became the one person that they could zone in on. And I'm not taking anything away from other Sandy Hook families. That was just and what they
went through. I'm not trying to you know, we're not making comparisons there, but it was just the order of events just made it that my name, in my face was recognizable amongst the conspiracy people in a different way. I had no intention of wanting to join the lawsuit. I didn't I had spent years and years and years trying to protect my family by by growing more and more isolated. I didn't want to put myself out there.
I didn't want to give them more fuel. I definitely didn't want to confirm any of the things that they were saying that the government had paid us to do this, And so then if I started suing somebody, I didn't want them to have AMMO that I was trying to make money off of my daughter's death. So it wasn't like we didn't think about it, wasn't like I didn't want to support the families. My wife and I thought about it long heard, and we just decided that was
just not the direction we wanted to go. And then a few months later the lawsuit in Connecticut got filed, and we had a group of families that we had done a lot of work together when we lived in Newtown before we moved away, and one of the families that we really trusted and really had become really good friends with, the Pinto family. They're both lawyers, the mom
and dad are lawyers. They looked through the lawsuit and saw that my name was all over in this thing, that a lot of the evidence that they were using for the claims that they were making had to do with me, because Alex Jones would put my face on
his show, he would say my name. So she advised us to look at it again from a different angle and consider joining the lawsuit because she was like, you know, your name is all over this thing, so you're going to be involved, whether you want to be or not, and you could get subpoenaed to testify at the hearing, not just by the Sandy Hook lawyers like Families lawyers,
but by Alex Jones's lawyer as well. And so that was the first time where it, I don't even want to say it dawn on me because it wasn't like a strong thing, but where the notion of using my voice came to me because I'd use my voice at the press conference and I got slammed because of it
and just eviscerated because of it. So the idea of me using my voice again wasn't something I was interested in, but she reframed it in a way that made me start to think that this might be a possibility for us, and eventually led us to join the lawsuit.
Another thing that swung your decision, I think, as you write that, there was another shooting victim from another school shooting that encountered the same kind of super disturbing confrontation that you had yourself, and you said, basically you didn't want people to keep experiencing these same sorts of things, and so I think it added to your desire to stop this and to get aboard this lawsuit and confront your demons.
And Alex Jones absolutely yeah, I mean that was not an easy decision to make. It took me a long time still. I mean that conversation I think happened in May with the Sandy Hook mom, and then I didn't join the lawsuit for a few more months. There was a lot of things that had to come into place, but one of the big catalysts is what you're talking about, and that was we had this weird series of events where the Parkland High School shooting that was on February fourteenth,
I was on Valentine's Day of twenty and eighteen. I believe we somehow had somebody that we knew knew one of the families that had been impacted by that, and so had made a connection, and we had just offered, like, if you if you ever wanted a talk, we're more
than willing to talk with you. And so, in a conversation that we had months later after the shooting, that got brought up, they were talking about the conspiracy people and what they were dealing with, and how the father had a very similar story to mine, that he had given a statement to the press and that he was
attacked because of it. You know, at that point, I was five and a half years down the road, and so I had developed some space and some hindsight, and I knew that now I could articulate their grief as being stolen from them. And when I talk about these people being evil, and Alex Jones being evil for what he did, because he pounced the moment that the shooting happened in Sandy Hook to start attacking and sewing doubt and attacking families, and in doing so, he robbed us
of our ability to grieve. I now look at grief as as scary as it was, and as much as I hated it in the beginning, grief is a very
sacred process. That has so much to offer and so much to teach you, and to rob somebody of that process is very evil act, in my opinion, And I saw that replaying in this family, and what that family did for me was basically just hold a mirror up to my own experience so that I could see it because I was so close to it in my own head, and I could see that that's what was happening to them,
and I knew that they had no energy. I knew that they had just at least had a sense of what it was that they were going through because I had been there. And so for me to be able to have this opportunity to say, like I could step in and do something, yes for me and my family, but also potentially for that family and hopefully for families in the future, and that's a very altruistic way to
look at it. Ultimately, I had to do it for myself, but those kinds of experiences really were catalysts that got me around to join in the lawsuit.
For sure, you're right about the court case itself. And Clint Watts, a former FBI agent turned investigative consultant, broke down Jones tactics and also the following of the money,
he denied that there was any kind of motivation. But this Chris Watts broke or Clint Watts broke everything down in terms of the guy's greed, motivation and knowing he was lying, and yet continued to incite his followers into the kinds of threats and the kinds of the kinds of threats that they issued to victim's families and the disgusting nature of the accusations that Jones leveled against the victim's families.
Yeah, I was the court process, like just litigating this thing for four years before we even made it to court. You know, it's just it's not worth writing a whole lot about. But it's just infuriating, just learning, just being exposed more and more to Alex Jones and who he is as a person and what he's willing to go, the extents of which he's willing to go to to
avoid accountability or just horrendous. And then you get into the court setting and I thought, I I talk a lot about how just ignorant, naive I wasn't a lot of things, and this is another example of that. I went into the court proceedings just figuring that I knew everything about what was what had been happening, and what was going on. And there were moments during the court during the trial hearing testimonies mainly from family members and getting to know them better that was very eye opening
to me. But Clint watts testimony just blew me away. The dots that he was able to connect, the timeline that he was able to construct, because again I was experiencing this in these weird fragments and through the lens of PTSD and trauma and grief, he was able to
articulate so clearly the series of events. How minutes after the shooting, he was already I was still sitting in the firehouse waiting for a policeman to come and give us an update, and he was already telling his viewers that this was a false flag event and that the government was lying, that the government had staged this, And that was before I even had confirmation that Emily had died.
After my press conference, Clint Watts learned through his investigative skills and what he was able to obtain from info Wars was there was a meeting immediately after my press conference that info Wars had where they had a brainstorming session about how they were going to be able to
use this press conference to their advantage. And I had carried so much shame and guilt for that press conference because I thought that me doing what I did, in what I considered mistakes that I had made in that press conference was what caused the conspiracy people to come after us. So there was a catharticness in realizing that I could kind of rid myself of that because it didn't matter what I said or what I did, they
were going to use it to their advantage anyway. But it was also very disturbing to see all this laid out because then I realized that even more so, that Alex Jones isn't just this crazy guy out there, and these conspiracy people are just these like lunatics, right that just kind of just go off of chance or whatever, Like it feels safer to put them in this orbit that is far enough away from you that you can just say that they're crazy and they they live out
there in this other world and I'm over here in this safe place. And that's a really big mistake for us to do as individuals and as a society, because they showed how calculating they are, how deliberate they are, and they sent to what they're able to go to to accomplish their goals, and so there wasn't any chance
about it. This was calculated, it was planned, and they were in pursuit of doing something very specific, and they were accomplishing that until somebody could stand up and try and put a stop to it.
You're right about the talented lawyers at the at this lawsuit, Josh Koshkoff, Chris Mattey, alanor Sterling, and Matthew Blumenthal, And you talk about the despicable narrative that was spewed by Norman Pattis, the defense lawyer. You gave him the benefit of the doubt that he would just protect his client, but then he continued with the defamin to statements and narrative of Alex Jones. So you lost all respect fro
him in that regard. The settlement from the judge and the denouncement, the very dramatic denouncement from the judge is indicative of quite a bit. So tell us about the settlement what it was. You might that it's unlikely that anybody would see any of this incredible sums of money However, it is satisfying to realize that Alex jones empire, the empire that he built on lies, would be destroyed.
So there was a it was a jury trial. The weird thing about what ended up happening was the judges in Texas and Connecticut both found Jones in default, meaning he he was such an awful player. He never complied with any core orders to turn over documents, anything that was relevant. He just played these games to the point where it was so atrocious that the judges were like, your behavior just proves that you're guilty, and default is the death sentence of things. Judges hate to do that.
They want a chance for there to be a trial, They want a chance for all the facts to come out. But because of his behavior and the way that he was going about things, they said, your behavior is proof enough that the claims against you are valid and true, and so you're guilty of defamation. You're guilty of the emotional harm that you caused these families. And so the trial was focused on compensatory damages. And so the point of the trial at that point, we didn't have to
prove it he was guilty. We just had to prove the extent of the harm that he caused. So for the jury, and I didn't get to write about this a whole lot in the book, the amount of respect that I gained for the jury members for what they had to go through to sit there for weeks on end, to listen to arguments from Norm Pattis and and what Jones was saying even in the courtroom hear about all these awful things that he was doing, and what we
went through the jury. I just have a tremendous amount of member of respect for the members of the jury and what they had to put themselves through, and in their verdict was just a confirmation of what we already knew that Jones and his followers are dangerous people. They they the harm that they inflict in the impact that it has on people's individual lives and on society as
a whole, are very real. And their verdict of nine hundred and sixty five million dollars in compensatory damages to the families was the only way our system has to say that. And so they did a very admirable job of painting that picture of this is exactly what this man does in the harm that he causes, and what it's capable of doing.
What did that settlement do for you personally?
So the juries, reward or however you want to say it, I mean it was validation right to everything that we had been through. For me personally, what I ultimately I joined the lawsuit because I realized that along the way, I had totally given up my voice and I had given up all my power, and yes, Jones was doing
all of these things. And when I did try and try and put a stop to it in some way by trying to get social media companies to take them off or whatever, and I was just put down, like I lost so much, and I gave up so much of my own sense of self and my own worth. So for me reclaiming that and that's why even the subtitle of the book is about reclaiming the truth about Sandy Hook And for me, it was reclaiming just it
started out just reclaiming myself. I am a good father and I am somebody that can protect my kids, and I needed to stand up and speak truth to that. And the process of this litigation in the courtroom and then me getting to witness Alex Jones on the stand, and then me being able to take the stand myself.
That was what I gained out of this whole process was and I know it sounds so cheesy, but it's like I was able to reclaim my voice and what that has done for me and how I now approach my life and how I approach my relationships and my family and grief has catapulted me into a much much healthier state of mine, in the state of being. And
that's what I got out of this whole process. I walked off the stand elated with knowing that I had accomplished with what I had intended to set out in this and that accomplishment has now snowballed as we've gone on in the future. I love the jury's verdict and it shows a validation of what it is that we went through. It didn't give me personally anything other than
that validation. But what I needed out of this experience was was that was what I was able to provide for myself in going through it and reclaiming those things that I felt like i'd lost.
Absolutely, I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about your extraordinary a father's fight, taking on Alex Jones and reclaiming the truth about Sandy Hook. For those people that might want to find out more about this book. Do you do have a website and do you do any social media that week refer to.
I have a very limited social media presence. I was off social media for years because of these guys. But I do have a website. It's my name, Robbie Parker, Robbie's Robbie, so Robbie Parker dot net. I do have an email that people can contact me at info at Robbie Parker dot net. Those would be the best basic to get a hold of me, or if anybody's interested in purchasing the book, that would be the way to find out more about it.
Thank you very much, Robbie Parker for a father's fight, taking on Alex Jones and reclaiming the truth about Sandy Hook. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night.
My pleasure, Dan, thank you, thank you,