Today, Dan and Jordan take in the events of the past couple weeks with the help of a couple guests, plaintiff's attorneys Mark Bankston and Bill Ogden. Tune in for insights about the trial, and to learn that Bill remembers Tila Tequila's dating show.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| That's our theme song for the week, apparently. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and Jordan, I am sweating. | ||
| Knowledgefight.com, it's down to break. | ||
| I have great respect for knowledge fight. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys. | ||
| Shane, me, are the bad guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge fight. | |
| Dan and Jordan, knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man, man, man, man. | |
| Need, need money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the advantage. | |
| And the advantage. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| And the advantage. | ||
| You're over here. | ||
| So Alex, I'm a big fan. | ||
| I love your world. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge fight. | |
| Knowledge fight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody! | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan? | ||
| Quick question for you. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| Where's your bright spot, buddy? | ||
| My bright spot is that sweet Cantina theme remix of our theme song that just played by DJ Dan Arkey. | ||
| So good. | ||
| Crushing the game with these periodic remixes. | ||
| There's definitely the theme song of our trip to Austin and being able to have that incorporated into the podcast for a special maybe one-off. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| I think it's a maybe one-off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're too lucky. | |
| We're too lucky. | ||
| It's just too lucky. | ||
| We're spoiled with talented folks who are willing to create things. | ||
| So we appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you, Dan. | ||
| Thank you so much, Anarchy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um, I would say my bright spot, uh, well, it might as well be that we were on the televisual box. | |
| That was pretty fun. | ||
| National television debut. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| We went out, we talked to, we talked to the demon Stelter. | ||
| Stelter! | ||
| It was, you know, we weren't in the same studio, so we couldn't smell him through the camera. | ||
| No sulfur or anything. | ||
| It may be, you know, so we can't confirm sulfur or not. | ||
| Yeah, and we also, you know, we were in a studio, and we were just staring at, like, a black wall. | ||
| We couldn't see him, even, as we were doing it, which was a little unnerving. | ||
| It was disconcerting, yeah. | ||
| Especially when I went back and saw his faces that he made during stuff, I was like, I would have said a different thing. | ||
| Did he do something like... | ||
| Yeah, absolutely! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just making mocking faces at us. | |
| So, Jordan, I mean, we were on with Stelter. | ||
| So, there's a couple of things I want to point out. | ||
| First, one of the big questions that we got was whether or not we got to ask him about his hatred or Alex's hatred of him. | ||
| And we didn't on air, although he did say we could ask him that, but there wasn't time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he made it clear that he was answering your questions. | |
| He's very much aware that Alex hates him. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So that part we can confirm. | ||
| And then the second thing I wanted to bring up vis-a-vis that interview is our parents had different responses. | ||
| What was your parents' response? | ||
| I got a text from my dad that was about how proud he was and how I was the first family member to make it on the national news. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| That is... | ||
| I don't know if that's actually true, because I would imagine there had to have been some kind of coverage of my brother's ice cream shop in the day. | ||
| You know, like, I would assume. | ||
| But I know that there was a ton of sort of local and regional stuff, but I don't know if there was ever, like, a national spotlight. | ||
| But I assume there was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But certainly no stelter, baby. | ||
| No, no, no, definitely not. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Of all people, my cousin. | ||
| Uh, who is, who consumes a lot of right-wing news was the first person to text me. | ||
| Uh, and then... | ||
| How dare you go on the Clinton News Network? | ||
| No, he was like, you did a great job. | ||
| Like, it was cool. | ||
| It was really nice of him. | ||
| And, uh, yeah, my dad was, uh, you know, he was doing some preaching today so they couldn't get to see it, you know? | ||
| And then I sent him a picture and they were like, wow, congratulations! | ||
| So, and then the conversation, the conversation went... | ||
| It's not so sweet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not been an avalanche of appreciation. | |
| You take the rough with the smooth, as they say. | ||
| You get what you get. | ||
| It's been a really interesting couple of weeks with the trial and stuff. | ||
| Just adding the surreality of that is almost hard to process. | ||
| I don't know how I feel about having makeup put on me. | ||
| It was interesting. | ||
| You look great. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Yeah, it was all a lot, but I appreciate them having us on, and I appreciate that they allowed us to not play into some of the, you know, like, hey, why don't you talk about Alex's X, Y, or Z thing, and we're able to... | ||
| Speak on the issue as we wanted to, and I appreciate that. | ||
| That's something that maybe some people wouldn't think a media outlet would offer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I think we're both actually very lucky that we're not in a... | ||
| Like, this is the behind-the-music moment where it all starts to fall apart, and we're still 100% in agreement, like, nah, fuck this shit! | ||
| We're gonna say exactly what needs saying, you know? | ||
| Yeah, and, you know, I think I saw a little bit of feedback that it was a little bit of a shallow interview, and to that I say, yeah, fair enough. | ||
| I mean, it was six minutes, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| A little hit like that is not something that you can really dive too deep in, and you gotta answer your question and get done, and... | ||
| And so, unfortunately, it may not satisfy people who want a thorough deconstruction of some of this stuff, but that's, I guess, what the podcast is for. | ||
| And yeah, it's a treat. | ||
| And speaking of treats, Jordan, for our episode today, we are thrilled to be joined once again by Mark Bankston and Bill Ogden. | ||
| Can't believe we get to do this. | ||
| I think Mark said in our little chat that this is the first press, so we're scooping everybody on this. | ||
| But it was really... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I feel like it's kind of condescending to say an honor, but it was. | ||
| It's very meaningful and something I'll always be very thrilled to have been able to be whatever small part of... | ||
| This that it was, and I appreciate them so much for allowing us to have, you know, a little bit of an inside track on some stuff, and their generosity with the listeners and us is just so wonderful. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| I'm glad that we are able to have this sort of button a little bit, although maybe it's a button that'll last all of Sneak Week. | ||
| Well, it's Sneak Week. | ||
| But, you know, wrapping up some of this sort of chapter. | ||
| It's very nice. | ||
| And being able to have a conversation with them to do that, I think everyone will enjoy. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| So we could belabor this longer and just chat about nothing, but I gotta be honest, it's late. | ||
| I gotta get this episode edited. | ||
| And I... | ||
| Don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Just got some Taco Bell delivered. | ||
| No, Dan! | ||
| I need to eat this shitty food. | ||
| Edit this part out. | ||
| Don't let anybody know. | ||
| Never. | ||
| I like bad food. | ||
| Don't care. | ||
| Anyway, Jordan, we'll be back soon, y 'all. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| We might be sneaky as hell this week. | ||
| It's Sneak Week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Anyway, enjoy the interview. | ||
| Hey, ladies and gentlemen, we are back and here in Chicago, as is the norm. | ||
| And we have a special bit of a chat decompression session. | ||
| A decompress sesh. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| If you like. | ||
| If it rhymes, it's good. | ||
| So, as listeners will know, we were in Austin recently for the trial. | ||
| True. | ||
| The Alex Jones-Sandy Hook trial. | ||
| We met a couple of fun people out there. | ||
| A couple of cool cats. | ||
| Just two dudes. | ||
| They were wandering the streets. | ||
| They were wearing nice suits, and we were like, I can't believe that these two people are not being taken care of by a staff right now. | ||
| And I can't believe there's no... | ||
| No podcasts. | ||
| Just asking them to come and share wisdom. | ||
| And Alex had a security detail 10 strong. | ||
| These two? | ||
| Zero security. | ||
| None! | ||
| Or better disguise security. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| Alex's security is wandering around with bulletproof vests and fake mustaches. | ||
| Very conspicuous. | ||
| Half of the journalists there were actually running security for these two. | ||
| Did you see the ficus in the corner of the room? | ||
| No, I didn't! | ||
| That's how good it is. | ||
| We figured this week is Sneak Week. | ||
| We have honorarily decided that this is Sneak Week for the sneaky snakes. | ||
| This is where we sneak. | ||
| And we thought, what better way to begin Sneak Week than to have a little bit of an end of the trial narrative arc, I guess. | ||
| And who better to join us than Bill Ogden? | ||
| Mark Bankston, plaintiff's attorneys for Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin. | ||
| Thank you for joining us, guys. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| Heroes for the Wonks. | ||
| Certainly become favorites of the community. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Thanks for making time for us, man. | ||
| I'm sure everyone's banging down your doors at this point. | ||
| Banging down Mark's. | ||
| I defaulted and told him he gets to handle all of it. | ||
| This is the only interview I'm doing. | ||
| No other press! | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I said I'll do this one and that's it. | ||
| No joke though, this is the since I walked off the courthouse grounds, this is the first time I've spoken to any sort of public media and you guys are first. | ||
| Y 'all are public media now, guys. | ||
| I was going to say, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Y 'all have to now follow. | ||
| You're on notice, bitches. | ||
| Don't mess around or I'll come for you. | ||
| I promise. | ||
| I mentioned this morning, as we're recording this, we were on Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter, and I was just like, don't cuss. | ||
| Don't swear. | ||
| It was so hard for me to not be like, this guy's full of shit. | ||
| I didn't scream one time. | ||
| One time! | ||
| Yeah, it was great. | ||
| That's the reason I'm here, actually, is because I knew if I went on CNN and the mood I'm in, a few might slip out. | ||
| My mouth is a little loose. | ||
| What's bringing that swearing to mind? | ||
| Where are y 'all's heads at? | ||
| Gosh, cloud nine right now, man. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know why, but this trial took more out of me emotionally and just exhausting-wise. | ||
| Well, I guess why? | ||
| Because every day was something else where we were like, holy shit. | ||
| But I feel good now. | ||
| I think that We wanted a little bit of difference when it comes to the numbers breakdown, but we're extremely happy with where it's at. | ||
| And I think the message that the clients wanted to send was sent pretty damn clear and loud. | ||
| So I'm super happy now. | ||
| But definitely exhaling and taking a deep breath and just kind of relaxing a little bit at this point. | ||
| I wasn't jumping on a private jet to go to New York City to do interviews. | ||
| And they offered. | ||
| That's a good point that you bring up there, too, about the numbers and such. | ||
| I think a lot of times the reporting on this misses. | ||
| There's a lot of flashy numbers and millions and stuff, and the context of it as the message and the actual intent and want of the plaintiffs is kind of lost in the shuffle a little bit. | ||
| I mean, too, in the complications of how this actually plays out, right? | ||
| You had people jumping on it immediately. | ||
| I saw a $45 million verdict, and they're not exactly sure how to report it. | ||
| They don't understand what the caps are. | ||
| They don't understand where it goes from here. | ||
| They don't understand anything about what's happening. | ||
| And then what people have to remember is Jones threw the company into bankruptcy mid-trial and lifted the stay for this particular trial. | ||
| So everything's going to bankruptcy court. | ||
| Yeah, you've got a practical cap on this where you've got $750 per claim and then you've got two defendants per claim. | ||
| So as the cap is applied, you're looking at like $4.5 million up on top of the $4.1 from the compensatory plus the $1.5 that they've paid in sanctions plus a couple hundred thousand. | ||
| They still have to pay in sanctions. | ||
| And about a million in interest on the $4.1. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bingo. | |
| So you're looking at like just maybe $10 million or over is basically what you're looking at on a base value. | ||
| That Bitcoin is gone! | ||
| Yeah, the air wipes out the Bitcoin. | ||
| But here's the thing about that, though, is that because they've put themselves into bankruptcy, and that means that the potential appeals that you could have, if you're going to be doing those over the next couple of years, they have to be baked into the value of how that gets done up in the bankruptcy state. | ||
| So the actual value is going to be higher than what we actually have under the cap, because that appeal, the potential to have that cap declared. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's an interesting thought. | |
| I hadn't considered that. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, I mean, the whole thing is to leverage your ability to appeal this, and especially because this would be like the golden case to appeal this on. | ||
| Because you have a damage cap on a case where there was a default judgment and there was even presumed damages in the nature of those claims, that if you now do a constitutionality challenge to this, it's the day. | ||
| We've been waiting for a case. | ||
| The sad part is that's not going to happen. | ||
| We're never going to get to the Supreme Court because we're going to get valued in the bankruptcy court. | ||
| So you leverage the appeal on that value. | ||
| And the thing is, you've got Matty coming in with his... | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is it? | |
| Nine plaintiffs. | ||
| You've got two more with Posner and De La Rosa. | ||
| And believe me, by that time when that state gets lifted, we're just going to absolutely kick their teeth in on that case. | ||
| I mean, that case, the damages in that case are fucking stunning. | ||
| I mean, it is really just horrific. | ||
| And then you've got Marcel Fontaine's misidentification case. | ||
| And that's all happened to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That didn't go away. | |
| Yeah, that never went away. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so... | ||
| I mean, that's just what, like, there's a clip going around the world right now about, like, we're dividing up the corpse of Infowars in the bankruptcy state. | ||
| That's what will happen. | ||
| You, for somebody who claims to not want to court attention and media, seem to be dropping these bombs that just, like... | ||
| Dan, I talked to one local reporter. | ||
| You can't stop yourself. | ||
| I don't want any media attention, so I'm going to throw pipe bombs from the top of this roof for months at a time. | ||
| You know, I don't want any attention, though. | ||
| The first time we talked to you, you said, I eat what I kill. | ||
| As a plaintiff's attorney, it's like... | ||
| You just can't stop yourself from these lines. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| You got no choice. | ||
| The funniest part, and I'll tell you the story, probably five years ago, maybe six years ago, Mark tried a case called Harold Adams, and he tried it. | ||
| He put his heart into it. | ||
| He tried it with his dad, and they got screwed. | ||
| And he got done with that case, and he was dead serious. | ||
| He's like, I'm never trying another case. | ||
| This isn't for me. | ||
| This isn't my thing. | ||
| And I think this is the first time he was in a courtroom since then. | ||
| Yeah, Mark? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I've had a couple since then that went well. | ||
| Some of them first or second, but yeah, there have been a couple where I've been like, okay, that's rewarding. | ||
| And then you start participating in some of these bigger trials. | ||
| You had a couple open mics before you guys took another show. | ||
| You did your five, you got a little good feedback, and then you're ready. | ||
| You spend your life second chairing trials when you're a young plaintiff's lawyer, and you know how trial works like the back of your hand. | ||
| But to actually be in this moment, this thing, I mean, it was surreal. | ||
| It was absolutely surreal. | ||
| And I did. | ||
| I got too emotionally invested in prior cases. | ||
| And so when they don't go well, you take a hit. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| I imagine Ray Nall is having a very interesting, surreal experience, but in the complete opposite direction. | ||
| Like, boy, I thought I was good at this. | ||
| Oh, this isn't going to be good. | ||
| Well, it's funny because now, in my opinion, I would say Mark now has the most famous lawyer moment of the last. | ||
| Decade at least. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That will stand out as something that was on television, you know, that people saw and that it was just rocked everybody. | ||
| It's the new if the glove doesn't fit. | ||
| Absolutely! | ||
| It really is! | ||
| Do you know what perjury is, sir? | ||
| That's no good. | ||
| Such a question you're not supposed to ask, but no objection was made. | ||
| At that point, because Mark had slapped Ray Nall, both Mark and the judge had slapped Ray Nall so many times, I really feel like at the end he was like, I just don't even want to stand up. | ||
| I'm not going to feel good about what happens here. | ||
| He took a game that he shouldn't have. | ||
| Absolutely, he did. | ||
| And he didn't understand the playing field. | ||
| He thought he was going to come in here and figure, you know, even bad press is good press. | ||
| And no, it is not. | ||
| You don't want to Google that guy's name right now if you're hiring a lawyer. | ||
| And what's weird about that moment in that courtroom was not only was it a pitch-perfect law-and-order moment, not only was it against one of the most evil dudes in America. | ||
| Who sputtered and coughed his way through it. | ||
| But the fact that the moment itself focused so intently on opposing counsel, that even the law and crime camera person who's ever doing the camera in there does this dramatic pan and pans down to Reynaud while he's sitting there stroking his chin. | ||
| What the heck is happening right now? | ||
| It's theatrical. | ||
| I tell you, I saw the whole thing play out on The Daily Show the night after I did it, and I was obviously on a high, but then I was like... | ||
| For a second, I almost felt bad for the dude, because I know all of his friends, as Alex would say, his liberal, trendy friends. | ||
| I mean, God darn. | ||
| I differ a little bit on that. | ||
| I do feel bad. | ||
| I think that he inherited a case that was shit already. | ||
| There was nothing he could do about it, and he probably took that case without... | ||
| Them appreciating where the case was and then just bomb after bomb after bomb was dropped on him. | ||
| I kind of feel bad because I think in five years at an airport in Atlanta, somebody's going to be like, oh, you're the guy with the cell phone records. | ||
| Do you mean when he's working at the Cinnabon in Atlanta? | ||
| Is that what you're describing? | ||
| I just... | ||
| It's rare that something like that happens, especially on such a big stage. | ||
| It never happens. | ||
| Yeah, what are you talking about? | ||
| It's rare that happens. | ||
| By rare, I mean like rare plus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's rare that the dinosaurs go extinct. | |
| I came home and I have a kind of rough around the edges cousin who I would not expect to be plugged into this sort of thing normally. | ||
| And he came right up to me and he was like, what the heck is going on? | ||
| That lawyer and he goes to me, man, I would not hire that guy to represent me in the Pepsi challenge, like at the mall. | ||
| Like, would not do it. | ||
| That is, wow. | ||
| The ripple effects of this are unreal. | ||
| And I did, I'll tell you, I felt bad for a moment, but I need to tell a story that I've told on the record in court. | ||
| So again, not telling tales out of school. | ||
| But the first time I met Renal back in March when he was coming in to defend their other lawyer who got found for tampering evidence. | ||
| And I think that's originally why they brought in a criminal lawyer. | ||
| He walked up to me outside on the steps out in front of the courthouse, and he tried to do some sort of psycho psyop stuff, you know, mess with your opponent's head kind of stuff. | ||
| And then he eventually tells me something along the lines of... | ||
| Like, you're never getting a dime off this case, or your clients are never getting a dime off this case. | ||
| Jesus! | ||
| And, like, you're about to do a bunch of work, hinting at this fraudulent bankruptcy he's about to file. | ||
| And then that shit just collapses on itself. | ||
| Everything goes south. | ||
| He ends up having his client owe a million dollars in sanctions, which he pays in the middle of trial. | ||
| They actually hand me that check and get that on over. | ||
| And now he ends up with this moment. | ||
| Yeah, it's just desserts. | ||
| If you were to come in this case and try to defend it with some sort of principled advocacy, that's one thing. | ||
| But if you're coming in just to be the bad man for Alex Jones, proto-fascist madman, whatever. | ||
| No, you get every bad thing that's coming to you. | ||
| And right now, oh my God, are the things dropping on him right now. | ||
| He's got to be up in Connecticut, do the show cause hearing for discipline, all of that. | ||
| Jones has actionable malpractice claims against him. | ||
| Roger Stone is begging him to sue him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Change the narrative. | |
| It's the same shit. | ||
| It's a false flag again. | ||
| It's Eric Holder put this guy and somehow weaseled him into Jones' confidences. | ||
| We made jokes about that. | ||
| Honestly, I think he has an actionable defamation claim against Roger Stone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They should just all end up shooting each other. | |
| It would be fantastic. | ||
| But it's all like, this is going wild. | ||
| I can tell you, there was this little part of fear of me that said when the bankruptcy came in, and then when we had this verdict, and then I know what's about to happen in the next couple of months, I was like, guys, your show's not long for this world because he is going down the tubes very, very fast. | ||
| But what is nice, what is really going to savor every moment is this downfall, this exit of Jones from the American stage is going to take a considerable amount of time and expose him to a considerable amount of danger. | ||
| You're going to have content for the next year that is just gold. | ||
| It's unreal. | ||
| It's so poetic. | ||
| It's finally happening, guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what I'm saying. | |
| It's finally happening. | ||
| Yeah, and I think one of the things that's really important about that is that as it happens, probably because it'll be a little bit protracted, there'll be so many opportunities for the inside of the sausage to be understood a little bit more by the public, which I think could be... | ||
| Incredibly helpful in teaching people about these sorts of actors and how they operate so you can understand other people like them and avoid falling for the same tricks from just another face. | ||
| Well, I can tell you, Wes and Kyle want to come talk to y 'all and they can do some educating. | ||
| And if you think I'm a little blue on your podcast, Wes is the guy who said ass in the courtroom. | ||
| Ask me, can you do that? | ||
| And I was like, absolutely not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| In any other courtroom, any other circumstance, it was something about his Tennessee draw and something about the whole posture, the tenor of the whole damn case. | ||
| He got away with saying about Jones putting his ass up on the witness stand. | ||
| And it flowed. | ||
| It actually worked. | ||
| I believe he said ass in the court. | ||
| When Wes did that, He just let it rip. | ||
| That was everything that he had emotionally. | ||
| He had practiced a couple times with us the night before, and it wasn't like that. | ||
| It's weird because this trial, the way it progressed, was like Kyle crossed Owen. | ||
| It was an absolute bloodbath. | ||
| And everybody was like, oh man, that's what I came here for. | ||
| And then Mark... | ||
| Via Alex Jones reintroduces the term Perry Mason to the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All these young kids know what that means now. | |
| And then Scarlett takes the stand and is, in my opinion, the most powerful moment I will ever be a part of. | ||
| When she dug in and just looked right at Alex and just spoke to him. | ||
| There wasn't an objection. | ||
| But there was also no questions being asked. | ||
| She was just talking. | ||
| What's Ray now going to do? | ||
| Like, objection! | ||
| Absolutely! | ||
| I'm going to win this case by objecting to her. | ||
| Alex said, like, she can monologue and I can't. | ||
| It's like, yes, because your attorney didn't object. | ||
| That was his choice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He knows that he can't. | |
| So we get that, and then here comes Wes Ball. | ||
| And so Wes had, he was the only one of us that could do the parents without crying. | ||
| Bad. | ||
| Me and Kyle both were like, I can't do it. | ||
| Mark was going to do it. | ||
| Kind of toward mid-trial, Mark was like, Wes, you should probably do both. | ||
| Wes had that. | ||
| Wes is... | ||
| Everybody's got their own style. | ||
| Wes is definitely the most cavalier, maverick-type style. | ||
| When cross happens, it's just a different type of tone. | ||
| He didn't get to show that. | ||
| All of a sudden, he took... | ||
| The closing and just laid it all out there. | ||
| That was by far the best closing I've ever heard. | ||
| It's probably a little bit unfortunate that it's so overshadowed by the Perry Mason moment. | ||
| No one's talking about the ass. | ||
| The overshadowing is insane because we're not talking about the fact that for the first time ever we played a clip of the defendant calling the judge a pedophile. | ||
| We all forgot about that. | ||
| Nobody's talking about that. | ||
| We all forgot that the defendant played... | ||
|
unidentified
|
We played a video of the defendant calling the jury a bunch of blue-collar simpletons in the middle of trial. | |
| That's true. | ||
| Those two things are insane, and they're not in the top five. | ||
| And calling Neil on the spectrum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| We're not talking about that anymore because so many kind of... | ||
| Just huge moments kept happening in this trial. | ||
| But most, I mean, obviously the Perry Mason one. | ||
| Because Alex said, nice try on the Perry Mason. | ||
| And then Mark's like, oh, you have no idea what I'm saying. | ||
| I was going to ask you guys, how do you feel? | ||
| Because I feel like ultimately the jury did an amazing job because of the amount of bullshit that is barraged at them in such a short period of time that their ability to kind of like... | ||
| At least process it into where it went. | ||
| I feel like it's kind of almost amazing in a way. | ||
| Did you guys feel that similarly? | ||
| No, they're really... | ||
| I mean, you chose them! | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that jury was a broad mix of different backgrounds and people. | ||
| And they were... | ||
| None of this bullshit stuck them for a second. | ||
| They were on it from square one. | ||
| And there was basically one juror who was a little hesitant about certain of the ideas of... | ||
| I don't know, free expression. | ||
| Not necessarily even free speech, but just sort of like, hey, you can compensate people, but you also just kind of have to tolerate evil businesses existing. | ||
| But every other juror just saw through that immediately was, these people are scum. | ||
| This is just absolutely horrible. | ||
| Once we were able to talk to them, they gave us their feedback after the trial. | ||
| It was clear the message they were sending for 100%. | ||
| And we really didn't know because like you say, You know, my brother actually told me about this. | ||
| He was saying, this trial, it's like trying to get your mom to start watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and you're like, who are all these fucking characters? | ||
| Like, why is Harry Styles showing up at the end of Eternals? | ||
| Like, none of this is making sense. | ||
| Steve Petranich is in a mid-credit scene. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But that's the thing, my brother said, man, it's just like the MCU movies, man. | ||
| Yeah, and you sure as hell don't want to miss the post-credit scenes every day, because that's where the real stuff goes down. | ||
| And it's true. | ||
| Every day when she left the courtroom, something crazy would happen in the end. | ||
| Yeah, he was about to get attacked and maybe lose his life and then I stepped in and saw how big I was. | ||
| Although one publication described me as one of the larger plaintiff's lawyers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, come on! | |
| Give me something folk-like or give me something larger. | ||
| It makes me sound like a... | ||
| An offensive lineman. | ||
| I don't think you saved his life necessarily, but I do think you might have saved his license because if Reynold really did go after him, I have no doubt Mark isn't going to be like, can I get the cops nearby? | ||
| I don't think that's how it's going to go. | ||
| The reason I stepped around is because as they both started mouthing back, and Mark, will you talk to me? | ||
| And the cameras... | ||
| So funny. | ||
| You know, unless you were in jury selection, you didn't know where that came from. | ||
| Yeah, hold on. | ||
| Let me tell that story, because not all the listeners kind of understand this, right? | ||
| So let me just set up this seminal moment of him flipping me off and doing the whole thing, is that immediately preceding that, I had basically managed to have a large swath of his evidence excluded, because he just doesn't know his way around civil law. | ||
| Poster board. | ||
| Yeah, it was bad. | ||
| I got all of his videos out. | ||
| He was upset. | ||
| And he had also just been cheered out by the judge for three different things. | ||
| He was hot that day. | ||
| And so, like, as we're leaving the courtroom, he gets, like, right up in my face. | ||
| Like, seriously up in my face. | ||
| Like, eighth grade schoolyard stuff, like, where he is, like, right up in there. | ||
| And, like, we're having to, like, kind of diffuse it a little bit. | ||
| But so what I say is, it looks on the camera like I'm being super, super reasonable to him. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| Hey, Federico, will you talk to me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Will you talk to me? | |
| And what people who don't watch the jury selection know is that this dude started jury selection by going up to every juror, being juror number one, Miss Rodriguez, whoever it was, right? | ||
| You know, Miss Rodriguez, will you talk to me? | ||
| And they'd be like, I guess. | ||
| And then before they could even say anything, go to the next juror. | ||
| Juror number two, will you talk to me? | ||
| Juror number three, will you talk to me? | ||
| And he did this for 16 straight jurors, and then it got so goddamn awkward that he would just be like, Third row. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Will you talk to me? | |
| All right. | ||
| All the ladies. | ||
| Ladies in the back. | ||
| Who's out there? | ||
| When I said that to him, which on the camera looks ostensibly like I'm being a peacemaker and trying to calm him down, it was just an absolute kick to him. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| You were trolling a little. | ||
| So he shot the bird. | ||
| But what you'll notice in that video, I have stopped paying attention to him by that moment. | ||
| I'm looking over and talking to somebody else. | ||
| I didn't even know he did it until the next day. | ||
| And yeah, the judge was absolutely furious about him doing all that. | ||
| I see them going toe-to-toe, and I'm watching it, and then I see just cameras starting to focus. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, I don't want to look back. | ||
| We got to get this. | ||
| That's why I kind of popped in, because I could see 10 different journalists whipping out phones and cameras. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I was just whoring myself to the camera. | ||
| But at the same time, I didn't want Mark to not have the white gloves on when it came to whatever this was going to end in. | ||
| So I was like, oh, hey, let's just calm down and we'll have a phone call later. | ||
| Yeah, there's a great picture that I saw of the two of you, Mark and Raynall, and Bill, you're just in the background looking on like, uh-oh. | ||
| There's just a look in your face of like, well, here we go. | ||
| I was just like, Mark, please know the cameras are on. | ||
| Please don't say anything better. | ||
| It's just so funny to me, not least of which, because that wasn't, like, the middle of the trial. | ||
| That was day fucking one! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Day one! | ||
| Yeah, I was under his skin right from the get-go. | ||
| It was right on. | ||
| It was right from the get-go. | ||
| And it just got worse every day. | ||
| And you have to understand, looking back on it, I knew what I had. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I knew what I had. | ||
| I knew what he had given me. | ||
| But you also... | ||
| You also had to wait a couple more days before it matured, as it were. | ||
| I had to wait for that clock to run out. | ||
| I said this on Twitter, but it is something that is hard to wrap my mind around. | ||
| If the defense had made no defense, those text messages wouldn't have been allowed. | ||
| The trial would have been over in a week or less. | ||
| So by doing this... | ||
| By doing this, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And not just that, but even if after the trial you wouldn't have been able to use them, you could have turned them over, right? | ||
| But you wouldn't have had that legal reason to use them in court. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And I could have never trapped Jones into double sealing his lie on what we did with the text messages. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And what's wild is, made that choice, get this, by the day we were going to rest, that day I was free and clear. | ||
| I had him. | ||
| And I had Jones under subpoena. | ||
| And I could have put him on the stand. | ||
| And I didn't. | ||
| I read it. | ||
| Because I knew they were going to call James the Santa. | ||
| I knew it. | ||
| And you want it that way because you want them to do that fucking bullshit song and dance where they did where they tried to humanize the guy or made something that he did reasonable. | ||
| You don't want them cleaning up what you just did. | ||
| And you'll notice when Reynold got devastated on that, he stood up and asked just a couple of questions and they were basically questions designed to protect himself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you do this? | ||
| Am I a good lawyer? | ||
| I'm a good lawyer, right, Alex? | ||
| I'm a good boy. | ||
| You just turned over things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We handled it. | |
| You trusted that. | ||
| And it's like totally in contradiction to what he testified in deposition, 100%. | ||
| But it doesn't matter. | ||
| I mean, think about that, guys. | ||
| You are sitting there and that happens to you. | ||
| And Jones gets off the stand and you have to close now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You are a lawyer with all that weighing down on you. | |
| That's all part of this, too. | ||
| And I noticed that even during... | ||
| The closing arguments. | ||
| When Kyle was presenting his closing arguments, Raynaud was on his laptop. | ||
| And I can see just enough of the glare of the screen to see the giant Costco logo on the bottom of an email. | ||
| And so I know that Raynaud, while Kyle is closing, is having to feverishly communicate with the Costco lawyers about the medical records that he should not even check. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| And so this is just wild. | ||
| I've never seen anything. | ||
| I think in a circumstance like that, it's time to tear a larynx. | ||
| I think at that point, you know Snickers isn't going to cut it. | ||
| You need something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My larynx is really bad. | |
| The hard cough right at the end is what everybody's seeing on social media right now, I guess. | ||
| But the grumblings... | ||
| That were happening throughout the development of the questioning. | ||
| Like, no, remember you had a depo and I asked you and you said you pulled it down into the search bar. | ||
| And he's like... | ||
| It was like he was just seeing how many marvels he could put in his mouth while still talking. | ||
| My favorite answer in that exchange is... | ||
| I need to play Chubby Bunny with cough drops. | ||
| When he says that he has multiple cell phones with that number. | ||
| I fucking love that. | ||
| That's fantastic when he just came up with stuff like that on the spot. | ||
| There's a picture of me just like... | ||
| Doting on Mark as he's doing it. | ||
| I'm just smiling like, fuck yeah! | ||
| This is exactly what I thought it was. | ||
| This is so much better than what I thought it was going to be. | ||
| You're my hero, Mark! | ||
| Look, even with this outcome, the clients, like, nothing could have happened in the trial exciting and the outcome happens. | ||
| They're thrilled. | ||
| They're over the moon, right? | ||
| It's like a rock has been lifted off of them. | ||
| They're like seeing sunshine. | ||
| I wanted to talk a little bit more about that. | ||
| I wanted to make sure we touched on that as opposed to talking all about that. | ||
| Look, that's why our spirits are so high right now. | ||
| It's because there was an absolute celebratory mood among Neil and Scarlett and their family. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| That is everything I've ever wanted. | ||
| I was so excited. | ||
| And part of it does come down to that there was such a dramatic repudiation of Jones in the courtroom where he fell into space. | ||
| That adds to it. | ||
| But the entire thing, because they know what's happening now. | ||
| They know where things are going. | ||
| They know the other cases that are coming. | ||
| They know everything. | ||
| All of it just makes them feel like they just put a battering ram through the fortress and it's all crumbling down. | ||
| I'm literal when I say in some ways it was like they were seeing the sunshine again for the first time. | ||
| They were really seeing a future where they weren't constantly thinking about this, where they weren't having to feel like... | ||
| This is a real important thing that I remember about What Scarlett told me is that when you're a parent, it's your job to protect your child. | ||
| And she was like, I couldn't be there on December 12, 2012 to protect him. | ||
| And when he died, it became my job to protect his legacy. | ||
| That was my job now. | ||
| And that's what I've made my whole life about. | ||
| And that's what I'm trying to do with the movement to counteract this stuff. | ||
| But you feel like every time you see this Jones stuff, every time you have these people contact you, every time it happens, you feel like you're failing your child again and again and again. | ||
| And she's like, it's over now. | ||
| Only the absolute most batshit crazy people believe this stuff. | ||
| Everybody else has moved on from it. | ||
| It has become toxic and it's done. | ||
| And to see them... | ||
| So happy about that. | ||
| There is a small part of me that maybe I'm just such a pessimist that I worry a little bit about people being redoubled by the consequences that come to Alex. | ||
| It being a galvanizing thing of folks harassing more. | ||
| I hope that's not the case. | ||
| I don't think it will be based on how he reacted to it all. | ||
| I do believe the parents. | ||
| As half-assed of apologies as he's made, he did, to some extent, at least on the stand, 100% repudiate all the dumb stuff he's been saying. | ||
| And on his show, he was saying that he wanted to have Scarlett on and that he supports her movement. | ||
| She's a wonderful woman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was before the punitives. | |
| Good point. | ||
| I found that to be one of those moments that I wish more people had talked about. | ||
| That idea of Alex inviting them on his show is so disgusting to me. | ||
| The idea of having them on saying, I guess, borderline nice things, and then I'm almost going to assume that he would be like, and also, you know I'm right to question this whole thing sooner or later, and then sell his bullshit. | ||
| That disgusts me on a level I can't even... | ||
| Comprehend when I think about it. | ||
| I will say this, though. | ||
| Scarlett's reaction to that was if it will get to just one person to support the movement further, I'm in. | ||
| She's my hero. | ||
| She really is. | ||
| She is such a strong person. | ||
| Neil as well. | ||
| And they do it in different ways. | ||
| But her involvement in the Choose Love movement is... | ||
| Impressive when you look at what her story is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everything about her is impressive. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You guys might be in a better position to make this council, but I would advise her not to go. | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The whole invitation was, of course, what I expect from Jones. | |
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| It's total bullshit. | ||
| It's farcical, all that. | ||
| A borderline offensive from Jones, but Jones is a madman, so whatever. | ||
| But what's really offensive to me is I expect that from Jones. | ||
| What I did not expect is to hear cross-examine of the plaintiffs of, well, did you ever try to get with Jones and work this out and work through your trauma with Alex fucking Jones? | ||
| Did you ever try to do that, Ms. Lewis? | ||
| And I'm just like, you're disgusting, man. | ||
| Like, you're just straight up disgusting. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Like, that and the quoting the anti-Nazi poem in the end, and you don't even get it right. | ||
| Oh, no, he did not. | ||
| Yeah, first they came. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, like, he just did the whole thing, and it's like, you did not just do that. | |
| Mark and I snapped at each other when he said, like, as he was saying it, we looked at each other like, no fucking ways to get in this right. | ||
| We both shook our heads like, yeah, yeah, I saw that. | ||
| The problem with that poem is that, like, it's first they came for the socialists, and then they came for the communists, like... | ||
| Alex hates communists. | ||
| He would come for the communists. | ||
| The poem made Alex the communist in the trial. | ||
| What's so messed up about it, it casts Neil and Scarlett and their lawyers as literal Nazis. | ||
| That's what we are. | ||
| We are the first road towards extermination of the jurors. | ||
| What the fuck are you doing? | ||
| I can't. | ||
| It's probably more Poorly thought through than intentionally getting that across. | ||
| I assume they probably did that. | ||
| That poem is much more applicable to a criminal trial. | ||
| The prosecutors, a government is coming for the people for this, that, and the other. | ||
| He might have used that a few other times. | ||
| I went to the APA website. | ||
| I think that's what he did. | ||
| He couldn't find the actual... | ||
| But yeah, that was an interesting quote, especially if we had played more of Jacobson's depot. | ||
| Of all the decisions that Reynold made, which were terrible, and all of them were, the one that really caught my breath, because I was in the court that day, but when he decided to cross-examine both Neil and Scarlett, I gasped. | ||
| I was like, there's no way you can possibly think this is a good legal strategy. | ||
| To badger the people that we're talking about you defaming. | ||
| Like, that's insane! | ||
| Interesting strategy on that. | ||
| Well, I will say this, though. | ||
| We can't say everything he did was bad because he did hold... | ||
| Well, he gave you the text. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and he held us on the compensatory damages a little bit. | ||
| You know, we asked for a lot. | ||
| We knew we weren't going to get that much, right? | ||
| You want to set, you know, a high bar and work down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But, I mean, 4.1 was... | ||
| Significantly less than what we would want there. | ||
| Made up for it on the punitive side. | ||
| But walking out of that, I had to say, fuck, as much as I hated how he tried the case and how many mistakes he could have prevented. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That isn't from anything he did. | |
| That's from jurors being conscious of what the situation is and want to send a message of punitive versus compensatory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
To the jurors, $4 million is more. | |
| To give these people $2 million a piece is more money than they've seen in their lifetimes or ever will see. | ||
| It's a huge number for them. | ||
| That is another kind of point about that is that one of the hard things that you guys, one of the hard jobs I'm assuming you guys had was trying to impress upon these people that $150 million is not a huge amount of money. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| That is what he made. | ||
| He made twice that in a year. | ||
| If he makes calls to a million dollars every day, he made twice that in a year. | ||
| That's not a huge amount of money. | ||
| You put on a certain case at trial based on the evidence that's really out there in front of you based on what his revenues are, what his net worth is. | ||
| The reality is Mr. Jones is a shitty businessman. | ||
| If we hit 10 million bar, we know anything above that is just messaging at that point. | ||
| Because once you were starting to talk 10 million, you're starting to average those out to the Lafferty plaintiffs. | ||
| Yeah, he's wiped out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's done. | |
| There's no more InfoWars. | ||
| There's no more Alex Jones. | ||
| There's no super bunker of gold hidden somewhere. | ||
| It's not that. | ||
| That's not what's happening here. | ||
| Well, and there's rippling effects of those, like, kinds of judgments that will just impact his business in ways that are, you know, not just directly you have to pay this. | ||
| There are other things that will have those, like, the ball rolling down the hill for him. | ||
| Listen, 10 years ago, I buried a million Bitcoin on an island in Barbados. | ||
| We gotta go pick it up. | ||
| It's on Little Six James. | ||
| If the evidence that's out there, right, if the evidence that's out there that can be used to surmise, hey, this guy should have $100 to $200 million, assuming he's not a total moron, right? | ||
| Like, that's basically the economist's conclusion. | ||
| If you don't, it's on you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| If you don't, it's on you. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And if that evidence is real, if all of this isn't just illusions, like all of it's smoking mirrors, if that's real, people are going to jail. | ||
| I need you to understand that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's almost certainly vastly less. | |
| In our opinion. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Based on the evidence that we have in front of us, because nobody can know the real truth until we're into this bankruptcy situation. | ||
| If all of this does surmise to be right, that there should be $100, $200 million? | ||
| That conclusion leads to jail. | ||
| That's what I really believe. | ||
| Bill is getting in between you and Ray now one more time. | ||
| That is the same thing. | ||
| He's stepping in between. | ||
| And here's why I don't think you have to qualify that. | ||
| Alex Jones stood on the stand under oath and said $2 million will wipe us out. | ||
| That's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You understand? | |
| Against the rules! | ||
| Against the fucking rules! | ||
| And I'm not saying that because that's true, the other thing is a lie. | ||
| I'm saying that that thing is also untrue, and there's a third truth somewhere in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's usually the case with Alex. | |
| Exactly, right? | ||
| It's never A or B, it's L. And it's six Z's minus four. | ||
| I can understand the temptation by somebody like Reynold to attempt to inject into the first part of the trial claims that Alex has a low net worth. | ||
| I can understand the rationale for money to do that. | ||
| I can understand why Jones wants to say that on the stand. | ||
| What I can't believe is that they allowed it to happen, that Jones gave testimony under oath about his financial condition before a bankruptcy proceeding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is astonishing to me. | |
| Yeah, it's definitely unwise. | ||
| And so that's what I'm saying is that if he was lying then, then he's in a lot of trouble. | ||
| That's the answer. | ||
| And so I don't know. | ||
| We can say that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have attorney's counsel here. | |
| On a less prison-y note, I will say that the amount of help and support that we had throughout this trial from Y 'all have to have the most loyal fan listening base of all time. | ||
| I mean, there were multiple people sending us clips that were in live time of when they were being put out by Infowars. | ||
| We had the Connecticut lawyers were helping us out as much as they could. | ||
| They were watching. | ||
| We had lawyers that we're friends with that did the Fetzer trial for Lenny Posner. | ||
| They came down and helped with the last few days. | ||
| We had friend lawyers that came in and out that were helping. | ||
| Our bankruptcy lawyers were there. | ||
| They were helping. | ||
| My girlfriend helped me prep the medical expert that I put on, Dr. Lubitz, and really helped us with him getting cross. | ||
| Just the amount of people that were willing and offering all of this stuff. | ||
| During the trial was insane. | ||
| That was the best part. | ||
| Let's juxtapose that with Alex, who had Bobby Barnes. | ||
| And he had some lawyer friend, apparently, who came to the courthouse and didn't know who Adam Lanzo was. | ||
| So he had a brain trust, too. | ||
| He had a lot of help. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Real talk. | ||
| How was the old dude? | ||
| Was the old dude the psychopath I thought he was? | ||
| You're talking about the mentor. | ||
| Ray Knoll's mentor. | ||
| Oh, Joey Mads? | ||
| Joey Mads? | ||
| Joey Mads? | ||
| So, I will say this. | ||
| He didn't talk much. | ||
| He was an ominous presence. | ||
| He was terrifying! | ||
| The times that he spoke with me were two times. | ||
| One, when Neil got off the stand, I waited in the hallway with him while the jurors had their questions, were submitting the questions. | ||
| And he was coming in from the bathroom right before we got started. | ||
| And he looked at me and he said, can I shake your client's hand? | ||
| And I said, yes. | ||
| And he shook his hand and he said, I'm so sorry for all of this. | ||
| And he was anyone about it. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I want to throw him out the window. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know you can't shake my client's hands. | |
| You can't absolve yourself of the bullshit you're carrying around. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| The hand was out. | ||
| But Neil's hand was out already. | ||
| What a good person! | ||
| The second time it happened was Mark and Raynall had just got done with some sort of battle in front of the judge, and it didn't go their way. | ||
| And I went to the bathroom, and he was next to me, and I just looked over, and I looked back, and he goes, man, it's like watching a couple of gladiators go at it in there. | ||
| And I was just like... | ||
| What a psycho! | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| You're insane! | ||
| These were not gladiators! | ||
| There was one gladiator. | ||
| You demanded him unshake Neil's hand. | ||
| He was like, man, a couple of gladiators going at it. | ||
| I was just like, there was one gladiator, and then there was not a gladiator. | ||
| The only interaction... | ||
| You remember when Russell Crowe stabbed Joaquin Phoenix in the throat? | ||
| Yeah, that's what this was. | ||
| The only interaction I had with old Joe was... | ||
| Ray Nolcombe rushing out of the room to get on the phone with Pattis and scream and yell about that. | ||
| You know, Joe was still in the courtroom for a minute after that disclosure of the phone. | ||
| And at this point, they're just running out of the room because they know that texts have been disclosed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| That's what they're about to go talk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what Ryan was about to go talk to Pat Patis about. | |
| But Joe's still standing there. | ||
| And he's kind of standing there in a daze looking at me. | ||
| So I take the opportunity to just turn over to him and I just look him right in the eye. | ||
| And I say, hey, by the way, I should also let you know that within those directories was contained the entire confidential psychiatric medical records of the Lafferty plaintiffs, as well as all of their confidential depositions, which neither you or Mr. Rayna are allowed to have. | ||
| So that seems like another problem that you're probably going to need to tackle immediately. | ||
| I've gone ahead and notified the plaintiff's counsel in Connecticut that this happened. | ||
| I'm just imagining Joe, like, pulling his collar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm seeing the Pink Panther! | |
| Absolutely motionless. | ||
| Just looks at me with Don Knot's eyes. | ||
| I mean, he is just there. | ||
| Don Knot's eyes. | ||
| Yeah, nice visual, isn't that? | ||
| You're coming up with these old references. | ||
| He kind of cracks himself out of it and just hightails it out of the room. | ||
| So I never actually had an interaction. | ||
| If I'm him, I maintain eye contact. | ||
| And just step backwards. | ||
| I slowly go underneath the little pew there. | ||
| Just slide right down and there I am. | ||
| You can't see me anymore. | ||
| I'm invisible. | ||
| While we're talking about other lawyers, I need to touch on this because there was Bobby Barnes on Infowars and he had some choice words about you, Mark. | ||
| He called you a leprechaun. | ||
| Demon! | ||
| Demon leprechaun! | ||
| Yes, but also... | ||
| Which I think is a positive compliment on him. | ||
| He was so confused by the moment where you yelled out, Bobby Barnes, media star! | ||
|
unidentified
|
That threw him. | |
| He was talking about it days after. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| That was fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was coming down into that court and we had just had a really good bit and I come back in there and there he was! | |
| He was just sitting in there. | ||
| And it was because I had just been back just like maybe 30-45 minutes before watching a video with our judge of Barnes giving a simulated opening statement and talking about pedophiles and stuff like this with the judge. | ||
| And I was like, look, at that point I brought it up because I wanted to ask Mr. Raynaud Look, nobody wants a gag order, but now stuff is getting said about the judge. | ||
| Can you get a hold of your client and his slapstick version of a lawyer? | ||
| Can you please do something about that? | ||
| And of course his answer is, no, I can't do anything about that. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I really don't think he could. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think he can. | ||
| I don't actually think that's an unreasonable answer on his part. | ||
| Mark Tarnes listens to No Man. | ||
| So, and I mean, he said, like, I mean, he told me personally, I don't think there's any, he wouldn't have any problem saying this, is that he spoke to Barnes about this. | ||
| Like, he tried, right? | ||
| Like, there's no, he doesn't want this to happen. | ||
| He's certain, Ray Knoll was certainly not pleased when a couple days later, I'm literally playing to the jury. | ||
| Like, video of Barnes talking shit, saying this is all rigged to a script, a literal script. | ||
| There's videos of them calling her a pedophile, judge on fire, all this stuff. | ||
| He doesn't want any of that. | ||
| But there he is. | ||
| Bobby's just sitting in the gallery. | ||
| And I noticed he took off. | ||
| He only stayed that one day. | ||
| Like, he was in Austin the whole time. | ||
| I think it was just for Owen, right? | ||
| I mean, he was there because he's Owen's lawyer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| I think I heard that on InfoWars, but that doesn't mean it's true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe because Pattis is on his way out. | ||
| Because Pattis has been his lawyer for all that stuff, and so I think maybe that's because he's on his way out. | ||
| He was just filling in for a sec. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| He was insisting that you're obsessed with him. | ||
| And that no one has called him Bobby since he was a child. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I think I've pretty routinely called him Bobby. | ||
| Yeah, I think we're pretty... | ||
| I think we're right on top of the bottle. | ||
| We started that, though. | ||
| Bobby Bottle Service. | ||
| Yeah, it came from Bobby Bottle Service. | ||
| That's what you call him. | ||
| Bobby Bottle Service, which is a Nick Kroll skit back in the day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Because Bill loves playing around with people's names. | ||
| And so when we know his name was Robert Barnes when he came, Bill just straight up in depo just started calling him Bob. | ||
| And then it turns out, we were in a depo, I think it was like two, three months after Barnes got out of the case. | ||
| And there's another lawyer there. | ||
| And Bill referred to like... | ||
| Him as Bob Barnes, again, to the witness. | ||
| And the witness was like, are you meaning Robert Barnes? | ||
| Or something like that. | ||
| Does he go by Bob, Robert? | ||
| And one of the lawyers goes, yeah, no, he goes by Bob. | ||
| And Bill's like, damn! | ||
| He loves the play of his name. | ||
| So yeah, Bobby got developed. | ||
| I would say that I am obsessed with him. | ||
| In exactly the same way, I'm obsessed with the few skits from I Think You Should Leave, and then I just cannot stop laughing at them. | ||
| I just watch them over and over and over again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's the coffin flopper of lawyers, right? | |
| Yes, he's the coffin flopper of lawyers. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You think that we're staging this, but he's literally falling out of this coffin every time. | ||
| So apparently the John Oliver skit just aired and Kyle said it was hilarious. | ||
| So we'll have to go back and take a look. | ||
| It was stinging in the background. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Rave reviews. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, already. | |
| We have time. | ||
| Let me just kind of... | ||
| Let me just kind of... | ||
| I'll tease this. | ||
| I don't think things are done. | ||
| I don't think things are done between me and Barnes. | ||
| I think he's going to still keep talking on the show and we're going to see where that leads. | ||
| Yeah, no shit he is. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Yeah, I think he is going to be obsessed and come up with a fun nickname for you now. | ||
| The thing that I just can't get over with is that he is the guy that Alex had to write an affidavit about to a court to say he has messed up everything and please don't punish me because we are getting rid of him and we will never have to hear from him again. | ||
| And then his corporate representative comes in and testifies that they're Thinking about suing him for malpractice. | ||
| And then now, as all the rats scurry from the ship, sort of like a Giuliani situation, he's the last one left. | ||
| There's a sinking ship. | ||
| Everybody knew to get off it. | ||
| There's ten lawyers who all made smart decisions to get out of the case. | ||
| Some voluntarily, some not. | ||
| Like Brad Reeves isn't hosting something on Infowars. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Marco's a little bit of, not an apology, but a little bit of a kind word towards Brad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| I absolutely do. | ||
| I don't know if Brad is listening to that. | ||
| You were fairly nice to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would not say that. | |
| There was no nicety to it, but it was less hostile. | ||
| That might be what I was picking up on. | ||
| Less hostile. | ||
| When I'm a lawyer, I'm every participant on season one of Survivor. | ||
| I'm not here to make friends. | ||
| I'm here to win. | ||
| I don't need any more friends. | ||
| I got friends. | ||
| Point of order. | ||
| I am a survivor historian, and they were not doing that on season one. | ||
| Season one, they did not know what the show was. | ||
| I think we might actually die on this. | ||
| Are they going to let us die? | ||
| Richard won't stop taking his dick out, and Rudy seems to be racist. | ||
| I don't know what's going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're taking me back. | |
| And it's because Rudy keeps taking a nap. | ||
| I don't know, like, what are we doing here? | ||
| Yeah, people saw that first season and they're like, we don't want to make friends with anybody on this fucking show. | ||
| I don't want to make friends with more like the dating shows. | ||
| That was the, like, rock of love. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just want to fuck Brett Michaels. | |
| I don't want to make friends. | ||
| What was that Flavor Flav show? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Same deal. | |
| They are making friends. | ||
| Flavor of Love. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I will say some nice classics. | ||
| Shot of Love. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The double shot when it was the bisexual version. | |
| Yes. | ||
| It was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We should get back to the show. | |
| Wow, these are some digs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going deep in the crate for this one. | |
| You just said Don Knot's eyes earlier. | ||
| That's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That would really be West. | |
| We were supposed to go East. | ||
| I will say that I want to say something nice about Brad because if it wasn't for Brad's forthrightness and honesty as an attorney, we likely would not have discovered some of the other malfeasance that occurred. | ||
| When the shit was hitting the fan on that, Brad Reeves was not about to risk his license for these shenanigans, and he didn't. | ||
| And so I gotta say something nice about him. | ||
| And then he withdrew when it was time to withdrew, when it became apparent to him that any effective representation... | ||
| He could have. | ||
| I said, Brad, get out. | ||
| It's about to get bad. | ||
| And he got one more paycheck. | ||
| One more paycheck. | ||
| I said, you don't want to be a part of this, and he didn't. | ||
| But no, I will say Brad was the only one. | ||
| I mean, he inherited the shit that everybody inherited. | ||
| That was already made. | ||
| And he tried. | ||
| But there was just, with us pressing the way that we were, excuse me, with Mark pressing the way that he was, you know, he couldn't keep up with that, plus go back and try to figure out the mess that was made. | ||
| And finally, he was like, with no client, you know, what appeared to me to be no client helping him or control, he was just like, I'm out. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| See, this gets to another thing about the sort of Raynald dynamic, is that, like, you know, in the same way that Reeves inherited a lot of this, Raynald did as well. | ||
| But he probably was the least lucky of all of them because... | ||
| He was caught holding the hot potato. | ||
| Yeah, and as the lawyers... | ||
| Shit. | ||
| The lawyers progressed and, you know, bad behavior kept happening, you guys... | ||
| We're of the mind that, like, sanctioning the lawyer is maybe something that also should be, as opposed to just sanctioning Alex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that, as my understanding, wasn't really the case with some of the earlier lawyers who behaved poorly. | ||
| And so Raynaud kind of got a little bit of the shaft there. | ||
| And that's because we truly, and I will say this to anybody, our firm, we don't press sanctions against lawyers. | ||
| We just don't. | ||
| Unless. | ||
| The lawyer... | ||
| Unless we can clearly see that the client had nothing to do with this. | ||
| It was purely the lawyer. | ||
| And there's been very few instances of that. | ||
| But yeah, at that point, we were kind of fed up. | ||
| Yeah, that is interesting. | ||
| There weren't that many instances of purely lawyer without... | ||
| Because even some of Raynaud's cross-examination, I really could hear... | ||
| The voice of Alex and Infowars behind it, like, hey, we need to ask these questions because these are the ones that are going to get us on. | ||
| Make sure they know I apologize. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And whenever he started whispering in Raynal's ear in the middle of his... | ||
| That was absurd! | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Mr. Jones, sit down. | ||
| In an emergency hearing. | ||
| To seal a bunch of records that should not have been sent. | ||
| And he's over there just... | ||
| Try telling her she's a pedophile. | ||
| That'll do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not a pedophile, a pedophile. | |
| Be clear. | ||
| So there's some lingering questions that I feel like we can address a little bit more now that the case is over. | ||
| And one of them surrounded my involvement in the deposition when I came down for that. | ||
| One of the questions that we have not really been able to answer was the question of whether or not they recognized me. | ||
| And part of the reason for this was because they didn't until they read the transcripts. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And this was something that I knew that we couldn't talk about, but do you want to explain that a little bit? | ||
| What happened there? | ||
| No, but this was a little bit of drama that I had to sit my lip on. | ||
| And look, we were sneaky about it because we always are. | ||
| We had the ability to bring experts whether testifying or consulting into depositions. | ||
| They have to sign a protective order though. | ||
| And so we had to have to sign a protective order. | ||
| And we brought that. | ||
| With other documents that we were giving to Brad Reeves, and as we were at the start of the deposition, he was just too busy to understand or even care to want to look too closely at it. | ||
| So he's got the acknowledgement of the PO, and he's got some of these other documents. | ||
| He isn't like, okay, now I'm going to start Googling who this Dan Friesen guy is. | ||
| And Brad doesn't know at all. | ||
| He's not plugged into this at all. | ||
| And so it was interesting. | ||
| He's not a monk. | ||
| Terrible idea. | ||
| We gave him a lot of good advice. | ||
| And Jones didn't recognize him either. | ||
| And so, was Randonzo in the room? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think he might have been in the room. | |
| For Alex's, yes. | ||
| Yes, for Alex's he was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| He came on the Saturday. | ||
| You weren't there for that one. | ||
| It scared me. | ||
| Yeah, so Randonzo was in the room too, and he doesn't know. | ||
| Nobody knows who you are in this case. | ||
| So, they just assumed he was a normal, everyday workaday expert in there. | ||
| Albeit, you know, a little bohemian looking. | ||
| Heavily bearded. | ||
| But I cleaned up. | ||
| I got a haircut. | ||
| He's a craft brewery of experts. | ||
| I will admit that we are a very beardy firm, as a law firm's go. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's my wife laughing in the background at that. | ||
| Yeah, so I think he just kind of fit in in a weird way. | ||
| Like, he's just, okay, this guy's just extra beardy. | ||
| Like, that's all that's going on here. | ||
| No red flags go off. | ||
| But when they get the transcript back, on the first page of the transcript is a list of everybody who's present in the deposition. | ||
| So it says Dan Friesen. | ||
| And they were like, well, let's figure out who this guy is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then they Googled you and they were like, what the hell? | |
| And they actually tried to insinuate that this was a violation of the protective order in some way. | ||
| Because, I don't know, I guess. | ||
| It's anti-podcaster bias. | ||
| It's basically like, he's a podcaster! | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's up with that? | |
| Like, it was just very, like, whatever. | ||
| And so we just, you know, like, we didn't even have to, like, this was not something you had to respond to. | ||
| But we did file a briefing, like, with, like, yeah, look at this Times article. | ||
| He's the expert. | ||
| We need him. | ||
| He knows more about Jones than anybody. | ||
| And, like, the entire thing that they were arguing, along with some other stuff, just collapsed in their face during that hearing of Jacqueline Blatt. | ||
| And they eventually pulled the whole motion and, like, sorry, you had to read that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're wrong. | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| They didn't even pursue it. | ||
| But yeah, it wasn't until they found out. | ||
| And they were, yeah, they were steamed about it. | ||
| They did not like that. | ||
| And I think that directive, I mean, look, you don't know if that was a lawyer strategy move to try to do that at that particular time, or if that came down from Jones himself of like, goddamn podcaster, I can't believe they put him in the room. | ||
| You know, like, I don't know what it was, but they weren't happy about it. | ||
| But it's a piece of information that I've long wanted to add to the Alex knows damn well who we are pile. | ||
| You know, it is that like... | ||
| It's something that went through court processes of recognizing who we are. | ||
| You know who we are according to the law! | ||
| Yeah, it's something that I've long wanted to... | ||
| It's a public record now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, we should get you a copy of that brief. | |
| Yeah, I was going to say, we're going to hang that up on the wall. | ||
| That goes in the podcast studio. | ||
| You can put that on your KnowledgeFive business cards and letterhead. | ||
| Also consulting experts. | ||
| I'm a consultant for things. | ||
| Mentioned in a brief. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm wet-versed in bird laws. | |
| So one of the other things I wanted to touch on and get to is the protractedness of the case. | ||
| It's all frustration. | ||
| Constant roadblocks and everything. | ||
| And then we get to the case. | ||
| And I don't know what your experience was like. | ||
| This is what I kind of want to know a little bit more about. | ||
| Even in the process of the trial, There was a sense of pretending that it wasn't a damages hearing and that it was actually an innocence or guilt kind of trial. | ||
| Did that feel like an extension of all of the bullshit coming into the trial itself? | ||
| How did you guys deal with that? | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| I don't know if you're saying that it felt that way from the defense, for example, because they kept pushing that sort of issue on liability. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| That's what I meant. | ||
| That was semi-invited by us in a way, because by the way we were going to put on the punitive case, we were kind of making it about all of that again. | ||
| We did a lot of heavy focus on just how bad their conduct was, because that's what determines the amount of punitive damages, is how bad they were. | ||
| So the exact same evidence that we would have shown to show that they were liable, with some rare exceptions of some things we didn't have to prove by prima facie evidence, like whether they published it or shit like that, all that other evidence would have been the same. | ||
| In a regular trial, if this default hadn't happened, that trial would look largely the same. | ||
| And so, because we were the ones who cast it as that, because obviously, you want to... | ||
| Front load these punitive damages. | ||
| You want that to be the thing you want the jury to be thinking about so that whatever your compensatories are, you get a boost on them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the thing. | |
| Again, even more importantly to consider, five years they have pushed this back, pushed this back, and at any point in time, if they had just said, fuck it, we quit. | ||
| You win. | ||
| We'll pay what we need to pay. | ||
| Text messages don't come out. | ||
| I don't understand how big a deal it is that they really shot themselves in the foot. | ||
| About as hard as you can. | ||
| They're going to end up with this judgment that we have. | ||
| I'll tell you, these plaintiffs early on, if they had just brought the suit and Jones had come to them with an amount of money below this verdict and had done a sincere apology and pledged never to say Sandy Hook again, I think they would have taken it back in 2018. | ||
| I would have told them to. | ||
| Yeah, we would have told them to. | ||
| As opposed to, like, later on, these kind of for show kind of offers of a settlement, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| It's the only thing that ever became official in terms of settlement offer is that they wanted to give them $500,000 apiece. | ||
| $500,000 apiece. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| And that's, like, with attorney's fees cut off of it and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| And that was so easy to turn down. | ||
| And then we ultimately collected more than that. | ||
| After they made the settlement, just out of sanctions. | ||
| We just took it. | ||
| And so I told them that at the time when they were offering me that. | ||
| I'm like, you're paying me with my own coin. | ||
| I'm going to take that in way more. | ||
| Don't even think that you're hiding that kind of thing from me. | ||
| And that was at a time which I wasn't even sure we were going to collect much more than those sanctions. | ||
| Infowars might be a total empty shell. | ||
| But now we know. | ||
| Infowars LLC is, for sure. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Apparently, now they own the IP. | ||
| Yeah, now apparently they own the intellectual property. | ||
| I mean, look, you could look at our briefing about the bad faith of the bankruptcy and why we're seeking sanctions against some of those attorneys. | ||
| It's because throughout that suit, they told us InfoWars LLC has absolutely nothing. | ||
| There's nothing there. | ||
| There's no assets, no anything. | ||
| And then we non-suit them, right? | ||
| And then we find out later from the schedules, oh no, they own the intellectual property for InfoWars. | ||
| Well, do they believe that intellectual property is worthless? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That would be an interesting argument. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| Who would pay for it? | ||
| I would. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd take it. | |
| I'd take it. | ||
| My clients would take it 100%. | ||
| And I'm not joking. | ||
| If you were to shut down Infowars as an existence and take it from Jones, and Jones can never use the word Infowars at all, you could launch a new website called Infowars that is legit independent media criticism that does it really well and really right, and the novelty of relaunching Infowars that has been stolen from Jones and relaunched as a good thing. | ||
| Write that down. | ||
| If you're describing the absolute most movie-ass dumb plot that we could possibly... | ||
| We end up owning InfoWars.com. | ||
| If we suddenly just walk into the InfoWars studio, the movie cuts out. | ||
| That's the end of the movie, right? | ||
| We're InfoWars now. | ||
| We have to talk seriously about this because we have some friends on the Cognitive Dissonance podcast. | ||
| And we've had long discussions about how we need that desk. | ||
| We need Alex's desk. | ||
| Sorry, guys. | ||
| I already called dibs. | ||
| I want people to walk into my room, into my office, and see that waving flag in the fucking wind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I called that and the document camera. | |
| That was the only two things I wanted was the desk and the document camera. | ||
| Put it up on the cam. | ||
| I will challenge you to a game of poker for the desk. | ||
| When we were thinking we were going to start seizing assets, I was like, the desk is mine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everybody's like, oh, it's very specific. | |
| In honesty, I want that desk, but in reality, I don't know if it would fit in here. | ||
| No, we wouldn't be able to get it in here. | ||
| It would be a Pyrrhic victory for me to get the desk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It would fit, but we'd have to remove the windows and winch it in. | |
| Fine. | ||
| I want the skull that he puts on the desk every now and again. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Personally, me, I want all of his guns, and I'm giving them to the homeless. | ||
| Please don't ask him to expand on that. | ||
| We have a charity that we're thinking about doing. | ||
| Second Amendment saviors. | ||
| Legally, that is the opinion of the lawyer. | ||
| Raising money to let... | ||
| Homeless people exercise their Second Amendment. | ||
| Yeah, just go to downtown Houston and start handing out ARs to homeless people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And when you get confronted about, this is not okay, this is dangerous. | |
| Oh, wait, now you're for background checks? | ||
| Now you're like, when suddenly, you get all these businessmen, conservative, pro-gun guys, you can't be given guns. | ||
| Certain people should have guns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Weird how it works. | |
| The Bastille can have guns. | ||
| Is that what you're telling me? | ||
| I think everybody can agree if you don't have a place to live stably, you might not need a Barrett 40 cal cannon. | ||
| I think everybody can also agree if you don't have a place to stay and you have a Barrett, then you can get a place to stay pretty quick. | ||
| You have squatters rights. | ||
| At this point, I do need to interject that these views that Mark Bankson is expressing are not the views of Farrah and Ball Peas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| I got to do my long disclaimer. | ||
| Who are we speaking for exactly? | ||
| This ends up with Robbie Barnes yelling about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This guy is legit trying to start a revolution! | |
| It's a revolution! | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a leprechaun on meth and he's trying to start a revolution! | |
| He mentioned the best deal! | ||
|
unidentified
|
What more do we have to know? | |
| It's so clear. | ||
| Another thing that kind of went over, including our heads in that moment, is Daria on the stand brought up Fast and Furious. | ||
| The movie. | ||
| However, no, Fast and Furious, the CIA gun running through Eric Holder. | ||
| And it was on Friday, and I was driving back to Houston because I went home to see my son for the weekend. | ||
| And I called Mark and I was like, Eric Holder. | ||
| Ran Fast and Furious, he also appointed Raynaud to the Department of Justice, I think in Laredo. | ||
| I was like, was that the same time period? | ||
| And I was like, why did we not think of this on the stand? | ||
| Do you know that your lawyer was involved? | ||
| Just to turn around and be like, excuse me, hey, Raynaud, what time did you work for Eric Holder? | ||
| Let's just establish that. | ||
| In the moment, there was just so much other nonsense being thrown around. | ||
| And it would be too hard to pull up a Wikipedia article on it for her. | ||
| Man, I think that they made a bit of miscalculation allowing her to, first of all, be the corporate representative and then testify, because I think that exposed her to more of the world, and I don't think that image was good. | ||
| No. | ||
| They didn't have a choice. | ||
| Mark's opinion. | ||
| Yeah, that's the way. | ||
| It was a total choice. | ||
| I subpoenaed her. | ||
| It was a choice to appoint her as the corporate representative. | ||
| Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have had her on the radar or the deposition. | ||
| I subpoenaed Do, Robert Do, to trial as well, and they suddenly claimed, oh, we don't control him anymore. | ||
| He's not an employee no more. | ||
| We don't control him. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| The other day, Alex was trying to get that clip from Idiocracy, and he said Do has it on his computer. | ||
| Now, I don't know if that means he still works there or anything. | ||
| Yeah, I think he's working from home is what's going on. | ||
| He testified he's still doing some contracting for them. | ||
| We have a theory that he's... | ||
| We have a theory that he's been dead for like a month. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I definitely know because he played a bunch of games with my process server and set him up to meet him somewhere and then disappeared and like took off out of, you know, I went on the trip kind of thing. | ||
| I was waiting for you to say, because I can see Bill's got a gamer. | ||
| I was waiting for you to be like, he was playing a few games of Call of Duty with Bill the other night. | ||
| That would be amazing. | ||
| That would be the ultimate. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| They said they didn't control him, and this was back in March, and then a few days later, they had him sign as 100% equity holder of Infowars LLC, sign a bunch of bankruptcy documents. | ||
| I'm like, this is bad, so that's another thing that our notion's about. | ||
| But it was weird that I thought each of the Infowars witnesses had their own weird vibe at trial, that the first one with Daria was like, that had the theme of the style and rhetoric of a CIA black site interrogation. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Owens had the theme of a father who is finally done with his dumb frat boy son's shit and just has caught him for the last time on everything. | ||
| And then the Jones thing was just on another planet. | ||
| People keep comparing it to... | ||
| Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney, the video game with the lawyers, and they do the sound effects to it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Objection! | |
| Very much Ace Attorney shit. | ||
| I mean, it was like a law and order, but all of them had all these weirdly different vibes to them. | ||
| But to me, I still go back to that Daria one, and she puts a shiver down my spine. | ||
| I don't know too much about her, but her reactions to some of these questions emotionally really bothered me. | ||
| I think she really set the tone for the trial. | ||
| That moment at the end of her testimony, whenever she's trapped fully in either a yes or no, I'm a psycho or not question. | ||
| Even the question doesn't really matter because it really boils down to, are you willing to say this? | ||
| Do you have it in you? | ||
| And then she tried not to. | ||
| I swear. | ||
| She tried to mumble and then finally she was just like... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you're like, I can't believe you. | ||
| I really can't believe you're a person. | ||
| Like, it's crazy. | ||
| Beyond Scarlett's testimony, the thing of this whole experience, being in the room for the Super Bowl picture questioning in the deposition itself will live on in my memory as one of the more visceral things that I've felt. | ||
| Like, it was... | ||
| I don't know how we kept it together in the room. | ||
| Just like the gasp that I almost let out of that. | ||
| You're sitting by on the side, so you're having to process it emotionally. | ||
| Me in the moment, I am conflicted by two emotions. | ||
| One, absolute revulsion and anger at her, but that is so tempered and put to the back seat by the fact that I know that I have just accomplished something phenomenal for my clients. | ||
| I have just put them this much closer to what they need to accomplish. | ||
| You can't do a fist pump. | ||
| In front of her face. | ||
| You can't be like, boom! | ||
| I nailed you! | ||
| For me, it was the disgust and all that, but also just the surprise of like, that is where your mind went. | ||
| It seems like that's something you might say if you're trying to come up with an excuse. | ||
| But you would stop yourself. | ||
| Yeah, you'd be like, there's no way I can get away with that. | ||
| I can't get away with this. | ||
| This is too much. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| And I just think about all the people worldwide who saw that Super Bowl picture for the first time in trial. | ||
| That was the goal with Daria, is to get you to understand this wasn't just him saying Sandy Hook was fake a few times. | ||
|
unidentified
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This was something much more deep and sinister and so revolting. | |
| That's such an important point. | ||
| The notion that he got something wrong and he said a few things is so false. | ||
| Based on the information that's presented, if people care to take the time to look at it, There is a conscious negligence. | ||
| There is a willingness to platform and fundraise for people who are acting maliciously and harassing these people. | ||
| There's so much more than just like, hey, he whiffed on this story or whatever. | ||
| And that's something that I think more people need to recognize. | ||
| We were asked kind of an interesting question today. | ||
| Stelter! | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Ultimately, it boiled down to, like, you guys have done 710 episodes. | ||
| How can we, like, learn anything about this? | ||
| And it's like, we're on here for six minutes. | ||
| If we were able to explain anything to you, then why would we do 710 fucking episodes of a show? | ||
| What kind of absurd idea is that we'll have anything to say of any value to you in this point? | ||
| That's almost a repudiation of everything we've ever done. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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100%. | |
| Also, a little dirty for Stelter to put our business on the streets. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Telling his audience that we put out 700 episodes. | ||
| That's embarrassing. | ||
| That's not a happy moment. | ||
| Yeah, that's not a proud we did at all. | ||
| My parents are watching. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Get somebody's daughter. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| So what other thoughts do y 'all have before we wrap this up? | ||
| I want to get your perspectives on just like, what are your takeaways? | ||
| That you want to make sure people know? | ||
| What are your thoughts? | ||
|
unidentified
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Go ahead. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| The first time that you have been polite towards each other, like, no, you go ahead. | ||
| Usually it's like, shut up! | ||
| The one thing I will say is that when you go through trial, you get close to your clients. | ||
| You don't have a choice. | ||
| You're with them every day and you talk with them and that's where you get to really appreciate them as people. | ||
| And the more and more that I met Neil and Scarlett, you know, at times I would, you know, at times you get frustrated for certain things that I'm not going to, you know, nothing bad, but just to kind of... | ||
| No, of course. | ||
| Some of the surrounding circumstances that were going on outside of us in the case that were going on during the trial. | ||
| But I will say that they, it was, there's a... | ||
| A surrealness feeling whenever they both took the stand and they told their stories in completely separate ways. | ||
| And I think when that happened, you know, it didn't happen until day five. | ||
| And so everybody had heard this ridiculousness and craziness and there was all these moments of just witnesses getting bloodied over and over again. | ||
| And then all of a sudden they took the stand and the mood shifted a little bit. | ||
| And even for me, and I know for, I think, all of us. | ||
| We talked about it more. | ||
| When that moment hit, it kind of got me back on track of like, let's go light this thing up for real. | ||
| As fun as those moments can be professionally, when you hear from the person that you represent how it actually affects them, it empowers you to really put your foot down on the throttle. | ||
| You can see that that's kind of what happened. | ||
| After that, it was just like a bunch of surgeons in an operating room just cutting things down, and then it all kind of got put back together. | ||
| There's something that's so kind of bizarre to me, and I have a perception of lawyers in general that isn't... | ||
| It's not entirely favorable, but there is something about... | ||
|
unidentified
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Me too, buddy. | |
| Me too. | ||
| I hate lawyers. | ||
| You guys, I've met you, I've spent time with you, and it seems like you have such an ability or a willingness to connect with your clients, be it the Scarlett Neal or Marcel. | ||
| There's a care that you have about your clients themselves outside of the context of it being your client and the case, the sort of cut-and-dry nature of the case. | ||
| And it's one of the things that... | ||
| Particularly offends me, I guess. | ||
| Maybe it's me taking something personally that I don't need to, but about when Alex describes you guys as like ambulance chasers and this, to know how much you all do actually care, it adds an extra layer to that that I think is so undeserved and, I mean, obviously... | ||
| It's not all about you guys, but there is an angle of that that sucks. | ||
| Yeah, you were talking about how nice our fans have been to you and all of that stuff. | ||
| And I will tell you this. | ||
| They are not nice because you're good. | ||
| If you weren't worth being nice to, our fans are very, very good at discerning whether or not to say, who gives a shit about these guys? | ||
| So you earned that. | ||
| But yeah, Mark and I don't like other attorneys. | ||
| We hate other plaintiffs' attorneys because there's a personality. | ||
| Your view on us isn't necessarily a wrong one. | ||
| I would say that we're in the minority, but it's not as small of a minority as you'd think. | ||
| There are a lot of... | ||
| Plaintiff's attorneys that do personal injury work out there that truly do do it for the right reasons and in the right ways. | ||
| You just hear about the bad stuff. | ||
| It's overshadowed by some attorneys that have pushed certain limits that they shouldn't have or done things that they shouldn't have. | ||
| That's always going to happen in any profession. | ||
| When you guys have Wes and Kyle on, they'll tell you. | ||
| They have decades worth of stories before I do. | ||
| They have clients years and years later that are quadriplegics that'll still text them and they check up on them and they keep up to them because you do care. | ||
| It's hard not to. | ||
| It's rare that you're going to go do a case where somebody got rear-ended in a school zone and has $30 worth of chiropractic and you're going to take it to trial. | ||
| Those are the trials we do. | ||
| So if we're trying the case, it's significant. | ||
| And because of that, we try hard not to get too emotionally invested. | ||
| Because it'll mess with our performance on how we do our job. | ||
| But at the end of the day, it's impossible not to care about these people because there's been very few people, if any, I can't think of any off the top of my head that deserved what happened to them. | ||
| So, you know, take that for what it's worth. | ||
| I'll say that I hope that what we did, you know, you heard Reynold attack us as plaintiff's lawyers, personal injury lawyers during the trial. | ||
| And I hope that for the people who do do it well, we have hopefully helped that reputation. | ||
| Because Bill's right that a lot of people in the profession invited to them themselves don't even treat their clients adversarial. | ||
| They're another person they're trying to get money from. | ||
| It's sick. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are you talking about Barnes? | |
| I mean, Barnes has done a little plaintiff's work himself, so I don't know how he does with his plaintiffs, but I know there are some who just do mercenary. | ||
| They're on all sides of the aisle. | ||
| But I've always said, clients have never paid me up front in any case I've ever done. | ||
| I've always taken money from some bad person or evil corporation and given it to them. | ||
| Growing up, I wanted to be either Robin Hood or Blackbeard, and I got to be in both. | ||
| That's really what I do, is I feel like I'm both of those things. | ||
| And it's been really rewarding to have all of the accolades, all of the stuff. | ||
| I'm not going to lie, it's been good. | ||
| It's been really nice. | ||
| And I was getting a lot of that before I got home. | ||
| And then I got home, and I walked in the door, and my son Ben comes up to me, and he's getting close to eight now. | ||
| When I first took these cases, he was six. | ||
| And he was, you know, the same age as these kids when they died. | ||
| And he was born on the same day as Noah Posner. | ||
| His first birthday is Noah's first birthday that he wasn't around. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was in 2013, the first birthday Noah had that he wasn't around. | |
| And Ben has a little duck that Scarlett gave him that has the Jesse Lewis Choose Love on his t-shirt. | ||
| And that's his Jesse duck. | ||
| And he loves that little Jesse duck like he wouldn't believe. | ||
| And he knows a little bit. | ||
| He knows enough now about what happened to understand what I'm up there doing. | ||
| That this horrible thing happened to these parents and they lost their little boy. | ||
| And there's a man who's just being awful to them and just tormenting them. | ||
| He understands that. | ||
| And when I came through the door, he just came bounding up to me. | ||
| And a look of just pleasure in his eyes of, Daddy's back from his trial. | ||
| Daddy's back from his trial. | ||
| Grab me around. | ||
| And every damn thing from these last two weeks melted off of me like snow in an oven. | ||
| Just came all off of me. | ||
| And everything I was thinking about, all these outside influences, and just the focus of that little boy hugging me, it broke me. | ||
| I had a night where I just stopped for a minute and thought about where all this led. | ||
| And that was more important to me than any of the things people were saying about me. | ||
| But I could feel proud of myself to him. | ||
| If I had to come home head in shame and say I couldn't help these people, man, that would have been tough. | ||
| So, given this moment to the world where they all got this, where Jones got his teeth kicked in in the middle of a courtroom, I love it. | ||
| I'm so happy that people will have that for years to come to make memes of, right? | ||
| Like, all of that. | ||
| But for me, it was my son. | ||
| If Law& Order Trial by Jury was still on, they'd do an episode where they had you, you know? | ||
| One of the writers for Law& Order did a tweet that was like... | ||
| If I would have written a script based on what's going on in the Alex Jones trial, I would have immediately been fired from that conference room because there's no fucking way that was ever going to happen in real life. | ||
| Just hacky stuff. | ||
| Just total hack stuff. | ||
| No, that's the type of stuff that only happens in real life. | ||
| Well, to quote Alex, truth is stranger than fiction. | ||
| He got bit by his own catchphrase. | ||
| I'll tell everybody out there listening, you saw during that cross that we have a flair for the dramatic. | ||
| We want to make this like a movie. | ||
| We want to do this. | ||
| We want to give you that story. | ||
| We want, because we know the power that it has to counteract him. | ||
| And I'll just tell you, we got sequels coming up. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's going to be good. | |
| Well, I think that's a great place to end it, honestly. | ||
| Yeah, but before we do, I think that to be clear, you're not using this, like, theatricality and narrative stuff in any dishonest way. | ||
| And I honestly think that it's one of the reasons that it's potent against Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| That's one of his big tools, is using things that are dishonest and manipulative. | ||
| In a theatrical, narrative-based way. | ||
| And it's so powerful against him to use things that are real and truthful in the same way. | ||
| There's no magical realism where we're coming from. | ||
| This isn't his universe. | ||
| This is about the potency of a true American story. | ||
| It's not magical realism, but he may be facing a hundred years of solitude. | ||
|
unidentified
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That is fair. | |
| That's the only magical realism. | ||
| I was going to say, that's crazy. | ||
| That's what you got. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I read it in college. | |
| I don't remember anything. | ||
| Obscure. | ||
| But yeah, with that said, I am checking out from social media. | ||
| News media, everything for a few days. | ||
| Leaving now. | ||
| My sugar mom has taken me on a trip for my birthday. | ||
| I'm going to decompress a little bit more and get away from all the noise. | ||
| You're going on a trip yourself. | ||
| Mark now gets to do all of that while I'm decompressing because he's the one that everybody wants to talk to. | ||
| He brought it on himself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, I'll tell you. | |
| Your audience, and it may be old by this time and this airs, or I don't know when you're going to put this out or whatever. | ||
| Tomorrow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, tomorrow. | |
| Okay, so if it comes out tomorrow, guys. | ||
| If y 'all put this on tomorrow, I got corporate media invites. | ||
| I'm probably going to be doing some of them. | ||
| But tomorrow night, Monday night, check out The Young Turks. | ||
| I'm going to do my first appearance talking about some of this on video with Young Turks talking to Anna. | ||
| Fun shit. | ||
| Hell yeah, man. | ||
| I'm sure that our wonks are very enterprising people, and I'm sure every single appearance you make, someone will make a post about it. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| It is true. | ||
| People will get amped. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But thank you guys so much for taking time in this immediate aftermath to talk with us. | ||
| It means a lot. | ||
| You're the number one legal podcast in the country now, so how can you not stop by and check it out, right? | ||
| Have we beat Viva Fry? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I saw that dude poke his head in the courtroom just very briefly. | |
| It's going to be a problem for them, some of the stuff that happened on that show. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| Anything that Barnes has touched, I imagine, will have some problems in the near future. | ||
| But yeah, I guess, I don't know, you have anything to plug? | ||
| Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation? | ||
| Honor Network and the Choose Love movement. | ||
| And those two things are... | ||
| They're both doing really good stuff for moving forward. | ||
| One on misinformation and one on just teaching kids how to stop hating each other. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Well, Bill, enjoy your trip. | ||
| I hope you get all the sun and relaxation you deserve. | ||
| And Mark, enjoy. | ||
| The Young Turks. | ||
| Whoever else knocks down your door. | ||
| Just being all famous over there. | ||
| Well, we'll talk soon, and I'm sure in the lead-up to the Posner trial, if the bankruptcy doesn't all derail everything completely, we'll have some debriefing to do there. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| All right, fellas, you have a great night. | ||
| All right, guys, take care. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |