InfoWars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is currently engaged in a legal battle with his ex-wife, Kelly, over who should get custody of the three children they have together. Though Alex Jones has been famous (or infamous) for the better part of two decades now, Kelly Jones has mostly stayed out of the news before the child-custody battle. (Indeed, confirmed photographs of her cannot even be found.) Here’s five things you need to know about Kelly Jones:
1. She Says Alex’s Conspiracy-Ranting Persona is Genuine
Alex Jones is best-known as a conspiracy theorist who has claimed that almost every terrorist attack or mass shooting in the past couple of decades was actually orchestrated by the U.S. government for nefarious reasons. A partial listing of such Jonesian claims includes: the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida was a “false flag terror attack”; the 2012 mass murder of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut was “synthetic, completely fake, with actors”; the series of tornadoes that devastated parts of Oklahoma in 2013 happened because “of course there’s weather weapon stuff going on—we had floods in Texas like 15 years ago, killed 30-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force”; the attacks on the Islamic Cultural Centre in Quebec City earlier this year, as well as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings, were both “false flags”; the 2015 mass murder at a church in Charleston, South Carolina was a government plot intended to discredit conservatives; and, of course, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a false-flag inside job.
At a pretrial hearing last week, Alex Jones’ attorney Randall Wilhite told District Judge Orlinda Naranjo that his client’s public persona as a conspiracy theorist should not viewed as evidence of what Jones is actually like because, according to Wilhite, Jones is merely “playing a character. He’s a performance artist.”
But Kelly Jones says that the angry conspiracy theorist of InfoWars is the real Alex Jones. According to the Austin American-Statesman, Kelly Jones testified at that pretrial hearing that her ex-husband is “not a stable person …. He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck. He wants J-Lo to get raped. … He broadcasts from home. The children are there, watching him broadcast.”
2. She’s Long Been the Target of Anti-Semitic Vitriol
Long before she and Alex divorced – let alone fought for custody of their children – Kelly Jones has inspired online rage among those who insist that Jewish people are inherently evil.
For example: in March 2013, Alex Jones posted a brief video to InfoWars showing the poisonous “giant Texas red-headed centipede” he’d found in his bathroom one morning. Anybody living in Texas or any other Deep South state knows that the warmer parts of the United States play host to a wide variety of large, nasty bugs – and Jones himself did not blame his multi-legged visitor on any shadowy conspiracy groups, though when he posted the video to InfoWars, he did include the snarky caption “To [sic] bad the Toilet Safety Agency (TSA) was not there to protect Alex and his family.”
Yet the anti-Semitic website Corruptico (link goes to an archive) watched the video and concluded that Kelly Jones planted the centipede in order to kill her husband and make it look like an accident. “Alex’s Jewish wife is sinisterly trying to kill him by making it look ‘natural.’ … If Alex foolishly continues to do reports regarding the discovery of potentially killer centipedes in his home as a normal course of Texas living, we will all become immune to the dangers being imposed on his life… until the night his Jewish wife gets it ‘right.’”
More recently, when the Austin American-Statesman reported some of Kelly Jones’ testimony in her child-custody battle, the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer (archive link) sneered that it was “just another Jew lie from the Jew wife.”
3. Alex Jones’ Attorneys Claim She is Emotionally Unstable
With Kelly Jones testifying that Alex Jones’ unstable InfoWars persona is the real deal, it is perhaps not surprising that Alex Jones’ attorneys made the opposite argument: Alex is a good parent, while Kelly has emotional problems making her an unfit mother.
The Austin American-Statesman reported on April 18 that during the day’s trial proceedings, Alex Jones’ attorney David Minton argued that his client did not display his InfoWars persona in front of his children. Minton also said that the Jones’ 2015 divorce settlement established that Alex would be the children’s primary parent with Kelly Jones allowed limited supervised visitation. Minton also said that Kelly Jones could have earned more time with her children, except her unstable behavior did not justify this.
However, Kelly Jones’ attorney Bobby Newman countered that his client is a devoted mother whose emotional episodes were merely a consequence of dealing with Alex’s attempts to drive a wedge between her and her children.
Charlie Warzel, a BuzzFeed technology reporter live-tweeting from the trial, said that Trey Gilbert, a former mental health counselor for Kelly Jones, testified that during an April 2015 session, Kelly claimed that Alex “was verbally, emotionally and sexually abusive” to her, and that Gilbert believed that she was telling the truth, based on her composure, behavior and other factors.
4. The Judge Imposed A Gag Order on Both Litigants in the Custody Trial
Though the media has been covering the Jones v. Jones custody trial, Alex and Kelly Jones, along with their respective attorneys, are forbidden from making public comments because the judge imposed a gag order on all parties.
After news first broke that Alex Jones’ own attorney claimed he was merely a “performance artist” on InfoWars, Jones made and released two videos – one recorded in his car as he drove to court that morning, then a more formal one made on the InfoWars set and released that night – obliquely addressing his lawyer’s claims. The morning video, which Jones released on his Facebook page and later took down (but not before RightWingWatch captured and saved a copy) showed Jones insisting he’s not a fake: “I am completely real and everybody knows it.”
In the evening video released on InfoWars, Jones argued it was the media (as opposed to his own hired legal team) claiming that Jones’ InfoWars persona is a fake. “They play these semantical lawyer games, ladies and gentlemen. It’s ridiculous.” Jones neglected to mention that the media reports of such claims were merely quoting what his own attorney argued in court.
According to the Austin American-Statesman, Kelly Jones’ attorney Robert Hoffman argued in court that Jones’ remarks on those videos seemed like a violation of the gag order the judge imposed on the case.
That said: Alex Jones’ attorney Randall Wilhite had already accused Kelly Jones of violating the gag order by allegedly spending Easter Sunday on the phone with reporters.
The American-Statesman reports that Judge Naranjo intends to look at cellphone records for Alex and Kelly Jones to search for possible gag-order violations.
5. Kelly Jones’ Monthly Alimony is $43,000
Robert Hoffman, lead counsel for Kelly Jones’ legal team, argued at a pretrial hearing that Alex Jones’ legal team was deliberately dragging out the proceedings in hope of driving Kelly Jones into bankruptcy. “They’d like to drag it out for two years, and she’ll be crushed and she’ll be bankrupt,” Hoffman said, according to the American-Statesman.
Though Kelly Jones currently receives $43,000 per month in alimony from Alex, Hoffman said she already owes his firm about $200,000 in legal costs for their work in the custody trial.
However, Judge Naranjo rejected a motion from Kelly Jones’ lawyers requesting more money from Alex. The American-Statesman quoted Naranjo as saying that the average juror is “not going to believe the amount of money that has been spent on this [trial] …. This case is not about Infowars. But, for some reason, this family has done very well. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be five lawyers on one side of the table and three over here, because of the business this family is in.”
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