Alex Jones sent nude photo of wife to Roger Stone, Sandy Hook lawyer reveals

Lawyers for the notorious American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones accidentally gave his legal adversaries a nude photo of his wife that he had texted to the conservative political operative Roger Stone, an attorney involved in the matter has acknowledged.

The seemingly farcical – but entirely true – development was the latest bit of fallout since one of the attorneys for a family suing Jones for defamation revealed last week that Jones’s own lawyer had inadvertently handed over numerous text messages belonging to the far-right provocateur and then failed to take steps to keep them out of court.

The lawyer, Mark Bankston, the recipient of the accidental leak, appeared on Monday on the Young Turks progressive news commentary show to confirm that one of the texts in question contained a naked photo of Jones’s wife sent to Stone, once an adviser to former president Donald Trump.

Bankston also expressed concern about whether Jones had obtained permission from his wife, Erika Wulff Jones, to send that photo to Stone or anyone else.

“I don’t know if that was consensual,” said Bankston, who recently won a nearly $50m judgment against Jones for the family of a six-year-old boy killed during the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which for years Jones falsely claimed was a hoax aimed at forcing nationwide gun control reform.

“And if it wasn’t consensual, Mrs Wulff Jones should know about that, and there might be something that needs to be done about that.”

Bankston conceded the possibility that “it could be totally consensual”. But, noting that some states criminalize the nonconsensual disclosure of intimate photos, he added: “I don’t see any indication that it was [consensual]. I’m concerned something might not be on the up and up with that.”

"That intimate photo was sent to Roger Stone and I don't know if that was consensual," Mark Bankston reveals an intimate photo of Alex Jones' wife was found in his phone and that it was sent to #RogerStone #tytlive pic.twitter.com/JCFLqljotr — The Young Turks (@TheYoungTurks) August 9, 2022

Before Bankston’s remarks on Monday, Jones had gone on a tirade about the leak on his rightwing conspiratorial online radio show Infowars, saying those suing him now had a nude photo of his wife. He stopped short of saying that he had sent it to Stone, who received a pardon from Trump after federal authorities investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election charged him.

Bankston, too, had previously said there were “intimate messages” from Jones among the texts that the Infowars host’s lawyer inadvertently provided. But it wasn’t until after Jones’s ranting that Bankston elaborated on what exactly those intimate messages entailed.

Neither Jones, his attorney nor Stone could immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.

A jury in Jones’s home town of Austin, Texas, recently ordered him to pay $49.3m in compensatory and punitive damages to the parents of the Sandy Hook student Jesse Lewis, who was among the 20 children and six staffers killed during the mass shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Jones has promised to pursue an appeal that could reduce that award drastically. Nonetheless, the decision marked a victory for Sandy Hook families, who have said the Infowars host’s lies about the massacre inspired threats and harassment from his rabid following and made it impossible for them to heal. And it was a substantial rebuke of Jones, who faces two similar lawsuits from other Sandy Hook families despite his media company’s attempts to shield itself by recently requesting federal bankruptcy protections.

02:04 'Your attorneys messed up': how Alex Jones's texts were sent to Sandy Hook family's lawyers – video

The accidental leak of Jones’s texts by his own legal team was one of the most memorable episodes in the trial pitting him against Jesse Lewis’s parents, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis. The texts were relevant because they contained ones that contradicted claims he made under oath that he had nothing on his cellphone pertaining to the Sandy Hook murders.

Bankston alerted Jones’s team to the accidental leak, but it did not take steps to seal them out of court as privileged.

The congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol moved quickly to ask Bankston to turn over those texts, interested in seeing what kind of contacts Trump’s team may have had with one of the ex-president’s most prominent supporters. Earlier in the committee’s investigation, Jones underwent a deposition, but he invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination throughout the proceeding.

Bankston has said most of those texts were from the middle of 2020, several months before the Capitol attack in early 2021.