Sandy Hook, page 25
Welch scrambled atop a storage unit and peered over the closet’s red-painted plywood walls, finding no one, and no basement entrance. Welch abandoned his search. He laid the rifle, handgun, and knife on beer kegs and a table across from the closet, walked back through the dining room and out the front door, surrendering to police, who made him lie star-fished in the center of Connecticut Avenue, one of Washington’s busiest thoroughfares.
Business owners and workers along a two-block strip of Connecticut Avenue were locked down inside their establishments for an hour. Alefantis joined his staff, who had been evacuated to a firehouse a block away. They waited for several hours while police cleared the scene and interviewed Comet staff, one by one.
It was late at night by the time Alefantis was allowed to reenter Comet. He stood in the center of the dining room. “The pizzas were in the kitchen window, food was half-eaten, beers half-full, but all the people were gone,” Alefantis said. “At that moment I imagined what it could have looked like—instead of it being an empty room, it being a bloody, horrific scene.”
The next day, customers called constantly, wanting to return to show their support. Comet’s young staff urged Alefantis to reopen right away. “In my gut, I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m scared and this doesn’t seem worth it,’ ” Alefantis told me.
They said they were scared, too. But they felt a responsibility to the community and an obligation to the truth, Alefantis said they told him.
The restaurant reopened two days after the gunman’s visit, on Tuesday, December 6. A private security guard stood outside the entrance, and Metropolitan Police squad cars sat in front and in back. Scores of news cameras lined the sidewalk in front, and the queue of customers snaked down the street. “I’m at the front door saying, ‘Welcome, c’mon in,’ and I’m thinking, ‘This is so fucked up and I can’t trust anyone,’ ” Alefantis recalled. He spotted one of his dearest friends in the line, smiling, her three little girls in tow.
He teared up at the memory of it. “I’m thinking, ‘Please don’t come in here, and don’t bring your children in here, because it is not safe.’ And it turns out when we spoke months and months later, she was thinking the exact same thing,” he said. But she said her girls wanted to go. Comet was their favorite place.
“There was this element of extreme disappointment. And the incentive to not ruin everything we’ve worked for,” Alefantis told me. “One of my missions in Comet was that it would be this place where people go there every week, and when you grew up, you’d say, ‘There’s this pizza place I would go in Washington where I lived, and we would play ping-pong. And my dad was always so happy.’ Sort of joyous family moments, you know?” I nodded, struck by the beauty of the thought.
“If we don’t do this, we’re going to ruin this for these kids. The social media companies can’t take this away. These crazy people can’t take it away.”
* * *
—
Welch told my Times colleague Adam Goldman from jail that “the intel on this wasn’t 100 percent”—a pretty dramatic understatement.
Alefantis testified in court to the terror and emotional damage wrought by Welch and the online lies that spurred him to action. He said he hoped that “one day in a more truthful time we will remember this day as an aberration,” a twisted period in history when “lies were seen as real and our social fabric had frayed.”
Prosecutors argued for a significant sentence for Welch, “to deter other people from pursuing vigilante justice based only on their YouTube feed.”
U.S. District Court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson sentenced Welch to four years in prison. She said sentencing had proved challenging because no one had committed a violent crime so damaging to so many people, prompted purely by internet delusion. At the time, anyway.
In a written statement to the court, Welch said, “I felt very passionate about the possibility of human suffering, especially the suffering of a child, and was prompted to act out without taking the time to consider the repercussions of my actions.”
The apology troubled the judge. She couldn’t tell whether Welch was sorry for his actions or sorry he didn’t find any children to save.
“The fear is now that even though no one was physically harmed in this case, other people who are worried about other issues will take up arms with the intent of sacrificing lives in order to achieve what they believe is a just result,” she told Welch in court.
“And as I’m sure you know, that kind of system of justice is utterly incompatible with our constitutional scheme, and with the rule of law.”
Her fears were well founded.
* * *
—
Alefantis’s lawyers sent Jones a letter demanding that he retract multiple statements he made on Infowars between late November and early December 2016, spreading the Pizzagate theory and telling his audience, “It’s up to you to research it for yourself,” comments they said inspired Welch to bring his high-powered rifle into Comet.
After Alefantis’s lawyers made it clear they were serious, Jones delivered a careful, legalistic statement on his March 24, 2017, broadcast.
“To my knowledge today, neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking, as was part of the theories about Pizzagate that were being written about in many media outlets and which we commented upon,” he said.
“In our commentary about what had become known as Pizzagate, I made comments about Mr. Alefantis that in hindsight I regret, and for which I apologize to him. We were participating in a discussion that was being written about by scores of media outlets, in one of the most hotly contested and disputed political environments our country has ever seen. We relied on third-party accounts of alleged activities and conduct at the restaurant. We also relied on accounts of reporters who are no longer with us. This was an ever-evolving story, which had a huge amount of commentary about it across many media outlets.” Infowars also removed videos of Jones’s Pizzagate broadcasts, which had drawn millions of viewers.
“To my knowledge today . . .”
“We were participating in a discussion . . .”
“This was an ever-evolving story . . .”
Pizzagate was a viral lie, not an “ever-evolving story,” or a “discussion.” Jones’s shouting, weeping, on-air peddling of the lie, his exhortations of “God help us, we’re in the hands of pure evil,” contained a call to action that brought a deluded man with a rifle into a family restaurant, convinced he was saving children.
* * *
—
For Alefantis and his team, the fear, if not the memory, of Welch’s visit would eventually ease. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube began closing accounts and removing content using the word “Pizzagate.” But the Pizzagaters hadn’t gone away. They were devising other ways, new code words to discuss the imagined plot.
In late January 2019, Ryan Jaselskis, a twenty-two-year-old, Los Angeles–based model, actor, and wellness coach with a history of mental illness, entered Comet’s back room during the dinner hour, doused a curtain used as a stage backdrop with lighter fluid, and eventually set it alight. Staffers put out the fire, and no one was hurt. Alefantis’s new security cameras recorded the attack, and Jaselskis was captured a few days later after he assaulted a police officer near the Washington Monument. Law enforcement found a Pizzagate-themed video on his parents’ YouTube account, posted hours before the Comet arson. In April 2020, Jaselskis was sentenced to four years in federal prison.[11]
Burning along the same social media fuse, and sparking on new platforms, Pizzagate begat QAnon, a new, more virulent mass delusion. QAnon, some of whose adherents see Trump as an avenging hero in a child-trafficking scheme led by Democratic politicians and Hollywood liberals, first appeared on 4chan around 2017, grew steadily, then surged during the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2020, Times technology columnist Kevin Roose described lurking[12] in QAnon Facebook groups and watching them “swell to hundreds of thousands of members,” spreading misinformation about the coronavirus along with the claim that Hillary Clinton and liberals drink the blood of children. The FBI began the 2020 election cycle by warning that QAnon posed a potential domestic terror threat. The social media platforms cracked down, but the hoaxers adapted, using hashtags like #SaveTheChildren as camouflage.
In August 2021, a forty-year-old QAnon believer shot his ten-month-old daughter and two-year-old son in their chests with a spearfishing gun. He told investigators that by killing them he was saving the world from monsters. QAnon followers have allegedly murdered a New York mafia boss, vandalized a church, and run for office by the score. One, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was elected a U.S. representative from Georgia. Greene has also shared posts on Facebook calling Sandy Hook a hoax, claims she has since renounced.
Will Sommer, now a reporter at the Daily Beast, calls QAnon a “rebranding” of Pizzagate.
“It’s fair to peg the Comet arson to QAnon,” he told me. “These kids are walking the same path tread by their Pizzagate forebears, and it all starts anew.”
* * *
—
I visited James Alefantis on a summerlike afternoon in late October 2020, exactly four years after he first heard the word “Pizzagate.” I wanted to learn whether he still believed that what happened was an aberration, a localized seizure induced by a short circuit in our political consciousness.
Alefantis dug two bottles of mineral water from a refrigerator near the red door of the storage closet, where Welch had expected to liberate a huddle of terrified children but instead found a messy tangle of coats, mop handles, and computer cables. We walked out the rear door, through which Comet’s panicked kitchen staff had fled, and where the dishwasher had surprised the gunman. Welch had just been released, and Alefantis thought he was still living in North Carolina. “I don’t think he’s coming back to Washington,” Alefantis told me in a tone suggesting he hoped he was right.
We sat in the parking lot behind Comet, which Alefantis and his staff had transformed during the coronavirus pandemic into an outdoor dining area, with a bar and firepit, picnic tables for families, and an arbor space for quieter groups. Alefantis told me he had chosen not to live his life in fear. But at one point during our conversation, two men sat down nearby and Alefantis, eyeing them, asked that we move out of earshot.
Alefantis was in his mid-forties, with an open, almost innocent way and a clever wit. He was dressed like his young colleagues, in artist’s black and sneakers, and he spoke like them, ending sentences with an upward lilt. A lifelong Washingtonian with many powerful friends, he retained an outsider’s awe at the business he’d built over the past fifteen years, including three restaurants and a nonprofit art gallery called Transformer.
Alefantis and I were speaking in the wake of a new crackdown on QAnon by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. For the first time since 2016, he could go a day or two without any threatening messages. Still, every few weeks another of Alefantis’s friends would call him, panicked. Pizzagaters had unearthed their connection to him and flooded their social media accounts with threats. Alefantis would carefully walk each through the drill: “Take down your Instagram, take those photographs off, go private—this is all we can do. You’re probably safe, but here’s how you report to the FBI. Here’s how you report to the police. Follow all the protocols.”
I asked whether he thought it would ever fully go away. He shook his head.
“Recently I’ve thought about changing my name,” he said. He’d just opened the third restaurant. “I told the Washington Post food critic not to mention me in the review. Don’t write my name. It’s going to get out there, but at least when you google the new restaurant, it’s not the first thing that comes up, and my staff isn’t getting attacked.”
Alefantis’s lawyers went on to represent the family of Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staffer gunned down in July 2016 in what police believe was a botched robbery attempt. Far-right conspiracists wrongly linked Rich to the theft of thousands of DNC emails published by Wikileaks during the campaign, speculating that Hillary Clinton ordered his killing in retribution. Police, Rich’s family, and federal investigators repeatedly debunked those false claims. But the theories persisted, spread by a coterie of Trump confidants, including Roger Stone and Sean Hannity, the Fox News commentator and Trump whisperer. Rich’s parents sued Fox News. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that Fox’s exploitation of their son’s murder amounted to a campaign of emotional torture. In late 2020 the case was settled.[13] Neither side disclosed the financial terms.
I asked Alefantis whether it helped to enlist lawyers in his case.
“Maybe for Jones,” Alefantis said. “I do think he deserves to be taken down. He’s very, very dangerous, and people like him are very dangerous.
“But the way the internet works, it’s constantly repopulating. I could pay lawyers or whatever to take everything down. But that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to stop sharing it.”
Alefantis paused, flipping his iPhone, encased in vivid green plastic, over and over in his hands. He is a chef and restaurateur, not “the face of fake news,” he told me. He didn’t know much about how social media works until it nearly destroyed his life.
“These people are in business. Their business is to sell you products. And if there’s no product to sell, they’re going to go out of business. And that’s it. It’s as simple as that. So they have no interest in policing at all. Pizzagate was a huge seller.”
We had been talking for a couple of hours. The first families in Comet’s weeknight dinner crowd had drifted into the parking lot, where the firepit blazed. The sun no longer lit our table, and the breeze had picked up. We stood and passed through the rear door. Alefantis again showed me where Welch had fired, climbed, and left his weapons. We walked to the room crowded with chairs and stage lights in the back, where Jaselskis had set the stage curtain aflame. The restaurant was full of families with little kids.
We passed through the front door and onto Connecticut Avenue. The wind, stiffer now, stirred burnished gold mums in pots along the street. I gathered my sweater around myself. Alefantis walked with me a few paces south.
I asked Alefantis what it had cost, the new panic button behind the host station, a full-time security guard for a year, the cameras, the security assessment by Gavin de Becker, author of The Gift of Fear, who trains people to trust their gut when it comes to other people’s evil intentions.
“It’s hard to tell,” Alefantis said, adding in his head. “The security guards alone were one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, at least. And the security company things, seventy-five thousand dollars. Another seventy-five thousand dollars . . . fifty thousand.” He stopped.
“It’s cost a lot. But we’re still here. There was a part of me that wanted to win. The winning was about truth over fiction,” he said.
He turned from watching the street to look at me. “Those things for me are not Zuckerberg talking points,” he said. “I believe them. I live them.”
* * *
—
Five days after our talk, Alefantis sent me an urgent-sounding email. “There is a very important detail about Alex Jones and how he relates to Comet,” he wrote. “Can I call you? . . . I haven’t talked about it before.”
We spoke an hour later. Alefantis had recalled a critical episode a week after Welch’s arrest. He’d been working late and returned exhausted to his duplex in Washington’s Logan Circle neighborhood. Collapsing on the couch, he brought up the newly filed complaint, United States of America v. Edgar Maddison Welch, on his phone.
As he read, Alefantis learned that two days before walking through Comet’s door, Welch sought his friends’ help “raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many. Standing up against a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard . . . defending the next generation of kids, our kids, from ever having to experience this kind of evil themselves. I’m sorry bro, but I’m tired of turning the channel and hoping someone does something and being thankful it’s not my family. One day it will be our families. The world is too afraid to act and I’m too stubborn not to.”
On page 4 of the complaint, Alefantis read text messages gathered by the FBI from Welch’s cell phone. He learned that on December 1, 2016, three days before Welch traveled to Washington, he sent a text message to his girlfriend, telling her he’d been researching Pizzagate and it was making him sick.
Welch had watched Pizzagate videos for hours that day, YouTube algorithms sending him one after another. He visited Comet’s website.
That night after 8:00 p.m., Welch texted a friend a link to a YouTube video, writing, “Watch PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture on YouTube.”
Alefantis searched for the video. It was an Infowars broadcast.
“I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ ” Alefantis told me. “Like, holy shit, this fucking gunman came here because of Jones!
“I called the attorneys and said, ‘Do whatever you need to get Jones.’ ”
He held for a beat, letting me take it in. “So there you go. I hope that helps.”
17
By late summer 2016 the Clinton campaign faced a decision similar to what James Alefantis and Seth Rich’s family had struggled with, as falsehoods sparked by Clinton’s candidacy caught fire across the internet. Clinton had met some of the Sandy Hook relatives and knew about the torment fed by Alex Jones. Erica Lafferty, the daughter of Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, the slain Sandy Hook principal, had appeared in an ad for Clinton’s campaign.
Business owners and workers along a two-block strip of Connecticut Avenue were locked down inside their establishments for an hour. Alefantis joined his staff, who had been evacuated to a firehouse a block away. They waited for several hours while police cleared the scene and interviewed Comet staff, one by one.
It was late at night by the time Alefantis was allowed to reenter Comet. He stood in the center of the dining room. “The pizzas were in the kitchen window, food was half-eaten, beers half-full, but all the people were gone,” Alefantis said. “At that moment I imagined what it could have looked like—instead of it being an empty room, it being a bloody, horrific scene.”
The next day, customers called constantly, wanting to return to show their support. Comet’s young staff urged Alefantis to reopen right away. “In my gut, I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m scared and this doesn’t seem worth it,’ ” Alefantis told me.
They said they were scared, too. But they felt a responsibility to the community and an obligation to the truth, Alefantis said they told him.
The restaurant reopened two days after the gunman’s visit, on Tuesday, December 6. A private security guard stood outside the entrance, and Metropolitan Police squad cars sat in front and in back. Scores of news cameras lined the sidewalk in front, and the queue of customers snaked down the street. “I’m at the front door saying, ‘Welcome, c’mon in,’ and I’m thinking, ‘This is so fucked up and I can’t trust anyone,’ ” Alefantis recalled. He spotted one of his dearest friends in the line, smiling, her three little girls in tow.
He teared up at the memory of it. “I’m thinking, ‘Please don’t come in here, and don’t bring your children in here, because it is not safe.’ And it turns out when we spoke months and months later, she was thinking the exact same thing,” he said. But she said her girls wanted to go. Comet was their favorite place.
“There was this element of extreme disappointment. And the incentive to not ruin everything we’ve worked for,” Alefantis told me. “One of my missions in Comet was that it would be this place where people go there every week, and when you grew up, you’d say, ‘There’s this pizza place I would go in Washington where I lived, and we would play ping-pong. And my dad was always so happy.’ Sort of joyous family moments, you know?” I nodded, struck by the beauty of the thought.
“If we don’t do this, we’re going to ruin this for these kids. The social media companies can’t take this away. These crazy people can’t take it away.”
* * *
—
Welch told my Times colleague Adam Goldman from jail that “the intel on this wasn’t 100 percent”—a pretty dramatic understatement.
Alefantis testified in court to the terror and emotional damage wrought by Welch and the online lies that spurred him to action. He said he hoped that “one day in a more truthful time we will remember this day as an aberration,” a twisted period in history when “lies were seen as real and our social fabric had frayed.”
Prosecutors argued for a significant sentence for Welch, “to deter other people from pursuing vigilante justice based only on their YouTube feed.”
U.S. District Court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson sentenced Welch to four years in prison. She said sentencing had proved challenging because no one had committed a violent crime so damaging to so many people, prompted purely by internet delusion. At the time, anyway.
In a written statement to the court, Welch said, “I felt very passionate about the possibility of human suffering, especially the suffering of a child, and was prompted to act out without taking the time to consider the repercussions of my actions.”
The apology troubled the judge. She couldn’t tell whether Welch was sorry for his actions or sorry he didn’t find any children to save.
“The fear is now that even though no one was physically harmed in this case, other people who are worried about other issues will take up arms with the intent of sacrificing lives in order to achieve what they believe is a just result,” she told Welch in court.
“And as I’m sure you know, that kind of system of justice is utterly incompatible with our constitutional scheme, and with the rule of law.”
Her fears were well founded.
* * *
—
Alefantis’s lawyers sent Jones a letter demanding that he retract multiple statements he made on Infowars between late November and early December 2016, spreading the Pizzagate theory and telling his audience, “It’s up to you to research it for yourself,” comments they said inspired Welch to bring his high-powered rifle into Comet.
After Alefantis’s lawyers made it clear they were serious, Jones delivered a careful, legalistic statement on his March 24, 2017, broadcast.
“To my knowledge today, neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking, as was part of the theories about Pizzagate that were being written about in many media outlets and which we commented upon,” he said.
“In our commentary about what had become known as Pizzagate, I made comments about Mr. Alefantis that in hindsight I regret, and for which I apologize to him. We were participating in a discussion that was being written about by scores of media outlets, in one of the most hotly contested and disputed political environments our country has ever seen. We relied on third-party accounts of alleged activities and conduct at the restaurant. We also relied on accounts of reporters who are no longer with us. This was an ever-evolving story, which had a huge amount of commentary about it across many media outlets.” Infowars also removed videos of Jones’s Pizzagate broadcasts, which had drawn millions of viewers.
“To my knowledge today . . .”
“We were participating in a discussion . . .”
“This was an ever-evolving story . . .”
Pizzagate was a viral lie, not an “ever-evolving story,” or a “discussion.” Jones’s shouting, weeping, on-air peddling of the lie, his exhortations of “God help us, we’re in the hands of pure evil,” contained a call to action that brought a deluded man with a rifle into a family restaurant, convinced he was saving children.
* * *
—
For Alefantis and his team, the fear, if not the memory, of Welch’s visit would eventually ease. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube began closing accounts and removing content using the word “Pizzagate.” But the Pizzagaters hadn’t gone away. They were devising other ways, new code words to discuss the imagined plot.
In late January 2019, Ryan Jaselskis, a twenty-two-year-old, Los Angeles–based model, actor, and wellness coach with a history of mental illness, entered Comet’s back room during the dinner hour, doused a curtain used as a stage backdrop with lighter fluid, and eventually set it alight. Staffers put out the fire, and no one was hurt. Alefantis’s new security cameras recorded the attack, and Jaselskis was captured a few days later after he assaulted a police officer near the Washington Monument. Law enforcement found a Pizzagate-themed video on his parents’ YouTube account, posted hours before the Comet arson. In April 2020, Jaselskis was sentenced to four years in federal prison.[11]
Burning along the same social media fuse, and sparking on new platforms, Pizzagate begat QAnon, a new, more virulent mass delusion. QAnon, some of whose adherents see Trump as an avenging hero in a child-trafficking scheme led by Democratic politicians and Hollywood liberals, first appeared on 4chan around 2017, grew steadily, then surged during the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2020, Times technology columnist Kevin Roose described lurking[12] in QAnon Facebook groups and watching them “swell to hundreds of thousands of members,” spreading misinformation about the coronavirus along with the claim that Hillary Clinton and liberals drink the blood of children. The FBI began the 2020 election cycle by warning that QAnon posed a potential domestic terror threat. The social media platforms cracked down, but the hoaxers adapted, using hashtags like #SaveTheChildren as camouflage.
In August 2021, a forty-year-old QAnon believer shot his ten-month-old daughter and two-year-old son in their chests with a spearfishing gun. He told investigators that by killing them he was saving the world from monsters. QAnon followers have allegedly murdered a New York mafia boss, vandalized a church, and run for office by the score. One, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was elected a U.S. representative from Georgia. Greene has also shared posts on Facebook calling Sandy Hook a hoax, claims she has since renounced.
Will Sommer, now a reporter at the Daily Beast, calls QAnon a “rebranding” of Pizzagate.
“It’s fair to peg the Comet arson to QAnon,” he told me. “These kids are walking the same path tread by their Pizzagate forebears, and it all starts anew.”
* * *
—
I visited James Alefantis on a summerlike afternoon in late October 2020, exactly four years after he first heard the word “Pizzagate.” I wanted to learn whether he still believed that what happened was an aberration, a localized seizure induced by a short circuit in our political consciousness.
Alefantis dug two bottles of mineral water from a refrigerator near the red door of the storage closet, where Welch had expected to liberate a huddle of terrified children but instead found a messy tangle of coats, mop handles, and computer cables. We walked out the rear door, through which Comet’s panicked kitchen staff had fled, and where the dishwasher had surprised the gunman. Welch had just been released, and Alefantis thought he was still living in North Carolina. “I don’t think he’s coming back to Washington,” Alefantis told me in a tone suggesting he hoped he was right.
We sat in the parking lot behind Comet, which Alefantis and his staff had transformed during the coronavirus pandemic into an outdoor dining area, with a bar and firepit, picnic tables for families, and an arbor space for quieter groups. Alefantis told me he had chosen not to live his life in fear. But at one point during our conversation, two men sat down nearby and Alefantis, eyeing them, asked that we move out of earshot.
Alefantis was in his mid-forties, with an open, almost innocent way and a clever wit. He was dressed like his young colleagues, in artist’s black and sneakers, and he spoke like them, ending sentences with an upward lilt. A lifelong Washingtonian with many powerful friends, he retained an outsider’s awe at the business he’d built over the past fifteen years, including three restaurants and a nonprofit art gallery called Transformer.
Alefantis and I were speaking in the wake of a new crackdown on QAnon by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. For the first time since 2016, he could go a day or two without any threatening messages. Still, every few weeks another of Alefantis’s friends would call him, panicked. Pizzagaters had unearthed their connection to him and flooded their social media accounts with threats. Alefantis would carefully walk each through the drill: “Take down your Instagram, take those photographs off, go private—this is all we can do. You’re probably safe, but here’s how you report to the FBI. Here’s how you report to the police. Follow all the protocols.”
I asked whether he thought it would ever fully go away. He shook his head.
“Recently I’ve thought about changing my name,” he said. He’d just opened the third restaurant. “I told the Washington Post food critic not to mention me in the review. Don’t write my name. It’s going to get out there, but at least when you google the new restaurant, it’s not the first thing that comes up, and my staff isn’t getting attacked.”
Alefantis’s lawyers went on to represent the family of Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staffer gunned down in July 2016 in what police believe was a botched robbery attempt. Far-right conspiracists wrongly linked Rich to the theft of thousands of DNC emails published by Wikileaks during the campaign, speculating that Hillary Clinton ordered his killing in retribution. Police, Rich’s family, and federal investigators repeatedly debunked those false claims. But the theories persisted, spread by a coterie of Trump confidants, including Roger Stone and Sean Hannity, the Fox News commentator and Trump whisperer. Rich’s parents sued Fox News. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that Fox’s exploitation of their son’s murder amounted to a campaign of emotional torture. In late 2020 the case was settled.[13] Neither side disclosed the financial terms.
I asked Alefantis whether it helped to enlist lawyers in his case.
“Maybe for Jones,” Alefantis said. “I do think he deserves to be taken down. He’s very, very dangerous, and people like him are very dangerous.
“But the way the internet works, it’s constantly repopulating. I could pay lawyers or whatever to take everything down. But that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to stop sharing it.”
Alefantis paused, flipping his iPhone, encased in vivid green plastic, over and over in his hands. He is a chef and restaurateur, not “the face of fake news,” he told me. He didn’t know much about how social media works until it nearly destroyed his life.
“These people are in business. Their business is to sell you products. And if there’s no product to sell, they’re going to go out of business. And that’s it. It’s as simple as that. So they have no interest in policing at all. Pizzagate was a huge seller.”
We had been talking for a couple of hours. The first families in Comet’s weeknight dinner crowd had drifted into the parking lot, where the firepit blazed. The sun no longer lit our table, and the breeze had picked up. We stood and passed through the rear door. Alefantis again showed me where Welch had fired, climbed, and left his weapons. We walked to the room crowded with chairs and stage lights in the back, where Jaselskis had set the stage curtain aflame. The restaurant was full of families with little kids.
We passed through the front door and onto Connecticut Avenue. The wind, stiffer now, stirred burnished gold mums in pots along the street. I gathered my sweater around myself. Alefantis walked with me a few paces south.
I asked Alefantis what it had cost, the new panic button behind the host station, a full-time security guard for a year, the cameras, the security assessment by Gavin de Becker, author of The Gift of Fear, who trains people to trust their gut when it comes to other people’s evil intentions.
“It’s hard to tell,” Alefantis said, adding in his head. “The security guards alone were one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, at least. And the security company things, seventy-five thousand dollars. Another seventy-five thousand dollars . . . fifty thousand.” He stopped.
“It’s cost a lot. But we’re still here. There was a part of me that wanted to win. The winning was about truth over fiction,” he said.
He turned from watching the street to look at me. “Those things for me are not Zuckerberg talking points,” he said. “I believe them. I live them.”
* * *
—
Five days after our talk, Alefantis sent me an urgent-sounding email. “There is a very important detail about Alex Jones and how he relates to Comet,” he wrote. “Can I call you? . . . I haven’t talked about it before.”
We spoke an hour later. Alefantis had recalled a critical episode a week after Welch’s arrest. He’d been working late and returned exhausted to his duplex in Washington’s Logan Circle neighborhood. Collapsing on the couch, he brought up the newly filed complaint, United States of America v. Edgar Maddison Welch, on his phone.
As he read, Alefantis learned that two days before walking through Comet’s door, Welch sought his friends’ help “raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many. Standing up against a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard . . . defending the next generation of kids, our kids, from ever having to experience this kind of evil themselves. I’m sorry bro, but I’m tired of turning the channel and hoping someone does something and being thankful it’s not my family. One day it will be our families. The world is too afraid to act and I’m too stubborn not to.”
On page 4 of the complaint, Alefantis read text messages gathered by the FBI from Welch’s cell phone. He learned that on December 1, 2016, three days before Welch traveled to Washington, he sent a text message to his girlfriend, telling her he’d been researching Pizzagate and it was making him sick.
Welch had watched Pizzagate videos for hours that day, YouTube algorithms sending him one after another. He visited Comet’s website.
That night after 8:00 p.m., Welch texted a friend a link to a YouTube video, writing, “Watch PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture on YouTube.”
Alefantis searched for the video. It was an Infowars broadcast.
“I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ ” Alefantis told me. “Like, holy shit, this fucking gunman came here because of Jones!
“I called the attorneys and said, ‘Do whatever you need to get Jones.’ ”
He held for a beat, letting me take it in. “So there you go. I hope that helps.”
17
By late summer 2016 the Clinton campaign faced a decision similar to what James Alefantis and Seth Rich’s family had struggled with, as falsehoods sparked by Clinton’s candidacy caught fire across the internet. Clinton had met some of the Sandy Hook relatives and knew about the torment fed by Alex Jones. Erica Lafferty, the daughter of Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, the slain Sandy Hook principal, had appeared in an ad for Clinton’s campaign.
