A Parkland Student and a Sandy Hook Father Discuss What Comes After ‘That Day’
When Robbie Parker decided to join a lawsuit suing infamous right wing conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones, he says it was for a multitude of reasons. Yes, he says it was for other parents of school shooting victims who, like himself, were accused of being crisis actors. Yes, it was to protect the legacy of his daughter, Emilie, who he says was already deeply kind and empathetic at just six years old. He’s quick to admit, and emphasize, though, that the fight was also for himself.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]On Dec. 14, 2012, Parker’s daughter was killed during a mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., by a semiautomatic rifle—a shooting that left 26 people dead.
For Parker, though, the trauma did not end there. The media onslaught and subsequent conspiracy theories and online vitriol bolstered by Jones through Infowars ripped through Parker and his family’s life, preventing the healing he knew was possible for them.
In 2022, Jones was found liable for defaming victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, and was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages to the victims’ families. Now, Parker has written and published a book, A Father’s Fight, about his experiences grieving for his daughter, and fighting for her legacy in the lawsuit against Jones.
It was easy in some ways to relate to Parker, who names the shooting at my school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., as the turning point in his choice to enter the lawsuit against Jones. Though neither of us experienced gun violence or online lies about that violence in the same way, we were both forever touched by it.
TIME sat down with Parker to discuss his book, the pressure of the media spotlight after tragedy, the healing process of writing, and suing Jones.
TIME: I wanted to start by offering a space to talk about that day—the day of the shooting when you found out about your daughter, Emilie’s, death. I get asked about that day all the time, and I recognize it’s sometimes strange to talk about this many years later. But, it’s also the first chapter of your book.
Parker: It’s important to give details about that day sometimes. And I liked that this was the lawyers’ approach in the trial [against Jones]—we need to really establish the truth of what actually happened, because we’re going to be dealing the whole rest of the time talking about people saying that it didn’t happen. I felt like in the book, I really had to, in a way that was as gentle as I could to the reader, really help them feel and understand just everything that transpired that day, and who Emilie was as a person. I had to make sure everyone understood that the biggest difference between me and anybody that’s reading this book that hasn’t been in this situation is chance. And that makes people very uncomfortable.
I often say that for me, the trauma of the day of the shooting was really a small part of the trauma, because so much of it came afterwards, with the media onslaught that followed. What was that pressure like for you? And how does it feel to look back on it?
I’m such a people pleaser. For a long time, I felt like, in order for me to feel like I’m in a safe place. I have to make sure that the people around me either feel okay or manipulate how they view me. That pressure was really, really intense. And I also had this pressure where I felt like I had to show up for my family at the same time. It really, really led to a big breakdown.
Yeah, and then it also becomes a really complicated thing to feel emotion, because of the eyes and the pressure. You have to actually relearn how to feel things.
It just gets uncomfortable and gets frustrating, because people are trying to relate to you, and you feel like they can’t. And then I was in a situation where I felt like I couldn’t go anywhere without feeling that. I would pump gas, wondering, “Am I doing this right? Is somebody watching me?” I was cautious about if I smiled, or if I was singing along in my car.
When did you realize that the attention was transferring from just sensationalism to ‘you’re a crisis actor’ and to denialism and vilifying. Or was it always there?
That came at me so fast. I became acutely aware of it in a very short amount of time. It was almost so immediate on the heels of learning that Emilie died that there wasn’t a way for me to process all of that info at once.
I was struck by this quote in the book: “I told my friends and my family that the vitriolic hate, the terrifying threats, and the online slander that defiled Emilie’s name and memory didn’t affect me.” Talk about the moment when you decided to let it affect you and to be honest about that.
I was so tired of carrying it. And then, I had an experience with the nurse that night [discussed in the book] in the NICU, where she was so distraught and so angry, and she was crying, and she was so emotional about seeing the things that were being said online about Emilie. It was this weird, bizarre experience. I was just like, why is this person expressing so many emotions and I’m not feeling anything here? That was a big turning point.
You talk about the shooting at my high school as another turning point for you, and a push for you to sue Jones, particularly after speaking to two parents of someone who was killed at my high school. I’m curious why that was the moment that spurred action.
There’s this quote that I’ve been saying lately from the HBO show Chernobyl: “Every lie we tell incurs debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt gets paid.” I can throw that on Alex Jones.
When Ryan came into the conversation, it was like I recognized myself in him. I needed that six years of time to create some distance away from my experience in those early days, to be able to see it clearly when it was mirrored back to me. [Ryan Petty’s daughter Alaina Petty was killed in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.]
What was it like to see Jones in court? It’s a very visceral moment in the book.
It was the antithesis of that “don’t ever meet your hero” thing. I felt like I knew exactly what was going to happen. He was going to come in. I was going to feel this way. I was going to stare him down like this perfect John Grisham moment.
And then it finally happened, and he was human, and I saw him struggling like, literally, just struggling to exist. It looked like it’s painful for him to walk, it looked like it’s hard for him to breathe—that debt that he had incurred weighed so heavily on him, is how I interpreted it. That touched me, and I was not prepared for that, but I’m kind of glad I had that human moment. People can do awful things to other people when they hate them because they don’t look at them as another person, right? And it leads you to think things and act in ways that aren’t authentic to you, and I don’t want to be that person.
What do you feel like you learned from this fight? And, knowing that this is a lifelong journey of reckoning and healing (at least for me it’s been a whole process to realize this), how does your court fight bring you to where you are now in healing?
I get asked a lot, “do you find victory in this,” or, “did you find justice?” You really have to adjust what your expectation and definition is of those words for yourself. It’s been over two years since the verdict, and Alex Jones is still on air, still making money. It can feel like, Man, I went through all this and there’s nothing to show for it, but that’s so not true for me.
When I got off the stand, it felt like my feet weren’t touching the ground. That moment was so euphoric in all of this. I can claim that as my victory, and I don’t live in fear anymore. I’m able to sit there and realize he has no power over me. He never did.
It recently came to light that the satirical newspaper The Onion was named the winning bidder for Jones’s Infowars—a transaction which was backed by the Sandy Hook families.
We came up with this strategy about what we were willing to sacrifice to make sure that none of his allies got [Infowars]. We were prepared to forego any money that we would have made from the sale. I have girls that are going to be going to college soon. My wife’s in college right now. Having a payday coming to help me with that is very tempting. But what I find beautiful is that every single Connecticut family was prepared to give that up.
I’d love to hear more about the writing process as a space for healing as well. For myself, I wanted to be a doctor, and then when the shooting happened at my high school, that’s how I turned to journalism. So I really see the power in writing.
We have inverse paths. When I was younger, I liked to write, and I would write stories in elementary school.I realized the reason I got into my NICU career was because you have children who are suffering because of nothing that they did to themselves, and it wasn’t their fault.
The results of this trial made me realize that I have more in me I need to express. I realized the more I shared [my writing], it wasn’t scary anymore. And when I shared, then other people opened up and they shared. In grief, things are so hard, or they seem so insurmountable, and writing was one way that I could push through that.