The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch released a tranche of far-right conspiracist Alex Jones’ text messages on Wednesday, seemingly corroborating previous reporting that the Infowars founder hired an ex-Blackwater mercenary to spy on his wife.
The previously private texts, which have become public largely due to Jones’ lawyer’s own ineptitude, also highlight the increasing levels of despair, paranoia and misery the Jan. 6 insurrectionist found himself in just before helping stoke the Capitol riots.
“I am in hell,” Jones texted his wife, Erika Wulff Jones, at one point.
There has been widespread speculation about the content of these 22,000-plus messages, which span much of 2019 and 2020, after Jones’ legal team accidentally sent a trove of texts to lawyers representing Sandy Hook parents in a defamation case Jones lost. The Jan. 6 House committee soon received those texts, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson became deeply concerned that his exchanges with Jones would leak.
While Carlson’s texts with the Sandy Hook truther eventually became public (and failed to embarrass the Fox star), the messages published on Wednesday provide a snapshot into Jones’ everyday personal and professional life. More than anything, they seem to punctuate how miserable Jones appears to be.
In at least two separate instances in 2020, the texts reveal that Jones arranged for his wife’s whereabouts to be tracked by one of his security employees, former Austin Police Department officer and Blackwater mercenary Tim Enlow.
As Jones was attempting to catch his wife cheating on him, however, texts reveal that the Infowars host appeared to be simultaneously carrying on an extramarital affair of his own. On the days he texted Enlow for information about his wife’s location, while incessantly demanding Erika return his messages, he was also arranging meetings with another married woman.
“Pleas[e] run me a bath,” he tells the unnamed woman at one point. Three hours later, he asks Enlow to provide updates on his spouse once again.
Several times throughout the messages, Erika recommends divorce to the MAGA conspiracy theorist, prompting Jones to describe his life as being “in hell.” In another exchange, Jones tells his father that he is living within a “black hole.” (On Christmas Eve 2021, Erika was arrested on domestic violence charges for allegedly striking Jones “over 20 times.”)
According to former Infowars employees who spoke with Hatewatch, Jones spends much of his workday in various stages of intoxication. “I would see him start drinking as soon as he got to the office, which would sometimes be at nine or ten in the morning,” one ex-staffer said while another noted that “nine out of 10 times there would be vodka” in the cup Jones carried around the office.
“Please get vodka,” Jones told his personal trainer in a morning text, two days after he was arrested for suspicion of driving under the influence. (The DUI charge was later thrown out.)
Jones, who has long decried pornography to his viewers as a plot to “end the family” and “reproduction,” also regularly texted links to hardcore films to his associates. (Jones also sent a “naked” picture of his wife to political trickster and Trump ally Roger Stone.)
“It’s meant to destroy families, destroy relationships. It destroys the pleasure of real sex. It destroys families,” Jones said during a March 2020 broadcast of Infowars.
That same day, he texted a PornHub link to a contact.
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