2019 Attorneys of the Year: Leonard Pozner/Sandy Hook defamation case

Leonard Pozner did not want to litigate whether a mass murder at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecti­cut, really happened in 2012. If James Fetzer and Alex Jones want to perpetrate that canard, Pozner refused to assist them.

So Pozner, who lost his son Noah, sued Fetzer, the author of “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook,” for defamation for alleging in the book that Pozner released a false death certificate, a crime in Connecticut.

Jake Zimmerman and Genevieve Zimmerman secured a damage verdict for $450,000 against Fetzer. They did not earn a fee for the case and paid the costs themselves, with the assis­tance of Genevieve’s firm, Meshbesher & Spence.

The crux of the damages claim was that Pozner has post-trau­matic stress disorder that is exacerbated by a secondary injury, such as the trauma caused by conspiracy theorists’ harassment and vilification.

“We could see that with Mr. Pozner. He did get better and then these comments came out and he just went downhill again,” Jake said.

The nature of PTSD is that it is hard to assign a dollar figure to it, so in her closing argument, Genevieve didn’t try. The jury came up with the $450,000.00 figure on its own, after she told them, “I wish I could provide you with a receipt.”

They see the court as the place to stop the viral growth of false information on the web and mete out consequences for wrongdoing. “What we do as lawyers is, we prove things,” Gen­evieve said.

Read more about Minnesota Lawyer’s superb class of Attorneys of the Year for 2019 here.

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