US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has blamed the various claims he's made over the years, including that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax, on "psychosis".
The Austin American-Statesman reports Jones described his conspiracy thinking as a kind of mental disorder during a deposition taken earlier this month for a Texas lawsuit filed against him by the parents of a six-year-old who was among the 20 children and six adults killed in the Newtown, Connecticut, attack.
During the March 14 deposition in Austin, Jones said he "almost had like a form of psychosis" where he thought events were staged.
But during the deposition, Jones continued to voice conspiratorial suspicions about the shooting, saying some people had told him there was a cover-up.
CNN reports that the InfoWars.com founder had repeatedly suggested in the past that the Sandy Hook shooting was a "giant hoax" carried out by crisis actors on behalf of people who oppose the Second Amendment.
InfoWars has also suggested the September 11 attacks were an inside job orchestrated by the US government.
CNN reported that Jones this week acknowledged the shooting was real during a sworn deposition he made as part of a defamation case brought against him by Sandy Hook victims' families.
"And I, myself, have almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I've now learned a lot of times things aren't staged," he said.
"So I think as a pundit, someone giving an opinion, that, you know, my opinions have been wrong, but they were never wrong consciously to hurt people."
He said it was the "trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much" that caused him to distrust everything, "kind of like a child whose parents lie to them over and over again."
"So long before these lawsuits I said that in the past I thought everything was a conspiracy and I would kind of get into that mass group think of the communities that were out saying that," he said. "And so now I see that it's more in the middle ... so that's where I stand."
