Alex Jones, far-right conspiracy theorist and frequently topless founder of InfoWars.com, has been accused of sexual harassment and discrimination, surprising exactly no one.
According to two Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints obtained by the Daily Mail, Jones frequently made anti-Semitic and racist comments to his staff, and groped a female employee.
In one of the complaints, former video editor Rob Jacobson says that during the 13 years he worked at InfoWars, Jones regularly bullied and belittled him, and his co-workers and managers frequently referred to him as “the Jewish individual” and “the resident Jew,” sometimes even doing so on-air during InfoWars’ live radio broadcast. At one point, one of Jacobson’s colleagues reportedly Photoshopped his face onto the image of a Hasidic Jewish man under the words “THE JEWISH INDIVIDUAL DEMANDS YOUR HOT TOPICS.”
The second complaint was filed by Ashley Beckford, a former production assistant for Free Speech Systems, InfoWars’ parent company. In it, Beckford says Jones “often spent his time shirtless, and endlessly leering, with or without a shirt, at female employees and guests,” and that he openly encouraged staff to make lewd and inappropriate comments toward women.
Beckford, who is African-American, also says she was “mocked” for her race, and called racial slurs by her colleagues and managers. She alleges Jones sexually harassed her, and once publicly groped her rear while saying, “Who wouldn’t want to have a black wife?”
In a statement to the Daily Mail, David Jones, Alex Jones’s father and head of human resources at InfoWars, said the office could be a bit of a “locker room” and that they are “equal-opportunity offenders.”
“Obviously Free Speech Systems and Infowars takes these things very seriously and will fully investigate all of those allegations, but they don’t make sense to me for a lot of different reasons,” the elder Jones said.
Wow, who could have imagined that the guy who claims 9/11 was an inside job, that Obama is a member of al Qaeda, and is currently picking fights with survivors of the Stoneman Douglas shooting would foster a hostile work environment?