There are some days in life you will never forget, even if you want to and even if you don’t want to.
Robbie Parker knows that about as well as anybody.
“Emilie would have graduated last year. She would have voted this year,” he said. “So, trying to wrap your head around that is kind of bizarre.”
It’s hard to believe it has been 12 years since his daughter, Emilie, was killed in the Sandy Hook school shootings. She was only 6 years old at the time. Her funeral was held in Ogden, where the family is from.
Almost immediately after the shootings, Parker and his family, as well as family members of the other victims, faced harassment and threats when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones used his InfoWars platform to claim the shootings were a hoax and that the grieving parents were “crisis actors.”
“I have never been able to reconcile a meaning behind that,” Parker said. “But it is a reality, and it is a truth of what it means to be in the world right now, so here we are.”
At first, Parker stayed out of the lawsuits against Jones. But after speaking with families impacted by the Parkland school shooting, he realized he had to take a stand.
He has also written a book, called “A Father’s Fight,” detailing his court case against Jones, what their lives were like during the past decade, and reclaiming his family’s story.
“I had spent years trying to hide from conspiracy theorists. I had spent years disconnecting from the world because of that and from myself. It altered who I was as a person. It altered relationships with my family members and how I engaged with the world, so this reclamation of doing things to try and get that back was a healing process in the sense that it brought connection back to me, and to those that I love, and to the world that I care about,” Parker said.
“A Father’s Fight” is set to be released on Nov. 19.
