In 2017, Robbie Parker sat in a grief session for parents who have lost children, feeling stuck.
“I was just like, ‘I feel like I just keep saying the same things, getting angry at the same things, and I just wanted to process it,’” he tells TODAY.com.
He started writing a story about grief.
What started as an "internal, personal project" morphed into the memoir "A Father’s Fight: Taking on Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook," which was published Nov. 19.
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Parker's daughter Emilie died at 6 years old on Dec. 14, 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
After the shooting, broadcaster Alex Jones repeatedly claimed on his show, Infowars, that the shooting was a “hoax,” starting and fueling a pervasive conspiracy theory that resulted in Parker and other Sandy Hook families becoming the target of harassment.
Parker joined other Sandy Hook families in litigation against Jones, suing him and Free Speech Systems LLC, the parent company of the website Infowars, for defamation.
Before joining the trial, Parker says he realized, "I had given up my voice."
Testifying against Jones and writing "A Father's Fight" is how he reclaimed it.
'He no longer controls this'
In the first chapter of the memoir, Parker writes about the day of the 2012 shooting and the first day of the trial against Jones, set 10 years later in September 2022.
For so long, he felt guilt and shame about the conspiracy theories.
The day after the Sandy Hook shooting, Parker spoke about Emilie at a press conference. He described her as an "exceptional artist," a "mentor to her two little sisters" and a skilled card-maker.
His heartbroken statement was used as fodder on Infowars, where Parker was dubbed a "crisis actor," with Jones harping on a few seconds of footage where Parker seemed to be "smiling" before he spoke.
"I spent so many years literally hating myself for that," Parker tells TODAY.com now. "I know it wasn't my fault, and I know I couldn't have seen it happen, but what that moment did, what it ended up doing and how it spiraled and what it brought into our lives and so many other people's lives ... I couldn't think about it without feeling disgust for myself."
That changed during the trial.
Jones testified on Sept. 22, 2022. Parker recalls Jones and Chris Mattei, the lawyer who represented the Sandy Hook families, having a "really contentious back and forth."
Mattei, at one point, referenced Parker specifically, claiming Jones put a "target on his back."
"Peace for me right now isn't feeling OK all the time.”
ROBBIE PARKER ON FINDING PEACE AFTER HIS DAUGHTER'S MURDER AT SANDY HOOK
"Chris stopped, and was just like, 'Have you ever watched what he said that night? Because you've only ever shown on your show that five seconds of him laughing or smiling,'" Parker recalls.
Mattei then played the video in the courtroom. The New York Times' coverage of the trial states that after the video played, Jones "blows up" and asserts "he’s not apologizing and that 'you liberals' can turn emotions on and off.”
As the video played, Parker says he watched Jones.
"He was avoiding listening to me or seeing me. That was the moment I'm like, 'I get to take it back. He no longer controls this,'" Parker says. "That was one of the most powerful moments for me personally in all of this."
For years, Jones said the shooting was not real, though on the stand in August 2022, he said it was "100% real," per the Associated Press. In 2022, Jones was ordered to pay $1.5 billion to the families. Parker was awarded $120 million in compensatory damages, the largest slice of the total.
Parker has said it was never about the money.
"We wanted to make it as hard as possible for Alex Jones to spread the harm and the lies that he has done," Parker said on MSNBC in November.
'A peaceful place to be'
Parker didn't miss any part of the 2022 trial. For several weeks, he flew from Connecticut back to Oregon every Saturday, then back to the East Coast on a Sunday red-eye.
When Parker testified against Jones, he didn't prepare with practice questions, he says. Instead, he had a therapy session several days before, and his therapist asked him to identify his "safe person" to keep him grounded in the moment.
It was the families' lawyer, Mattei.
"One of the first things I said was, 'I've been waiting for this for a really long time,'" he recalls.
"Emilie felt things really deeply and profoundly, but she also knew how to communicate ... That's the thing I miss about her the most."
ROBBIE PARKER ON HIS DAUGHTER EMILIE, WHO WAS KILLED AT SANDY HOOK ON DEC. 14, 2012
He says he felt the support of other families there, describing them as a team.
In his memoir, he calls the group of parents The Families, capitalized, but notes, "For a long time, I held the other parents at arm's length."
While they had an "immediate bond" in the aftermath of the shooting, Parker says he felt like he didn't know how to interact or connect with them.
During the trial, he says, he bonded with The Families.
"Spending all that time with them, and having long lunches with each other, and just finally getting to laugh with them and tell funny stories and sad stories and open up and feel really safe," he says. "That was one of the most precious gifts I could have received through that whole experience."
He says that he started writing because he was "resisting grief." He now likens the experience to a roller coaster.
"There's all these ups and downs and twists and turns, but yet, I always felt like I was ending up right where I started, and that's how a roller coaster is," he says.
He has a new understanding of the word "peace."
"Peace for me right now isn't feeling OK all the time," he says. "But the fact that I am in a place where I can handle setbacks, and I can handle things that are hard, and I can see the things that are beautiful, and I can hold both of them at the same place ... that's a very peaceful place to be."
December 14
Every year, December 14 is different for Parker.
Shortly after Emilie's death, he says the family would ask, "What's something that Emilie would enjoy?" For example, on her first birthday after the shooting, they visited Harry Potter World at Universal Orlando because they had been reading the "Harry Potter" books together.
"That was easy," Parker says. "It's hard now because I don't know what she would love. I don't know what she would be into. I don't know what struggle she would have."
The family sticks together, he says. Emilie's younger sisters, Madeline and Samantha, are "wonderfully artistic," so they often find a way to complete a project or craft together.
This year, "I'm just going to go out to the beach and just walk," he says. "Just try and keep it real simple."
In the process of publishing his memoir, Parker says it's been "really great being able to talk about her a lot."
He recalls one story he likes to tell about Emilie: After a huge snowstorm, Parker went out to shovel the driveway. It took hours, and he missed dinner, putting the kids to bed — all the moments of their nightly routine.
When he came into the house, he found a plate full of food and his favorite drink on the table, thanks to Emilie.
"I found out later that she was in bed and realized, 'Oh, Dad didn't get any dinner.' Everybody else was in bed, and she got up and put together this plate for me," he says. "And then the next morning, she didn't say anything about it.
"Why I get so emotional talking about it, is because Emilie had this wonderful ability — she felt things really deeply and profoundly, but she also knew how to communicate and share it with you. And that's something I've always struggled with," he adds.
"That's the thing I miss about her the most. I miss being around somebody that could show me how that works."
This story originally appeared on TODAY.com. Read more from TODAY:
