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.
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.
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 .