Sandy Hook Charity Dumps Kelly As Host After Alex Jones Interview. Kelly Responds.

On Monday, the charity Sandy Hook Promise, deeply upset that NBC host Megyn Kelly interviewed Alex Jones, who has claimed the massacre in June 2012 when 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary school, was a hoax, decided to rescind its invitation for Kelly to host the organization’s annual Promise Champions Gala on Wednesday. According to a statement from the organization, Kelly also agreed to step down from hosting the event.

The charity released a statement, saying:

Sandy Hook Promise, a leading gun violence prevention organization, and NBC host Megyn Kelly have agreed that Kelly will no longer host the organization’s annual Promise Champions Gala on Wednesday, June 14th, in Washington DC. This decision was spurred by NBC’s planned broadcast of Kelly’s interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who believes the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT, was a hoax. “Sandy Hook Promise cannot support the decision by Megyn or NBC to give any form of voice or platform to Alex Jones and have asked Megyn Kelly to step down as our Promise Champion Gala host,” said Nicole Hockley, co-Founder and Managing Director. “It is our hope that Megyn and NBC reconsider and not broadcast this interview.”

Kelly issued a defense of her interview on Twitter, pointing out vehemently that she also thinks Jones’ claim of a hoax is indefensible, and that what she was trying to do was question how a man who traffics in conspiracies rather than truth has the ear of the President of the United States as well as millions of other Americans:

Jones has a long history of claiming the massacre was a hoax, calling the shooting “staged” in 2013, adding, “It’s got inside job written all over it.” In March 2014, Jones said, “I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying, and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.” He reiterated in December 2014, “The whole thing is a giant hoax … The general public doesn’t know the school was actually closed the year before. They don’t know they’ve sealed it all, demolished the building. They don’t know that they had the kids going in circles in and out of the building as a photo-op. Blue screen, green screens, they got caught using.”

In 2015, Jones blathered that “Sandy Hooks is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are that they clearly used actors.”

Despite his recent efforts to walk back his conspiratorial theories, Jones still won’t give up the idea that the massacre was a hoax, and features numerous headlines on his site, Infowars, which promulgate the theory that the massacre was a hoax.

Jones called for the interview to be pulled, claiming he had been mischaracterized: