“I think that it's absolutely incredible that I got to talk about it, that I got to share it with the jury and the world and Alex Jones,” Scarlett Lewis said.
It was the testimony that put Lewis’ mission of choosing love on the world stage.
“I wanted to tell you to your face because I wanted you to know that I am a mother and I know that you are a father and my son existed,” Lewis said in a Texas courtroom earlier this month.
The words from the mother of Sandy Hook victim Jesse Lewis led the jury to order Alex Jones to pay Lewis and Jesse’s father more than $49 million dollars in damages for the suffering caused by Jones’ lies about the massacre, including that it was hoax and that Lewis was an actress.
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“I've thought about it and I think that it sent a very strong message out that truth is very important and that you cannot spread lies about people to intentionally harm them or with knowing that it will intentionally harm them and I think it's a really important thing, especially in our society today. We have to trust one another, we really do. It's vital for a civilized society,” Lewis said.
“Alex, I want you to hear this too. He'd written three words, nurturing, healing, love,” Lewis said in the courtroom. Those were the three words Jesse wrote on a chalkboard at their home before he was killed.
What Lewis says she wasn’t expecting and what became the centerpiece of the trial was her Choose Love Movement, the organization she founded, inspired those three words on the chalkboard.
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The movement has been taught in more than 10,000 schools, in all 50 states, in over 120 countries serving more than three million children worldwide addressing what Lewis says is the root of preventing school violence, essential life skills known as Social Emotional Learning.
“That is how to have healthy relationships, how to manage our emotions, how to self-regulate, how to process pain in our lives, how to make responsible decisions, all of these skills and tools that we are not born with, we actually have to learn,” Lewis said.
It's a movement that Lewis says just might have moved Alex Jones himself.
In his testimony, Jones told the courtroom he now believes the Sandy Hook tragedy was 100% real. Lewis says she believes Jones came to the trial on the last day to personally apologize through letters written to her and Jesse’s father.
“It said, 'I am very truly sorry' and I believe that he is and he expressed the intention to help the Choose Love Movement and that door’s always open for him, but he's going to have to walk through it. But I do believe that there is that opening in his heart that he's seen it now and he knows, knows that it exists and that it is a possibility for him,” Lewis said.
