For the latest episode of 60 Minutes, which aired yesterday (January 3), the father of the youngest victim in the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting was given a facial disguise in order to prevent conspiracy theorists from recognizing him.
"Why did the father of a six-year-old victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre need a Hollywood-style disguise to speak to 60 Minutes? Find out tonight," the CBS show tweeted.
Pozner's six-year-old son, Noah, was one of the 20 children and six staff members by 20-year-old Adam Lanza in the attack on an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
The father has been persistently threatened and attacked by conspiracy theorists who believe the massacre was a hoax set up by politicians in an attempt to ban guns in the US.
"Lenny Pozner’s son Noah was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting," 60 Minutes wrote alongside a clip of the program. "Now, Pozner and his family receive online death threats from people who falsely claim the shooting never happened. He fought to get Facebook to take down posts attacking his son’s memory."
Pozner told CBS News in 2019 that he has had to move at least six times since the shooting for his own safety.
"I was being attacked for the memory of my son," he said.
"My son’s very short life was being attacked, and I just wasn’t going to stand for that," Pozner added.
He was also asked about the conspiracy theories he had encountered to which he responded:
"Conversations denying the tragedy. Accusing the government of staging it. That Noah did not die. That I’m not Noah’s father. It all revolves around the notion that these are staged shootings, scripted events, that I’m an actor, that I’m paid, to fake the death of a child."
The 60 Minutes segment centered on a campaign to make social media companies responsible for the content that is shared on their platforms.
Pozner has continued to defend himself and his son's memory against the conspiracy theorists, winning a $450,000 settlement from the writers of a book that stated nobody lost their lives in the shooting.
In 2017, Lucy Richards of Florida was sentenced to five months in prison for sending Pozner death threats and was banned by a judge from browsing websites run by conspiracy theorists.
