Alex Jones, host of Infowars, and his company were ordered to pay an additional sum of $473 million for peddling false conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school massacre, bringing the total judgment against him to a whopping $1.44 billion.
Barbara Bellis, the presiding judge of Connecticut, imposed punitive damages on Jones and Free Speech Systems. Jones incessantly told his followers the massacre that killed 20 first graders and six educators was staged by “crisis actors” to enact more gun control.
“The record supports the plaintiffs’ argument that the defendant’s conduct was intentional and malicious, and certain to cause harm by their infrastructure, ability to spread content, and massive audience including the infowarriors,” the judge wrote in a 45-page ruling.
Christopher Mattei, a lawyer who represented Sandy Hook, said he hopes the award acts as a deterrence to conspiracy theorists.
“The Court recognized the ‘intentional, malicious … and heinous’ conduct of Mr Jones and his business entities,” Mattei said.
On Thursday’s show, Jones called the award “ridiculous” and a “joke” and said he had little money to pay the damages.
“Well, of course I’m laughing at it,” he said. “It’d be like if you sent me a bill for a billion dollars in the mail. Oh man, we got you. It’s all for psychological effect. It’s all the Wizard of Oz … when they know full well the bankruptcy going on and all the rest of it that it’ll show what I’ve got and that’s it, and I have almost nothing.”
Families of victims of the shooting as well as an FBI Agent testified during a month-long trial about being threatened and harassed for years by people who deny the shooting happened. Strangers showed up at some of their homes and confronted some of them in public. They were threatened with rape and death.
Six jurors ordered Jones to pay $965 million to compensate the 15 plaintiffs for defamation, infliction of emotional distress and violations of Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act.
Jones brandished the trial as an assault on free speech rights. He says he will exercise his right of appeal. He also has said he doesn’t have the money to satisfy the judgment sum because he has less than $2 million to his name — which was a contradiction to an earlier testimony at a similar trial in Texas. Free Speech Systems, meanwhile, is seeking bankruptcy protection.
He said he only had a “couple hundred thousand dollars” in his savings account.
Bellis found Jones and Infowars’ parent company liable for damages without a trial last year, as a consequence for what she called his repeated failures to turn over many financial documents and other records to the plaintiffs. After the unusual “default” ruling, the jury was tasked only with deciding on the amount of compensatory damages and whether punitive damages were warranted.
Jones said that, though he availed the court with tonnes of documents, the default ruling deprived him of his right to present a defence against the lawsuit.
The Sandy Hook plaintiffs’ lawyers are entitled to get one-third of the $965 million in compensatory damages under a retainer agreement.
There is no limit on punitive damages for violations of the UTP Act. No specific amount was claimed by the plaintiffs, but under one hypothetical calculation, they said such damages could be around $2.75 trillion under the unfair trade law.
In a similar trial in Texas, Jones was ordered to pay nearly $50 million to another child’s parents killed in the Sandy Hook shooting for calling the massacre a hoax. A forensic economist testified during that trial that Jones and Free Speech Systems have a combined net worth as high as $270 million.
A third and final trial over Jones’ hoax claims is scheduled to begin at the end of the year in Texas. As in Connecticut, Jones was found liable for damages without trials in both Texas cases because he failed to turn over records to the plaintiffs.
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