Disaster for Alex Jones and Infowars as Supreme Court rejects last-ditch bid to avoid paying $1.4B to Sandy Hook families
The Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch appeal from right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones who is desperate to avoid paying nearly $1.5 billion to the families of the Sandy Hook massacre he falsely called a hoax.
The justices turned down his appeal without comment Tuesday.
Last week, Jones pressed for the nation’s high court to intervene, warning that unless justices take action, his Infowars website and assets will likely end up in the hands of satirical news website The Onion.
That potential acquisition — which was put on hold last year — would support families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, which killed 20 children between six and seven years old. Jones has called it “staged” and a “hoax,” fueling a wave of harassment against the families.
Without the Supreme Court’s intervention, Infowars stands to be acquired “by its ideological nemesis and destroyed,” his lawyers wrote in court filings last week.
In her late 2021 ruling, Judge Barbara Bellis found Jones liable for defamation and only convened a jury to determine the amount of damages the families would receive, citing Jones’ unwillingness to abide by the court’s orders to produce evidence to the plaintiffs.
In their Supreme Court appeal, Jones’ attorneys claimed those were “minor” discovery violations that did not justify an unjust and disproportionate penalty.
In 2022, a jury delivered a massive $964 million verdict against Jones and Infowars’ parent company Free Speech Systems, with Bellis adding an additional $473 million in punitive damages for spreading falsehoods about the shootin.
A Connecticut appeals court upheld all but $150 million of the verdict last December, while the state’s top court denied Jones’ request for a review in April. A separate $49 million judgment awarded to the parents of another Sandy Hook victim in a defamation lawsuit in Texas is currently being appealed.
The families have maintained that Jones’ conduct towards them over the years was both malicious and intentional, claiming that his motivation all along was profit, which they added was supported by his attempts to hide evidence throughout the case.
During the trial for damages, the families also testified that they were subjected to death threats and harassment from Jones’ supporters. The Infowars founder has insisted that there is no evidence linking him to those actions.
According to Jones’ legal team, the default ruling violates the First Amendment, and the $1.4 billion judgment runs afoul of the Eighth Amendment due to excessive punishment.
“It is an amount that can never be paid, and which based on the trial court’s findings may not be dischargeable in bankruptcy,” his lawyers argued. “The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions.”
His legal team has also argued that Jones’ remarks about the shooting being a hoax perpetrated by crisis actors weren’t defamatory to the victims but “expressions of constitutionally protected opinion.”
