Alex Jones ordered to pay nearly $1B to families of Sandy Hook shooting victims

Alex Jones, right-wing conspiracy theorist, was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion to the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, and an F.B.I. agent who responded to the scene, for making millions off of lies he spread in claiming the deadly 2012 elementary school massacre was a “hoax.”

The jury awarded $965 million in damages based on defamation and slander as well as emotional distress to 15 individuals. Additional attorney’s fees will be awarded at a later date.

Last year, Jones was found liable by default for damages. Waterbury Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis took the rare step of issuing a default judgment in the case because she said Jones and his companies, Infowars and Free Speech Systems, had failed to turn over documents including records that might have showed how, and if, they had profited from spreading misinformation about the school shooting and other mass killings.

Jones has since recanted that stance and now says he believes that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which 20 young children and six school staff members were killed, was ‘100% real.’

The jury delivered its verdict in Waterbury court on Wednesday after four days of deliberation. They were tasked with deciding how much Jones and his company Free Speech Systems should pay to relatives of eight Sandy Hook victims and to an FBI agent who responded to the massacre.

The Infowars host declined to put on a defense during the trial.

The December 2012 shooting in Newtown killed 20 first-graders and six teachers and school staff. The gunman also killed his mother ahead of the school shooting and killed himself when police arrived, according to officials. Jones called the shooting a hoax meant to increase gun control. He has since admitted the shooting occurred.

After the trial began on Sept. 13, relatives of the victims took to the stand to describe the anguish they suffered when Jones, host of the conspiracy theory web-show “Infowars,” told his vast audience that the shooting was fake and that the 20 children killed in the attack were “crisis actors.”

Relatives of the victims said the harassment has not stopped in the nearly 10 years since the shooting.

The Sandy Hook families described being tormented with death and rape threats as a result of Jones’ claims. They sued him for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and violating Connecticut’s unfair trade practices law by profiting off the hoax lies.

Mark and Jackie Barden, whose 7-year-old son Daniel was killed, told the court on Oct.4 that people had urinated on their son’s grave and threatened to dig it up to prove he was still alive.

During closing arguments on Thursday, Oct. 6, before the jury began deliberations, Christopher Mattei, attorney for the victim’s families, told the court that families were “drowning in grief” after losing their young children in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, while Jones profited greatly off the lies he told his Infowars audience of millions.

“The lies that started on December 14, 2012, are continuing to this very day,” Mattei said to the court. “In two months it will be 10 years, 10 years since these families lost their loved ones and even now, even now, he’s still doing it.”

Mattei told the jury that Jones’ lies were driven by greed, according to the Independent.

“The more people see it, the more people come to the website, the more people come to the store,” Mattei said to the jury.

The attorney proceeded to display Infowars analytical audience numbers and drives for the courtroom to see. From December 2012 to January 2013, Infowar’s page views jumped 43% from 24,981,196 views to 35,702,506 as the Infowars host began to spread defamatory lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting being a hoax.

Mattei highlighted the fact that the lies were continuous. Two years removed from the tragedy, Infowars published a false article to its millions of followers with the headline: “FBI Says No One Killed At Sandy Hook.” The attorney told the jury the story drew in huge traffic for the website.

“Every single one of these families were drowning in grief, and Alex Jones put his foot right on top of them,” Mattei said to the jury Thursday.

The lawsuit is one of several filed against the conspiracy theorist by relatives of the 26 people killed in the mass shooting.

Although Jones’ walked back his stance in, during a contentious day of testimonies on Sept. 22, he told the jury he was “done saying I’m sorry” for calling the school shooting a hoax.

Mark Barden, whose son Daniel was among the 26 victims, told the jury that conspiracy theorists threatened to dig up the boy’s grave to prove the shooting never happened.

“This is so sacrosanct and hallowed a place for my family and to hear that people were desecrating it and urinating on it and threatening to dig it up, I don’t know how to articulate to you what that feels like,” Barden told the jury. “But that’s where we are.”

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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