A Connecticut jury ordered Infowars founder Alex Jones to pay $965 million in damages to the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook shooting for the suffering caused by years of lies that the massacre was a hoax, the Washington Post reported. Yesterday’s verdict marks the largest award to date in a multi-pronged legal battle by the families to hold Jones responsible for circulating falsehoods about the 2012 mass shooting, in which 20 children and six educators were killed in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. Within hours of the shooting, Jones was telling his audience that it was staged as a pretext for confiscating guns. Within days, he began to suggest that grieving parents were actors. In the years that followed, he repeatedly said the massacre was faked. The families testified during the trial that the lies spread by Jones led to harassment and threats by conspiracy theorists who have accused them of faking their own children’s deaths. They described feeling unsafe in their homes and hypervigilant in public. Some of the families moved away from Newtown. The largest single award of $120 million went to Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, was killed in the shooting. Jones spent years mocking Parker as an actor. The plaintiffs also included an FBI agent who responded to the shooting. He was awarded $90 million in damages. Read more.
In related news, Alex Jones will join his bankrupt production company in court-supervised settlement talks with families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims, Bloomberg News reported. Jones has agreed to participate in the talks, his lawyer, Shelby A. Jordan, said in a federal court hearing in Houston on Wednesday. The mediation will move forward in the coming weeks while a bankruptcy trustee investigates Jones’ bankrupt company, Free Speech Systems, and its finances, lawyers said in court. FSS filed bankruptcy in July in the second attempt this year by companies controlled by Jones to force Sandy Hook families that have won court victories against him to resolve their cases in bankruptcy. Last month, Bankruptcy Judge Christopher M. Lopez expanded the powers of the trustee overseeing the FSS bankruptcy case, and ordered an investigation of the company. Read more.
