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Infowars founder Alex Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion to relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting for spreading the lie that the massacre was staged — a stunning verdict that one lawyer called “probably one of the largest defamation verdicts in U.S. history.”
. . . his claims that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown was staged by advocates of gun control sparked a years-long legal battle. Jones, who has used his website Infowars as an unfiltered platform to spread and amplify conspiracy theories and far-right political ideas for decades, labeled grieving parents of the victims “crisis actors” and called the massacre “the fakest thing since the $3 bill.”
. . . last month, he once again told his audience that people were right to raise questions about the massacre, saying, “I don’t really know what really happened there.”
. . . Jones faces three separate defamation lawsuits for his comments about Sandy Hook.
In 2018, families of some of the children killed in the shooting, along with an FBI agent who was among the first to respond at the scene, sued Jones in Connecticut. This is the case in which a jury decided Wednesday that Jones should pay $965 million in damages for the emotional distress the plaintiffs said Jones’s claims — which in some cases targeted individual parents — caused them.
. . . The size of the damages awarded in that case signaled that the jurors found Jones’s conduct particularly reprehensible and harmful. Outside the courtroom after the verdict was read, Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter was killed at Sandy Hook and who was awarded the highest amount in damages of any Connecticut plaintiff, said he was grateful to the jury. “Every day in that courtroom, we got up on the stand and we told the truth. Telling the truth shouldn’t be so hard, and it shouldn’t be so scary,” he said.
- Compensatory Damages.
- Defamation.
- Conspiracy Theories.
