Nov 27, 2023:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/27/sandy-hook-families-alex-jones-legal-debt-00128825
Jan 7, 2023:
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3803823-alex-jones-attorney-suspended-for-sharing-sandy-hook-families-medical-records
Dec 2, 2022:
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3759482-alex-jones-files-for-bankruptcy-as-damages-owed-to-sandy-hook-families-total-nearly-1-5b-report
Nov 23, 2022:
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3748500-judge-rules-alex-jones-must-pay-full-50m-in-damages-to-sandy-hook-family
Nov 10, 2022:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/connecticut-judge-orders-alex-jones-pay-more-damages-sandy-hook-victims-families
Oct 23, 2022:
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3700261-alex-jones-files-appeal-for-new-trial-in-sandy-hook-defamation-case
Sep 22, 2022:
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3657278-alex-jones-im-done-saying-im-sorry-over-false-sandy-hook-hoax-claims
Sep 13, 2022:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/alex-jones-faces-2nd-trial-sandy-hook-hoax/story?id=89825009
Aug 5, 2022:
In Austin, Texas a jury awarded $45 million in punitive damages to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of 6-year-old Sandy Hook shooting victim Jesse Lewis, in the Alex Jones defamation case.
Yesterday, the same jury awarded Heslin and Lewis $4.1 million in compensatory damages.
Jones, who is widely regarded as a right-wing conspiracy theorist, is the host of his own Austin-based Alex Jones Show and is the owner of the Infowars website.
The lawsuit was filed because Jones claimed on his show that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax staged by the U.S government in order give the government more reason to take away American citizen's guns. That claim resulted in harassment of, and death threats made to parents of some Sandy Hook victims by some of Jones' supporters.
Source:
Lenzen, Cecilia. (August 5, 2022). "Jury awards parents of Sandy Hook victim more than $45 million in punitive damages in Alex Jones defamation case". The Texas Tribune. Retrieved 2022-08-09
Lenzen, Cecilia. (August 4, 2022). "Jury awards parents of Sandy Hook shooting victim $4.1 million in defamation case against Alex Jones". The Texas Tribune. Retrieved 2022-08-09
The lawsuit was filed in late 2018. There was no jury trial to determine whether Jones was innocent or guilty of defamation. Instead, the judge assigned to the case, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, entered a default judgment against him on September 27, 2021 because of Jones' "persistent discovery abuses" during the course of the trial, his failure to turn over required documents, and his failure to carry out other obligations required by the court.
In 2019, Jones sought to have the case dismissed on free speech grounds, but he was rejected by the Texas Court of Appeals.
In addition to this lawsuit, Jones has been the target of three other lawsuits filed by Sandy Hook families, all of which resulted in judgement by default.
View detailed information about case filings for all four lawsuits here.
Source:
Hauser, Christine. (October 1, 2021). "Alex Jones Loses by Default in Sandy Hook Defamation Lawsuits". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-08-13
More:
- Alex Jones Scolded By Judge for Lying Under Oath After Parents Testify in Sandy Hook Case | Rolling Stone
- Alex Jones's Legal Meltdown | Texas Monthly
- Alex Jones Gloats About Bankruptcy Plot To Tie Up Sandy Hook Damages 'For Years' | HuffPost
- Alex Jones' $49.3M verdict and the future of misinformation | The Hill
- Five of the most dramatic scenes from the Alex Jones trial | The Hill
- Alex Jones concedes Sandy Hook attack was '100% real' | The Hill
In early August, 2018, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify removed podcasts, pages, and channels belonging to Jones and InfoWars from their social media platforms. The companies stated they did this not because of Jones' conspiracy theories, but because Infowars "expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics."
On September 6, 2018, Twitter "permanently suspended" Jones and InfoWars for violating Twitter's abusive behavior policy.
In 2016, Jones spread lies supporting the conspiracy theory "Pizzagate" which claims that the Washington, D.C. pizzeria Comet Ping Pong is a front for a child sex ring involving Hillary and Bill Clinton. In 2017 Jones apologized to the owner of the pizzeria for his remarks.
Just before the turn of the century, Jones pushed a conspiracy theory regarding Y2K. Read more about this in an article entitled "My mother has been a follower of Alex Jones since the '90s. She's not going to stop now."
Jones also pushed a conspiracy theory regarding the 1993 standoff between law enforcement and the Branch Davidians (led by David Koresh) in Waco, Texas. Read more about this in an article entitled "How a Crazy Plan to Rebuild Waco Compound Gave Us Alex Jones".
Commentary:
Most likely, you've heard Trump and other conservatives refer to Republicans who don't embrace the MAGA movement as RINO (Republican in name only). Well, I'm going to dub my own personal acronym for Alex Jones and others like him: RWNJ (right-wing nut job).
If you've followed Jones at all over the past five years or so, you know he's a far-right anti-government conservative, and he's one of Donald Trump's most ardent supporters. By his actions and his words he has proven himself to be a RWNJ.
Think about how paranoid and full of government hate you'd have to be to not only believe, but then go ahead and broadcast out to the public that the Sandy Hook massacre was a "hoax" concocted and carried out by the U.S. government to help give that same government more reason to take away American citizen's guns. You'd have to be some kind of "nut job", and frankly borderline insane, to believe something like that.
Facts and objective reality prove that Sandy Hook was real. Jones eventually, finally admitted that Sandy Hook was real, but by then way too much damage had been done by his loud, foul, and relentless mouth.
My previous post on this website entitled "Op-Ed | A Message to Those Who Support Donald Trump and the Ongoing 'Stolen' 2020 Election Narrative: Belief is not Fact" goes into depth about Trump and belief versus fact. Jones is a prime and highly disturbing example of what happens when a person gets so caught up in their emotions, their beliefs, and their "agendas" that they ignore and become totally blind to simple, objective facts.
During the course of the defamation lawsuit, Jones said:
This is quintessential Jones, verbalizing his beliefs that all government is corrupt.
In early 2019, during a sworn deposition, Jones said the following:
In that same deposition, Jones also said that it was the "trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much" that caused him to distrust everything, "kind of like a child whose parents lie to them over and over again."
Source:
Maxouris, Christina; Joseph, Elizabeth. (April 1, 2019). "Alex Jones says 'form of psychosis' made him believe events like Sandy Hook massacre were staged". CNN. Retrieved 2022-08-14
Jones claims that his prior "form of psychosis" was caused by the media. Blaming your own mental/emotional state on the media? Yeah, right. No judge or reasonable human being on planet earth would buy that argument.
For many years Jones has been belching out conspiracy theories, hate, and violence on his podcasts, and making a ton of money doing it. Jones is highly disturbing example of what's terribly wrong with America.