This isn’t the first time the conservative social media guy has been ordered to pay out for his comments calling the mass shooting of students and teachers a ‘hoax that parents where part of’, which resulted in threats to the parents of the victims….A FBI agent will also share in the fines …..
Jones has tried escape and hide having assets to pay the civil fines…
This is one of the several civil cases against him….
Alex Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, must pay close to $1 billion to the family members of eight victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary and an F.B.I. agent who responded to the scene of the 2012 massacre, which killed 20 first graders and six educators.
Mr. Jones, who was not in court to hear the jury’s decision, had been found liable for defamation after he spent years falsely describing the shooting as a hoax and accusing the victims’ families of being actors complicit in the plot. As a result, the families were threatened in person and online. He used his Infowars platform to spread these lies.
Here’s what to know:
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The jury’s decision divided the money among 15 plaintiffs: 14 relatives of eight Sandy Hook victims, and William Aldenberg, an F.B.I. agent targeted by conspiracy theorists. The plaintiffs were awarded varying amounts by the jurors, who considered their testimony and other evidence presented in court to gauge the damage done to their reputations, invasion of their privacy and other factors.
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This case presented the greatest financial risk to Mr. Jones, because he was found liable of violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, by using lies about the shooting to sell products on Infowars. There is no cap on punitive damages under that law.
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Mr. Jones’s assets are a matter of dispute. He has put Infowars’ parent company into bankruptcy, but the families have accused him of doing so to avoid paying the damages.
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Mr. Jones has a third Sandy Hook damages trial pending stemming from a defamation suit he lost to Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, parents of Noah Pozner. An earlier trial, in the suit brought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of Jesse Lewis, ended with Mr. Jones being ordered to pay $4 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages to the Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis…..
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First Amendment scholars rejected Mr. Jones’s free speech defensein a separate defamation case brought against him in 2018 by a Democratic Party activist. Mr. Jones had argued that his conspiracy theories about the activist amounted to opinion, not statements of fact. The scholars retorted that freedom of speech protections do not extend to defamatory speech.
“The Supreme Court has never endorsed the view that knowingly false statements causing direct, legally cognizable harm to another should be protected,” they wrote.