CONSPIRACY THEORIST ALEX JONES ORDERED TO PAY NEARLY $1 BILLION TO SANDY HOOK LIES

Thu 13 October 2022:

Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist, has been ordered to pay $965 million in damages for making false claims that the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 was a hoax.

In the defamation trial in Connecticut, the families of eight victims and an FBI agent who responded to the attack had demanded at least $550 million.

They claimed that the right-wing radio host’s false statements caused a decade of stalking and threats of death.

Sandy Hook Elementary School saw the deaths of twenty children and six adults.

The verdict on Wednesday came after three weeks of testimony in a state court in Waterbury, Connecticut.

Jones for years relentlessly promoted the lie that the massacre never happened, and that the grieving families seen in news coverage were actors hired as part of a plot to take away Americans’ guns.

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During closing arguments last week, lawyers for the families of eight Sandy Hook victims said Jones for years cashed in on lies about the shooting, which drove traffic to his Infowars website and boosted sales of its various products.

For years, Jones, the founder of the conspiracy-filled Infowars website and talk show, insisted that the shooting was a “staged” government plot to take away Americans’ firearms and that “no-one died.”

He claimed that some of the victims’ parents were “crisis actors” and that some victims never existed.

The families, meanwhile, suffered a decade-long campaign of harassment and death threats from Jones’s followers, lawyer Chris Mattei said.

“Every single one of these families [was] drowning in grief, and Alex Jones put his foot right on top of them,” Mattei told jurors.

Jones’s lawyer, Norman Pattis, countered during his closing arguments that the plaintiffs had shown scant evidence of quantifiable losses and urged jurors to ignore the political undercurrents in the case.

“This is not a case about politics,” Pattis said. “It’s about how much to compensate the plaintiffs.”

Jones now acknowledges the attack was “100% real”, a concession he made in August at a separate defamation trial in Texas.

Many of the families were visibly emotional, some sobbing as the verdict was announced on Wednesday.

A series of parents’ emotional testimony during the three-week trial was notable.

Some claimed to have experienced an onslaught of online abuse, while others claimed they were forced to move homes repeatedly out of fear. Mark Barden, a father, recalled learning that his son Daniel’s grave was being desecrated by people “urinating on it and threatening to dig it up.”