All the torment and conspiracies that Alex Jones heaped upon the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting families via his show Infowars cost him nearly one billion dollars Wednesday. After all, the talk show host caused immeasurable damage to the lives of the family members after their little children died in a horrid mass shooting. Beginning just hours after the deaths.
Twenty children and six adults died in the massacre just before Christmas. Eight plaintiffs and one FBI agent filed defamation suits. The talk show host claimed actors were complicit in a plot. The plantiffs’ attorneys asked for a dollar for each of the 500,000 views. The jury doubled that number awarding the survivors $965 million in damages.
Jones lies led to the retraumatization of family members for years following the death of the little first graders. He called the tragedy a hoax, the dead children actors. The families faced years of death threats and rape threats. Jones’ followers confronted them at their homes. One family had to move six times.
But parents and siblings of the victims had an opportunity to speak at the trial. They told of being harassed for years by people who believed Jones’ lies. The social media was vicious. Jones urged people to go to the families homes and tape them. The families were inundated by strangers coming to record them.
Principal Dawn Hochsprung’s daughter Erica Lafferty told of the rape threats mailed to her home. Mark Barden said that conspiracy theorists sent him threats to defame his son’s grave. They urinated on the child’s grave. Others threatened to dig up the boy’s grave to “prove” it was a hoax.
Jones acknowledge Sandy Hook massacre was real. Yet he remained defiant calling the hearing a “kangaroo court.” He even disparaged the judge. He called the plaintiff’s attorney an ambulance chaser. The conspiracy theorist claimed the trial infringed upon his free speech rights, and he could not resist labeling the trial the Democrats’ conspiracy to take his show out:
‘I’ve already said “I’m sorry” hundreds of times and I’m done saying I’m sorry.’
The Connecticut trial:
‘accused Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, of using the mass killing to build his audience and make millions of dollars. Experts testified that Jones’ audience swelled when he made Sandy Hook a topic on the show, as did his revenue from product sales.’
Now Jones is looking at another trial in Texas in several months over a lawsuit filed by yet another family whose child died in the shooting. It first appeared that the remarkable judgments might bankrupt Free Speech Systems which is the umbrella company that covers Infowars. Certainly, Jones’ testimony was that he had filed for bankruptcy protection.
However, an economist testified in a Texas lawsuit that Jones and his company were worth up to $270 million. Jones is already being investigated for background fraud as he tried to avoid these findings.
Jones failed to share evidence including records that could have proven whether Infowars made money from spreading horrific lies about the Sandy Hook massacre. The conspiracist defaulted on bringing evidence that would exonerate him. Then he skipped out before closing the arguments.
In an earlier case, relatives of five children and the three teachers killed that bloody day took Jones to court for insisting there were only actors. One of the first responders, an FBI agent was also disparaged and threatened. And Jones said all of it was a plot to confiscate Americans’ guns.
The talking head received a judgment from the jury in the first case that left him close to $50 million poorer, and the dead child’s parents reimbursed for their terrible suffering at Jones’ hand.
Christie writes Gloria Christie Reports & Three White Lions Substack newsletters and a Three White Lions podcast available on Apple, Spotify, etc. She is a political journalist for the liberal online newspaper The Bipartisan Report. Written in her own unique style with a twist of humor. Christie’s Mueller Report Adventures In Bite-Sizes a real-life compelling spy mystery (in progress). Find her here on Facebook. Or at Three White Lions her book on Amazon Kindle Vella and the Gloria Christie Three White Lions podcast on Apple, Spotify, etc.