Joanna Slater reports in the Washington Post that:
A Connecticut jury ordered Infowars founder Alex Jones to pay $965 million in damages to the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook shooting for the suffering caused by years of lies that the massacre was a hoax.
Wednesday’s verdict marks the largest award to date in a multipronged legal battle by the families to hold Jones responsible for circulating falsehoods about the 2012 mass shooting, in which 20 children and six educators were killed in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
Jones has been spewing lies for a long time:
Within hours of the shooting, Jones was telling his audience that it was staged as a pretext for confiscating guns. Within days, he began to suggest that grieving parents were actors. In the years that followed, he repeatedly said the massacre was faked.
The families testified during the trial that the lies spread by Jones led to harassment and threats by conspiracy theorists who have accused them of faking their own children’s deaths. They described feeling unsafe in their homes and hypervigilant in public. Some of the families moved away from Newtown.
The largest single award of $120 million went to Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, was killed in the shooting. Jones spent years mocking Parker as an actor. The plaintiffs also included an FBI agent who responded to the shooting. He was awarded $90 million in damages.After the unanimous verdict was announced, the family members gathered outside the courthouse and thanked the jury.
“The truth matters,” said Erica Lafferty, the daughter of Sandy Hook Elementary Principal Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, who was killed at the school. “Those who profit off other people’s pain and trauma will pay for what they’ve done.”
This was the second verdict against Jones:
In August, a jury in a different case in Texas said Jones must pay nearly $50 million to the parents of Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old killed at Sandy Hook. The actual payout, however, will be far smaller because of state limits on such awards.
That's over one billion dollars. And there are more trials coming.
The truth matters. And this kind of lying must be expensive -- very expensive.
Image: bloomberg.com
6 comments:
The damage awards are one thing; collecting is another. I understand that Jones squirreled away his ill-gotten gains in complex off-shore investments. Getting to the bottom of those may take years.
Cap
I suspect it won't be easy, Cap. But I do hear that bankruptcy laws won't protect him.
I’ve long maintained that Alex Jones
may be the most diseased person in North America
The way he’s managed to monetize Hate
is Malignant Atrocity that cannot be measured
I’m astonished that Joe Rogan actually defended him
Say it ain’t so.. Joe🦎
Some people are Evil Personified, sal.
Jones is entitled to propose any political view, I suppose, as long as it doesn't destroy the physical or mental health of other citizens. So if he was trying to ensure that gun owners would be free to buy the guns of their choice (in the USA of course, not Australia etc), then he can do it.
However Jones concentrated, on public radio and tv, on ensuring that the families of the dead children and teachers from 2012 would never... ever recover. Jones could even be charged with intentionally promoting suicide amongst the families.
I agree, Hels. Jones is all about cruelty -- monstrous cruelty.
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