Supreme Court spurns Alex Jones' bid to block $1.5 billion defamation judgment

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court refused Tuesday to stand in the way of a $1.5 billion defamation judgment against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for spreading false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.

The justices did not provide an explanation for their decision, which they issued without asking the families of the Sandy Hook victims to respond to Jones’ appeal. It leaves in place one of the largest defamation judgments in U.S. history.

“The Supreme Court properly rejected Jones’s latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused. We look forward to enforcing the jury’s historic verdict and making Jones and Infowars pay for what they have done,” Chris Mattei, an attorney representing the victims’ families, said in a statement.

In his petition for review, Jones argued a Connecticut judge was wrong to impose a default judgment against him, which he called a “death penalty sanction.”

“It is an amount that can never be paid, and which based on the trial court’s findings may not be dischargeable in bankruptcy,” Jones wrote. “The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions.”

Just a month after Jones lost a similar defamation case in Texas by default judgment, Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis found him automatically liable to the families for failing to comply with her discovery orders in November 2021.

Jones asked the justices to declare the sought information — about his business finances and the analytics of how his social media posts and websites performed as a result of his defamatory statements — irrelevant to the case. He claimed the issue didn’t warrant sanctions and that the judgment poses a threat to all media broadcasters who will be inclined to self-censor reporting.

In the ensuing “damages-only” trial, a jury awarded the 15 family members of Sandy Hook shooting victims, along with one FBI agent, $1 billion in damages, to which the judge added nearly $500,000 in punitive damages.

This led the conservative media host to file for bankruptcy in 2022. In August, a Texas state judge ordered all assets from Jones’ conspiracy theory site, Infowars, to be liquidated and paid to the families. The move reopened the door for the satirical news outlet The Onion to buy the platform and turn it into a parody site.

“Without a stay now … Infowars will have been acquired by its ideological nemesis and destroyed — which Jones believes is the plaintiffs’ intention,” Jones wrote in his emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

The defamation suit against Jones and his company Free Speech Systems was spurred by his coverage of the 2012 Connecticut-based Sandy Hook Elementary School murders, where Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 students and six staff members before dying by suicide.

Jones expressed opinions of the tragedy being a “hoax” or “staged” by the Obama administration to promote stricter gun control laws. He urged his listeners to investigate for themselves rather than relying on news media, leading to years of threats and harassment against the victims’ families.

Erica Lafferty, the daughter of slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, testified that people mailed rape threats to her house. Mark Barden told of how conspiracy theorists had urinated on the grave of his 7-year-old son, Daniel, and threatened to dig up the coffin.

Hensel Richman testified that she and her husband were flooded with messages saying their daughter did not exist before Jeremy Richman died by suicide in 2019.

Attorneys representing the families and Jones did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988, or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). Visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources * for a list of additional resources.*

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