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A Texas jury has ruled that Infowars host Alex Jones must pay the parents of a Sandy Hook school shooting victim $45.2 million in punitive damages. Friday’s decision comes a day after the same jury awarded the plaintiffs $4.1 million in compensatory damages, culminating the latest phase of a defamation lawsuit first filed in 2018 over Jones’ repeated false claims that the deadliest shooting in elementary school school in US history is a scam.
Jones was not in court when the jury read the unanimous verdict.
The damages phase of the trial, which ended Friday, marks the first time Jones, an influential purveyor of far-right conspiracy theories, has faced financial consequences in court for the outlandish lies he told through his Infowars show about the shooting. In the early days after the 2012 shooting, which killed 26 people, including 20 young children, Jones said on his program that “nobody died” at Sandy Hook and that the attack was a ruse “staged” by advocates for gun control in order to produce anti-gun sentiment.
Alex Jones must pay $4.1 million to Sandy Hook parents, jury says
In the lawsuit filed by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, the settlement hints at what Jones may face in the coming months in her additional Sandy Hook defamation lawsuits in Texas and Connecticut.
It remains to be seen how much of the punitive damages the parents will ultimately receive, as Texas law limits such awards to a plaintiff to twice the compensatory award plus $750,000, according to Carl Tobias, a tort expert at the university’s law school of Richmond.
That calculation means plaintiffs could see less than a quarter of the total award awarded by a jury, and that amount could be even further reduced if the compensatory damages are for non-economic reasons, such as emotional distress, rather than lost wages , said Tobias.
Punitive damages are meant to sting, Tobias said, so juries tend to award amounts proportionate to the defendant’s finances, although many states controversially have caps on such awards.
“The theory is that the damage is supposed to be significant enough to deter the person who did it – and other members of the public,” he said.
Jurors on Friday heard additional testimony about Jones’ finances before deliberating how much to punish Jones for his lies and deter him from repeating them.
In court Friday, Bernard Pettingill, Jr., a forensic economist and former professor of economics at the Florida Institute of Technology, testified that he estimated the combined net worth of Jones and his business units at between $135 million and $270 million.
“You can’t separate Alex Jones from the companies. He is the companies,” Pettingill said.
The testimony stands in stark contrast to Jones’ public statements that he is financially destitute; his defense team initially asked jurors to award the plaintiffs $1 per claim after claiming Jones lost millions of dollars and followers when he was kicked off social media platforms like YouTube and Spotify.
Free Speech Systems, the parent company of the Infowars website, filed for bankruptcy during the trial, although Pettingill and other witnesses said it was impossible to fully verify Jones’ finances because he had not provided documents to the court .
Jones’ refusal to comply with court orders regarding documents and other evidence led District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis County, Texas, to enter judgments against Jones last September, making him liable for all damages.
But in a dramatic courtroom moment on Wednesday, it was revealed that Jones’ legal team had inadvertently sent the contents of his mobile phone to a lawyer representing the parents. The apparent error prompted plaintiff’s attorney Mark Bankston to accuse Jones of lying under oath when he testified that he did not have any text messages related to the Sandy Hook massacre.
On August 3, attorney Mark Bankston accused Alex Jones of perjury after cross-examining the contents of Jones’ phone. (Video: KXAN News)
During jury deliberations, Jones’ attorneys asked for a mistrial and demanded that Bankston delete the phone records they turned over, which the judge denied.
Jones’ lawyers said the legal battle against him was an attack on First Amendment rights, while the parents’ legal team argued his rhetoric was defamatory and not protected.
Sandy Hook attorneys say Alex Jones’ attorneys accidentally gave them the contents of his phone
Heslin and Lewis testified during the nearly two-week defamation phase of the case that Jones’ relentless false claims that their son never died and that they were “crisis actors” created a “living hell” for them.
While on the bench Tuesday, Heslin said that while he was grieving for his son, he was also dealing with death threats and abuse from those who embraced Jones’ rhetoric.
Judge Maya Guerra Gamble reprimands Infowars founder Alex Jones for lying under oath during his libel trial in Travis County on August 2, 2022. (Video: The Washington Post)
“I can’t even describe the last nine and a half years, the hell that I and others have had to go through because of the recklessness and negligence of Alex Jones,” Heslin told the jury.
In his closing arguments Friday, Bankston said jurors were tasked with punishing and deterring Jones with their verdict and urged them to use their voices to “stop Alex Jones.”
“You really have the ability today to stop this guy from doing this again: continuing to tear at the fabric of our society because of the large monetary gain he’s made so far,” Bankston said.
“Speech is free,” he added. “Lies you pay for.”
Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.
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