The Supreme Court spurned a last-ditch plea from conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones Tuesday to throw out a $1.4 billion defamation judgment against him over wildly false claims he espoused about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre.
Jones argued that First Amendment protections should shield him from the monetary punishment, claiming that the penalty would lead to the end of his Infowars empire.
“The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions,” his legal team argued in its September petition to the high court.
The Supreme Court rejected an appeal from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and left in place the $1.4 billion judgment against him over his description of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. REUTERSIn keeping with standard practice, the justices did not provide a reason for their decision not to hear Jones’ appeal — listing it with dozens of other cases rejected for oral argument.
A Connecticut jury found Jones liable for defamation in 2022 over his false claims that the murder of 20 first-grade students and six faculty members at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a “false flag” operation.
The Infowars host further falsely claimed that the shooting was staged and “completely fake with actors.” Jones had been a staunch critic of the push for stricter gun control laws in the wake of the shooting.
The justices did not comment on their order, which they issued without even asking the families of the Sandy Hook victims to respond to Jones’ appeal. REUTERSFamily members of the victims, as well as an FBI agent who responded to the massacre, had sued Jones for slander.
“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 for the Sandy Hook families, said after the high court’s move.
Jones filed for bankruptcy in late 2022, and his lawyers told the justices that the “plaintiffs have no possible hope of collecting” the entire judgment. APIn his plea to the high court, Jones had argued that the end of Infowars would mean his audience “will not have just been deprived of a valued source of information, the risk is they will have been greatly deceived and damaged by operation of media source InfoWars by their ideological opposites.”
Jones, 51, has yet to pay any of his 10-figure obligation and is mounting a separate appeal of a $49 million defamation judgment in Texas, also related to his statements on the Sandy Hook killings. The Infowars host is also challenging efforts to liquidate his assets to help pay off the penalty.
The Connecticut judgment entailed a $964 million verdict and a subsequent $473 million in additional punitive damages.
Jones declared bankruptcy in 2022, and his attorneys have claimed “plaintiffs have no possible hope of collecting” all of the money.
