By Dietrich Knauth
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to hear a challenge by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to a $1.4 billion judgment awarded to families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in Connecticut over the Infowars website founder’s false statements that the 2012 incident was a hoax.
The justices turned away his appeal of the Connecticut Appellate Court’s decision in a defamation lawsuit against him to uphold most of the judgment issued by a judge and jury in 2022 to 14 family members of children and school employees who were killed and an FBI agent who responded to the shooting. In doing so, the top U.S. judicial body left the judgment in place.
Twenty-six people – 20 students and six staff members at the school in Newtown, Connecticut – were killed in the incident by a 20-year-old former student who then fatally shot himself.
Jones has argued that the judgment in the lawsuit brought against him in Connecticut violated his rights under the U.S. Constitution to due process and free speech. It is believed to be the largest judgment in American libel case history, according to his filing to the Supreme Court.
He also lost a similar lawsuit in Texas, though the roughly $50 million judgment in that case was far lower. Jones is separately appealing that judgment. He declared bankruptcy after losing the lawsuits.
Chris Mattei, an attorney representing the Connecticut plaintiffs, said that the families look forward to enforcing their judgment against Jones now that the Supreme Court has rejected his “latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused.”
Jones said on a program shown on the Infowars website that the Supreme Court left in place a flawed ruling that empowered judges to find liability without a jury’s involvement.
“Judges are now king,” Jones said. “They can just find you guilty, have a show trial and tell a jury that you’ve got all this money and not even show any evidence of it, and then make it non-dischargeable so that you could never even pay it back.”
Jones vowed that he would not be silenced even if a court allows the Sandy Hook families to seize Infowars as part of their efforts to collect on the judgment.
He was sued for defamation after calling the shooting a “false flag” operation meant to stir up anti-gun sentiment among Americans, and he has said that the parents of slain children were “crisis actors” who were faking their grief in television interviews.
Jones refused to cooperate in the legal proceedings. He has objected to the fact that Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis determined he was liable for defaming the parents, and that a six-member jury was asked only to consider how much he should pay. Jurors awarded compensatory damages of $965 million in the trial held in the city of Waterbury.
The judge then added $473 million in punitive damages, and an appeals court later reduced that amount to $323 million after Jones appealed. In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Jones challenged the original $1.4 billion sum.
The verdict is so large that it “can never be paid,” according to the filing, and a bankruptcy court has ruled that Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to avoid paying the debt.
In his filing to the Supreme Court, Jones said that the judge’s default judgment was based on “small discovery errors” and “trivial” missteps by his lawyers, and led to an unfair trial.
Jones previously asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the Connecticut case in 2021, after Bellis imposed sanctions on Jones for public statements he made during the litigation but before he was found liable for defamation. The Supreme Court declined to take the case at that time.
Jones is separately appealing his loss in Texas, and is currently challenging a court order that would force the sale of Infowars. Jones faces two more defamation lawsuits from other Sandy Hook parents and the family of a man who was falsely identified as a school shooter. Those cases have not yet gone to trial.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
