You may remember one month ago when a jury in Waterbury, Connecticut, awarded compensatory and punitive damages approaching $1 billion to families who sued conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for defamation. Jone and his InfoWars show made a lot of money promoting the fact-free conspiracy theory that the 20 6- and 7-year-olds and the six other adults murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 weren’t real. Jones spent years promoting the idea that a secret cabal controlling the world faked their deaths and hired dozens of people to spend the rest of their lives pretending to be in anguish over the deaths of their loved ones.
What was the motivation? To take away your guns. That was 20 years ago. Depending on your criteria, there have been no fewer than 100 children killed on school grounds in the United States since that time. No major federal gun laws have passed to mitigate this. If there is a hell, Jones will have a special place there.
On Thursday, Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis ruled Jones must pay $473 million in punitive damages. This comes on top of the compensatory damages he already faces. An attorney for the plaintiffs, Chris Mattei, told reporters that he believes the ruling “serves to reinforce the message of this case: those who profit from lies targeting the innocent will face justice.”
RELATED STORY: Jury awards Sandy Hook families almost $1 billion in damages against Alex Jones
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The day before this decision was handed down, Bellis temporarily blocked the InfoWars conspiracist from moving any personal assets outside of the U.S. In her decision on Thursday, she told the court: “The record also establishes that the defendants repeated the conduct and attacks on the plaintiffs for nearly a decade, including during the trial, wanton, malicious, and heinous conduct that caused harm to the plaintiffs. This depravity, and cruel, persistent course of conduct by the defendants establishes the highest degree of reprehensibility and blameworthiness.”
Jones is now on the hook for around $1.44 billion in this lawsuit. According to Fox 34, Jones spent his day on his show saying he is broke and that the ruling is a “joke,” ranting: “Well, of course I’m laughing at it. It’d be like if you sent me a bill for a billion dollars in the mail. Oh man, we got you. It’s all for psychological effect. It’s all the Wizard of Oz ... when they know full well the bankruptcy going on and all the rest of it, that it’ll show what I’ve got and that’s it, and I have almost nothing.”
The ruling breaks down into $150 million for violating Connecticut's Unfair Trade Practices Act and around $323 million in attorney fees for the families.
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