Infowars’ Alex Jones was ordered to pay $4,100,000 in compensatory damages to a family of a child killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, who triumphed over him in a case over the 2012 mass shooting. He still faces a judgment on potential punitive damages in the case.
In 2012, a gunman killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut. Jones used his platform as host of the most conspiratorial-minded show online to repeatedly lie about the shooting. Over a number of years, Jones called children crisis actors and claimed the shooting never happened.
Ten members of the jury signed on to the verdict finding against Jones. This is just the first of several cases Jones will face, after he was found at fault for lying about the school shooting.
Lawyers for the family members of the victim were asking for $150,000,000. Jones claimed, over the course of the trial, that almost any settlement would bankrupt him. However, it was revealed that Jones’ empire, at one point, may have been making up to $800,000 a day.
Over the course of the past decade, alongside his lies about the shooting at Sandy Hook and a number of other false conspiracies, Jones’ Infowars became an online titan.
The trial captivated the internet as clips of Jones being scolded by a judge for lying under oath went viral. Jones’s defense team also accidentally forwarded the entire contents of his phone to the lawyers for the families of Sandy Hook, which revealed he’d misled the court during discovery.
Jones has pushed numerous other conspiracies on his channels, although he has never been successfully sued in court before.
During the trial, Jones admitted that he knew the shooting was real. However, he was not in the courthouse when the ruling was issued.