Photo Credit: AP.
WATERBURY,
Conn. (AP) — The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones should pay $965 million to
people who suffered from his false claim that the Sandy Hook Elementary School
shooting was a hoax, a jury in Connecticut decided Wednesday.
The verdict
is the second big judgment against the Infowars host over his relentless
promotion of the lie that the 2012 massacre never happened, and that the
grieving families seen in news coverage were actors hired as part of a plot to
take away people’s guns.
It came in a
lawsuit filed by the relatives of five children and three educators killed in
the mass shooting, plus an FBI agent who was among the first responders to the
scene. A Texas jury in August awarded nearly $50 million to the parents of another
slain child.
Robbie
Parker, who lost his 6-year-old daughter, Emilie, said outside the Connecticut
court that he was proud that “what we were able to accomplish was just to
simply tell the truth.”
“And it shouldn’t be this hard, and it shouldn’t
be this scary,” he added, his voice breaking.
Jones wasn’t
at court but reacted on his Infowars show.
As courtroom
video showed the plaintiffs’ names being read out along with the jury awards to
each, Jones said that he himself had never mentioned their names.
“All made
up. Hilarious,” he said. “So this is what a show trial looks like. I mean, this
is the left completely out of control.”
Jones’
lawyer, Norm Pattis, said the verdict was higher than he expected. He plans to
appeal.
The trial featured
tearful testimony from parents and siblings of the victims, who told about how
they were threatened and harassed for years by people who believed the lies
told on Jones’ show.
Strangers
showed up at their homes to record them. People hurled abusive comments on
social media. Mark Barden said conspiracy theorists had urinated on the grave
of his 7-year-old son, Daniel, and threatened to dig up the coffin. Erica
Lafferty, the daughter of slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, testified
that people mailed rape threats to her house.
“I wish that
after today, I can just be a daughter grieving my mother and stop worrying
about the conspiracy theorists,” Lafferty said outside court. But she predicted
that Jones’ “hate, lies and conspiracy theories will follow both me and my
family through the rest of our days.”
To plaintiff
William Sherlach, the verdict “shows that the internet is not the wild, wild
West, and that your actions have consequences.”
He had
testified about seeing online posts that falsely posited that the shooting was
a hoax, that his slain wife, school psychologist Mary Sherlach, never existed;
that he was part of a financial cabal and somehow involved with the school
shooter’s father; and more. He told jurors the shooting deniers’ vitriol made
him worry for his family’s safety.
“Going forward — because, unfortunately, there
will be other horrific events like this — people like Alex Jones will have to
rethink what they say,” Sherlach said.
Testifying
during the trial, Jones acknowledged he had been wrong about Sandy Hook. The
shooting was real, he said. But both in the courtroom and on his show, he was
defiant.
He called
the proceedings a “kangaroo court,” mocked the judge, called the plaintiffs’
lawyer an ambulance chaser and labeled the case an affront to free speech
rights. He claimed it was a conspiracy by Democrats and the media to silence him
and put him out of business.
“I’ve
already said ‘I’m sorry’ hundreds of times, and I’m done saying I’m sorry,” he
said during his testimony.
Twenty
children and six adults died in the shooting on Dec. 14, 2012. The defamation
trial was held at a courthouse in Waterbury, about 20 miles (32 kilometers)
from Newtown, where the attack took place.
The lawsuit
accused Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, of using the
mass killing to build his audience and make millions of dollars. Experts
testified that Jones’ audience swelled, as did his revenue from product sales,
when he made Sandy Hook a topic on the show.
In both the
Texas lawsuit and the one in Connecticut, judges found the company liable for
damages by default after Jones failed to cooperate with court rules on sharing
evidence, including failing to turn over records that might have showed whether
Infowars had profited from knowingly spreading misinformation about mass
killings.
Because he
was already found liable, Jones was barred from mentioning free speech rights
and other topics during his testimony.
Jones now
faces a third trial, in Texas around the end of the year, in a lawsuit filed by
the parents of another child killed in the shooting.
It is
unclear how much of the verdicts Jones can afford to pay. During the trial in
Texas, he testified he couldn’t afford any judgment over $2 million. Free
Speech Systems has filed for bankruptcy protection. But an economist testified
in the Texas proceeding that Jones and his company were worth as much as $270
million.
A lawyer for
the families in the Connecticut case, Josh Koskoff, said that “if this verdict
shuts down Alex Jones, good.”
“He’s been walking in the shadow of death to
try to profit on the backs of people who have just been devastated,” Koskoff
said. “That is not a business model that should be sustainable in the United
States.
Associated
Press journalists Jennifer Peltz in New York and Ted Shaffrey in Waterbury,
Connecticut, contributed.