Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been ordered to pay US$965 million in damages to the families of victims in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.
For years, Jones claimed on his far-right conspiracy platform, InfoWars, that the 2012 US mass shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 children and six adults, was a hoax.
His lies about the mass shooting to his followers incited harassment and death threats to be directed at the grieving families on a regular basis for years.
Jones now acknowledges that the shooting was “100% real”, but his response after receiving the Connecticut jury’s decision was to mockingly say, “Do these people actually think they’re getting any of this money?”
As courtroom video showed the jury awards being read out, Jones went on to tell his InfoWars followers that the trial was “all made up”.
Over the three weeks of courtroom testimony, relatives of eight Sandy Hook victims and a former FBI agent took turns recounting how Jones’s lies have compounded their grief exponentially.
Some families told the court of receiving threats, and that Jones’s followers would dig up and vandalise the graves of their loved ones.
Mark Barden testified that conspiracy theorists urinated on the grave of his seven-year-old son, Daniel, and threatened to dig up the child’s coffin.
Individuals also mailed rape threats to the home of Erica Lafferty, the daughter of slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung.
“I wish that, after today, I can just be a daughter grieving my mother and stop worrying about the conspiracy theorists,” says Lafferty, adding, however, that, “hate, lies and conspiracy theories will follow both me and my family through the rest of our days.”
I hope, one day, I’ll become a fraction of the woman you were. I love you, Mommy. pic.twitter.com/ZHpGP0Ajgu
— Erica Leslie Lafferty (@ericalaff) October 13, 2022
While many of the families were in court and visibly emotional as jurors read the verdict, Jones was broadcasting himself to his followers and asking them to pay him money that he pledged would not go towards his legal costs.
“The money does not go to these people,” he said. “It goes to fight this fraud and it goes to stabilise the company.”
As for how much money Jones actually has, Economist Bernard Pettingill Jr. testified in court saying that Jones’s company, Free Speech Systems, was worth as much as $270 million USD. There was also testimony that after Jones made Sandy Hook a topic on his InfoWars show, his audience heightened and he cashed in on a lot of product sales.
It’s still unclear, however, how much Jones can afford to pay from the nearly US$1 billion verdict.
Journalist and author of the book Sandy Hook, Elizabeth Williamson says the decision was “financially ruinous for Alex Jones”.
But from her time speaking with the victims’ families, Williamson says that, “None of the [them] expressed any worry that they wouldn’t get paid. For them, this really was about signalling to the rest of us that there is a sick phenomenon going on in our society and the spread of disinformation and false narratives is rampant right now.”
Williamson adds that in the decade since the Sandy Hook shooting, this phenomenon has only grown.
Student survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and American gun control activist, David Hogg points out information found in a YouGovAmerican survey showing that nearly 1 in 5 Americans believe mass shootings have been faked by groups trying to promote stricter gun-control laws.
Many are hopeful that this court case will send a strong message for the need to hold the spread of disinformation accountable and want to see the Sandy Hook families paid the full compensation they’re owed by Jones.
The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Chris Mattei says that Jones tried to hide his assets throughout the court case but that himself and his team “as representatives of these families and the other families who have brought cases, will be coordinating to make sure that those assets are available for recovery to the victims of his offences.”
In closing arguments at the trial, Mattei said: “When every single one of these families were drowning in grief, Alex Jones put his foot right on top of them.”