A Texas court has slashed a $50 million judgment against Infowars founder Alex Jones to just $1.5 million.
Jones was ordered to pay $50 million to parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting after falsely claiming it was a hoax.
On Friday, an appeals court ruled that the trial court “abused its discretion” by allowing the judgement to exceed a statutory cap on damages.
The ruling does not affect a $1.4 billion judgement against Jones in Connecticut, which the US Supreme Court declined to overturn. But it marks a significant legal victory for Jones after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.
The unanimous opinion by the Texas Third Court of Appeals on Friday found that Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis did not show evidence that harassment enflamed by Jones’ hoax claims rose to a level that would allow them to exceed the state’s $750,000 cap on damages for each plaintiff.
Heslin and Lewis’s 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, was among 20 children and six educators killed in the 2012 attack in Newtown, Connecticut. The lawsuit and 2022 verdict against Jones marked the first time Jones was held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre.
Families testified that they endured death threats and intense harassment from Jones’ supporters.
Jones repeatedly told his millions of followers that the 2012 massacre was staged by “crisis actors” to enact more gun control. He portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his First Amendment rights but admitted during trial that the attack was “100% real” and that it was wrong to lie about it.
Heslin and Lewis told jurors that Jones’ apology wasn’t enough and called on them to make him pay for the years of suffering he put them and other Sandy Hook families through.
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Jones’ trial attorney Andino Reynal had said he would appeal the damages amount and predicted shortly after trial that he could get it reduced to $1.5 million.
Separate legal proceedings continue after Jones and his company filed for bankruptcy. Jones gave up the Infowars brand in April and moved to a new location, switching his shows to new websites and posting them on his personal X account.
The satirical website The Onion moved to take over Jones' Infowars platforms and has set up its own Infowars webpage on its website, running videos of shows parodying Jones.
