It’s unfortunate that the families of Sandy Hook probably won’t actually get anything close to the nearly $1 billion that a Connecticut jury assessed Wednesday against right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones for his monstrous lies about the massacre that killed their children. But the historic verdict nonetheless sends a strong message to those who inhabit the sewers of profitable misinformation out there: Society has had enough.
Within hours of the shooting deaths of 20 small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012, Jones began monetizing the unimaginable pain of the families. The founder of Infowars, a website dedicated to spreading right-wing conspiracy nonsense to boost its sales of sketchy dietary supplements, claimed for years that the massacre was a hoax staged by the government as a pretext for gun confiscation. Jones accused the parents and their slain children of being paid actors. His nutty followers, believing his con, harassed and threatened these grieving parents to the point that some of them had to relocate. Stalkers pursued them even in faraway states.
Jones clearly thought this sadistic campaign was a cost-free way for him to build his gullible but profitable audience. Happily, he’s been proven wrong. Already on the hook for tens of millions of dollars from other litigation stemming from his Sandy Hook lies, Jones was hit with his biggest bill yet on Wednesday: a jury award of $965 million in compensatory damages to the families of eight of the victims and a federal first responder. That total will likely grow when a judge decides on punitive damages next month.
Contrary to the predictable rants of fellow conspiracists like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., there’s no free speech issue here. No one is questioning Jones’ right to spout even the most offensive of his opinions. But publicly, maliciously lying in ways that incite harassment and disrupt people’s lives is not a right. It’s defamation, and it’s legally actionable. The fact that Jones’ motivation was personal profit makes it all the more fitting that he faces financial ruin for it.
Jones’ net worth is believed to be as high as $270 million. He has claimed bankruptcy and played other financial games designed to avoid that ruin. The parents’ lawyers are challenging those games at every turn, as they should. Meanwhile, Jones is again demonstrating his bottomless amorality by using the verdict to ask his audience for money for his appeal.
In any case, it’s becoming clear that Jones will either lose everything or spend his pathetic life in court trying not to. The message to other conspiracy hucksters should be clear. In the words of Erica Lafferty, daughter of one of the adult victims: “The truth matters. Those who profit off other people’s pain and trauma will pay for what they’ve done.”
———
