Far right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones fumed live on his InfoWars show as the jury in his defamation trial awarded roughly billion dollars in damages against him to families of the victims of the Sandy Hook mass shooting.
“This is exactly what I expected,” Mr Jones said during the livestream on his website.
The Connecticut jury reached its verdict on Wednesday afternoon after deliberating for three days. Lawyers representing the families of eight victims and an FBI agent pursuing Jones for had requested $550m in damages, the jury ended up awarding them around $1bn.
“This is all just delusional leftist crap, like two men can have a baby,” Jones railed as events in the courtroom turned against him.
The finding came after four weeks of testimony from family members about how Jones’ conspiracy theories about the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 and repeated attacks on many of the family members involved impacted their lives.
The extent of the damages — one plantiff alone was awarded $120m — may imperil InfoWars’ future. Jones certainly wasted no time after the damages were read out, imploring his viewers to help him “fight” by making donations and purchasing supplements and other products on his website.
Jones promised his viewers that no money donated would go to paying the damages he owes, but he did say that he is nearly “out of money” and mocked the plantiffs for expecting that he would pay them the damages he now owes. Jones’ net worth is estimated to be between $135 and $270m, a fraction of what he now owes.
“This must be what Hell’s like,” Jones said at one point. “They just read out the damages, even though you don’t got the money.”
Jones vowed earlier in the trial that he was “done apologising” for his lies about the Sandy Hook victims and their families, including that the victims were “actors” and that the mass shooting was a “giant hoax.” In the years following the shooting, he continued to claim — and profit from the claim — that the shooting was a “false flag” operation. As a result, plantiffs said, they were harassed in public and re-traumatised.
Jones suggested on Wednesday that he would continue speaking similarly about other traumatic mass shootings that have happened in recent years.
“They want to scare us away from question Uvalde or Parkland,” Jones said. “We’re not going away. We’re not going to stop.”
As his show continued on Wednesday, Jones spread baseless conspriacy theories about Covid-19 vaccines, CNN, the Democratic Party, and a range of other subjects. He continued to hawk supplements and other products on the show’s website.
Jones’ bill could further increase in the coming weeks, as a judge will decide whether to award the plantiffs further punitive damages for their claims that Jones violated the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act.
