HARTFORD, Conn. — A Connecticut jury on Wednesday ordered broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to the families of eight Sandy Hook shooting victims and a law enforcement first responder to compensate them for a decade of abuse from people who believe his lies that the 2012 elementary school massacre was a hoax.
The astonishing $965 million compensatory damages verdict, after three and one-half weeks of gripping accounts of harassment from Jones and his followers, could increase in coming days with the addition of punitive damages, which are awarded for particularly outrageous and willful conduct.
Fifteen people sued Jones — parents, spouses and siblings of the 20 first graders and six educators murdered when a gunman shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown with an assault rifle. Within hours of the murders, as relatives came to grips with their losses, Jones began what would become years of broadcasts to an audience of millions claiming that the relatives were actors in a phony production staged to win support for gun control.
Parents of the murdered children testified that, as a result Jones’ broadcasts, threats began so quickly and grew so serious that, within days, authorities were taking security measures to protect mourners at their children’s’ funerals. Lawyers for the families presented the jury with evidence that the harassment continued through the trial.
Two kinds of punitive damages apply in the case against Jones’ and his company, Free Speech Systems. Judge Barbara Bellis is responsible for deciding in both cases.
The six person jury, which deliberated for three full days, found that the relatives are entitled to punitive damages in the form of attorney fees and the costs of preparing and pressing the suits. That figure could reach well into the millions of dollars in a case that has been litigated by multiple lawyers over four years in state, federal and U.S. bankruptcy courts in Connecticut and Texas. Bellis will decide on the amount.
The jury also found that Jones and Free Speech Systems violated Connecticut’s unfair trade practices law because his broadcast, internet and retail sales businesses drove profit with broadcasts that intentionally — and falsely — vilified the families. The families presented evidence suggesting that Jones did so knowing that his bogus Sandy Hook hoax programming caused spikes in audience numbers and in sales at his retail sites where he sold nutritional supplements and survivalist gear.
State law sets no limit on damages awarded under the unfair trade practices act.
Bellis is expected to set a schedule by which Jones’ lawyer and lawyers suing for the relatives argue over punitive damages.
The verdicts follow a hard-fought trial.
In both his opening and closing statements, Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the families, told jurors they had the power to return a verdict that stops Jones.
“He’s going on 10 years of defaming these families, and it’s not stopping,” Mattei told the jury in his closing. “This is their one chance, and your one chance … to render a verdict on just how much devastation Alex Jones has caused.”
Mattei did not suggest a damage award, but presented the jury with a formula for reaching one: Determine fair compensation for a person harmed by a single lie, told once. Then multiply that sum by 550 million, a figure that an expert trial witness for the families said reflects Jones’ massive audience reach across his broadcast, internet and social media platforms.
“You may say that is astronomical,” Mattei said. “It is. It is. It is exactly what Alex Jones did. He built a lie machine to push this stuff out. He built a lie machine … But you know something, that’s not enough.”
Jones’ lawyer, Norman A. Pattis, conceded that his client’s claims — the school shooting was a hoax and the grieving parents were actors — are false and despicable, but they are what Jones or guests on his broadcast believed when they made them. Pattis accused lawyers for the families of appealing to jurors’ emotions by doing what they accuse Jones of — fomenting anger.
“Alex invented fear,” Pattis said in his closing argument. “Alex invented anger. Alex invented what is wrong with this world. Kill Alex and we’ll all live happily ever after … The angrier you get the more money they will get. You are sort of like a pinball machine: Put enough money in and pull the lever and maybe all that money will pop out.”
Jones testified once, as a witness for the relatives. His testimony ended in a shouting match when Mattei gestured toward family members sitting in a group in the courtroom gallery and accused Jones of putting “a target” on their backs. Jones fired back, “Is this a struggle session? Are we in China? I’ve already said I’m sorry, and I’m done saying I’m sorry.”
Bellis threatened to convene contempt hearings if there were further outbursts.
Jones declined to testify in his defense and Pattis chose not to put on any defense at all. Outside on the courthouse sidewalk, Jones convened a succession of press conferences at which he called the trial a “kangaroo court” and said Bellis is a “tyrant.”
Because of a rare default ruling by Bellis a year ago, Jones’ defamation trial was actually a hearing on damages. The default punished Jones for failing to comply with court orders to disclose business records and found in favor of the families on the central point of their suit — that Jones’ hoax broadcasts were outrageous lies and responsible for a decade of harassment and anguish.
The default prevented Jones from presenting a defense and limited what he could argue to minimize damages. As a result, the only question before the jury was what Jones owes.
A Texas judge issued a similar default in a suit by Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlet Lewis and in August a jury in Austin awarded $4.1 million in compensatory and $45.2 million in punitive damages. A third suit by Sandy Hook relatives is pending.
Still earlier this year, the victim families settled a suit against Remington Arms, which made the rifle Lanza used, for $73 million.
The heart of the families’ case at trial was a succession of painfully emotional accounts of their suffering at the hands of mostly anonymous tormentors who confronted them on streets, left messages on their cars or showed up at their homes.
Among them was that of Robbie and Alissa Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed. Jones seized on a video clip of Parker mourning his daughter’s murder, making it a regular prop on his hoax broadcasts. Jones claimed Parker had to have been acting the part of bereaved parent, because he smiled nervously and consulted notes as he approached the television cameras.
Parker did not know at the time he was the first of the parents to speak to reporters outside his church. And he though he would be facing only a single television camera from Utah, where he and his wife grew up and their families lived. Instead he was sunned as he appeared before an army of television lights.
Alissa Parker said Jones twisted a small clip of the video and it led to “a full-on assault” by his audience.
“They called Emilie a whore,” Alissa Parker said. “Just the most horrific things you could ever even imagine. Just calling Robbie a liar, and that we’re going to burn in hell for what we’ve done.’”
Robbie Parker testified that minutes before their daughter’s funeral he discovered his wife hiding, overcome in a coat closet.
“She was curled up, just sobbing,” he testified, “and saying, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’”
A year after the school shooting, Robbie Parker said he quit his job as a physician’s assistant at Danbury Hospital and moved 3,000 miles west to Washington in hopes that the harassment would decrease with distance from Newtown. He said he learned he was wrong within months of the move as he walked along a street in Seattle while attending a charity event.
Parker said he was confronted by a man who recognized him from the video and began screaming curses.
“The guy just kept following me and he was just in my ear the whole time: ‘Emilie’s alive, isn’t she? She’s alive, huh? Son of a (expletive), she’s alive.’ And I just kept walking and walking. People are staring at us and he just won’t shut up,” he said.
“I’m just trying to hold it in. For years, I’ve been dealing with this. And I never had the chance to tell anybody how I felt or what I thought,” Parker testified. “I retreated every single time something happened to us. I put another layer of camouflage on us. Nobody can know where we are. And I retreated and I retreated.”
“And now this guy was in my face and he wouldn’t leave me alone. And he said Emilie’s name one more time. I turned around and I looked at him and, I’m paraphrasing at this point, and I said, ‘How dare you. You’re talking about my daughter. She was killed. Who do you think you are? How do you sleep at night?’
