Alex Jones spent years claiming the Sandy Hook school mass shooting in 2012 was a hoax
(Picture: Getty Images)Alex Jones has been ordered to pay at least $965m in damages to the families of the Sandy Hook mass school shooting for claiming they were actors and the tragedy did not happen.
A jury in a state court in Connecticut gave its verdict on Wednesday after a three-week trial. Relatives of the children who were killed said they had suffered years of threats and harassment because of Jones’s lies.
The claimants’ lawyers accused Jones of making millions of dollars from his claims as audiences for his shows grew when he made them and he increased sales of his products.
In August a court in Texas had ordered Jones to pay $4.1 million (£3.4 million) in damages in relation to his numerous claims about Sandy Hook,
Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, who brought the earlier defamation lawsuit forward, requested up to $150 million (£125 million) for 10 years of harassment, emotional suffering and death threats from his viewers following his false claims.
The Sandy Hook shooting is among the worst in US history and the worst in a US school. On December 14, 2012 Adam Lanza, 20, entered the school in Newtown, Connecticut and shot and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were children. Lanza killed himself as the first emergency services began to arrive. The tragedy led to growing calls for tighter controls on gun ownership. Jones claimed the shooting had been faked by gun control advocates.
On his show Infowars, Jones claimed that the couple were “crisis actors” and victims of the 2012 shooting, including their son Jesse Lewis, were not really killed.
So who is the radio host?
Who is Alex Jones and what is Infowars?
Born Alexander Emerick Jones, the 48-year-old far-right conservative was born in Dallas, Texas in 1974.
The American show host has credited his first encounter with conspiracy theories to Gary Allen’s book None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which alleged that global bankers were puppeteers of American politics.
His early broadcasting career began on a live call-in program, not 200 miles south of his hometown in Austin, on the ACATV broadcasting network. Aged 22 Jones began his now famous red-faced alt-right rants on topics from the illuminati to how NASA faked the moon landing to the New World Order.
At the turn of the century, he was fired from KJFK-FM and started The Alex Jones Show from his own home.
Around 100 stations syndicated his show in 2001, but many dropped it after Jones claimed that George W Bush’s administration had manufactured the 9/11 tragedy.
After hosting Donald Trump on air and boosting his rise to office, the “false flag” conspiracist was identified by lawmakers for reportedly being one of the organisers of the Stop the Steal rally outside the Capitol in 2021.
Jones is also known to be an outspoken supporter of the Second Amendment, the American constitutional right to bear arms.
What is Infowars?
In 1999, Jones founded the show Infowars focused on conspiracy stories, with his then wife Kelly Jones.
The accompanying website in 2016 surpassed the reach of major news sites, such as The Economist, with around 10 million monthly visits.
From 2015 to 2018, the Infowars store reportedly made $165 million from products such as dietary supplements and bulletproof vests.
YouTube hit the gun rights advocate with a ban on live streams and removed four Infowars videos for “child endangerment and hate speech” in 2018. Facebook followed with a 30-day suspension on his profile and removed the same clips from the site.
Jones was banned from Apple, Spotify, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Mailchimp in the same year.
Google Play also removed the Infowars app from the Play store after it was used to spread Covid-19 misinformation.
This year, in the middle of the Sandy Hook trial, Infowars’ parent company declared bankruptcy – which could delay payment to the families of victims for several years.
