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Alex Jones must pay nearly $1 billion to families of victims of a mass shooting in Connecticut, a jury in the state said on Oct. 12.
The jury said Jones, the InfoWars host, must pay the money for defamation, slander, and emotional damages. Jurors said the plaintiffs should also be awarded attorney’s fees, which are set to be determined in November.
Jones for years claimed that family members of victims were actors who faked the tragedy and described the shooting as being staged as part of a government plot to take away Americans’ guns.
The plaintiffs in the case were relatives of 20 children and six staff members who were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. Adam Lanza, 20, shot his mother at their home and then went to the school, where he opened fire, according to authorities.
The verdict, which came after three weeks of testimony in a state court in Waterbury, Connecticut, far outstripped the $49 million Jones was ordered to pay by a Texas jury in a similar case earlier this year. Jones’s lawyers have said they’ll appeal that amount.
Lawyers for families of eight Sandy Hook victims during closing arguments in Connecticut said Jones cashed in for years on lies about the shooting, which drove traffic to his InfoWars website and boosted sales of various products promoted there.
The families suffered a decade-long campaign of harassment and death threats driven by Jones, attorney Chris Mattei said. “Every single one of these families drowning in grief, and Alex Jones put his foot right on top of them,” Mattei told jurors.
Some of the family members testified during the trial.
“After the shock of Ben’s murder, we were … I felt like I was underwater. And I didn’t know which way was up,” David Wheeler, father of Benjamin Wheeler, 6, one of the Sandy Hook victims. “You’re grasping with that, you’re trying to get your head around that, and to have someone publicly telling the world that it didn’t happen and that you’re a fraud and a phony is incredibly disorienting.”
Jones’s lawyer said during his closing arguments that the plaintiffs had shown scant evidence of quantifiable losses. The attorney, Norman Pattis, urged jurors to ignore the political undercurrents in the case. “This is not a case about politics,” Pattis said. “It’s about how much to compensate the plaintiffs.”
Jones, who has since acknowledged that the shooting occurred, testified and railed against his “liberal” critics. During a press conference outside the courthouse in Waterbury, Jones said he has apologized repeatedly for his remarks.
“I have apologized for six years for anything that I did wrong questioning Sandy Hook. I didn’t question Sandy Hook to be mean, I wasn’t the leader in questioning Sandy Hook, but I did say things that were hurtful and not true. But I did not do it on purpose,” Jones said.
He also said, “I have a right to question something.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
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Many times my public comments — over the years —- were reposted by others at Prison Planet and Infowars sites — appreciated, as that was the intention to get the data disseminated far and wide!
I have ABSOLUTELY NO connection to Alex Jones and appreciated his reports on those Bilderberger meetings —- when David Rockefeller (fave of Noam Chomsky and Rush Limbaugh — hope Limbaugh altered his opinion before he died) was alive it was important to keep repeating Rockefeller’s praises for Mao Zedong, Mao’s bloody Cultural Revolution and the details of the Rockefeller Plan, now rebranded as the Great Reset and the WEF Plan, but I warned him and warned him (probably not alone) not to classify EVERYTHING, especially Sandy Hook Massacre, as conspiracy —- would cause major problems while trivializing Actual Conspiracies!!!
While I think that AJ is scum and that his attitude is awful, if you divide the amount he has to pay by the number of victims listed in this article it comes out to over 37 million dollars per person. I realize that a person’s life is priceless but not one of the 26 would have made much over a million during their lifetime. So, in my worthless opinion 37 mil per person is a little on the high side. On the other hand, if I were AJ, I would give them every bit of the money the lawyers could find, take the cash I had and find me somewhere else to live beyond the reach of US interests.