Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his company were ordered on Thursday to pay an extra 473 million dollars (£405 million) to victims’ families and an FBI agent for calling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax, adding to a nearly one billion dollar jury verdict issued last month.
Judge Barbara Bellis, in the state of Connecticut, imposed the punitive damages on the Infowars host and Free Speech Systems.
Jones repeatedly told his millions of followers the massacre that killed 20 children and six teachers was staged by “crisis actors” to enact more gun control.
Eight victims’ relatives and the FBI agent testified during a month-long trial about being threatened and harassed for years by people who deny the shooting happened.
Strangers showed up at their homes and confronted some of them in public. People hurled abusive comments at them on social media and in emails. And some received death and rape threats.
Six jurors ordered Jones to pay 965 million dollars (£828 million) to compensate the 15 plaintiffs for defamation, infliction of emotional distress and violations of Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, which bans deceptive business practices and unfair competition.
Jones has called the trial unfair and an assault on free speech rights.
He says he will appeal against the verdicts and also says he does not have the money to pay such huge amounts, because he has less than two million dollars (£1.7 million) to his name – which contradicted evidence at a similar trial in Texas.
On his show on Thursday, Jones called the award “ridiculous” and a “joke” and said he has little money to pay the damages.
“Well, of course I’m laughing at it,” he said. “It’d be like if you sent me a bill for a billion dollars in the mail.
“Oh man, we got you. It’s all for psychological effect. It’s all the Wizard of Oz … when they know full well the bankruptcy going on and all the rest of it, that it’ll show what I’ve got and that’s it, and I have almost nothing.”
Free Speech Systems, meanwhile, is seeking bankruptcy protection.
Bellis found Jones and Infowars’ parent company liable for damages without a trial last year, as a consequence of what she called his repeated failures to turn over many financial documents and other records to the plaintiffs.
After the unusual “default” ruling, the jury was tasked only with deciding on the amount of compensatory damages and whether punitive damages were warranted.
Jones says he turned over thousands of documents and the default ruling deprived him of his right to present a defence against the lawsuit.
In Connecticut, punitive damages for defamation and infliction of emotional distress are generally limited to plaintiffs’ legal fees.
The Sandy Hook plaintiffs’ lawyers are to get one-third of the 965 million dollars in compensatory damages under a retainer agreement – putting their legal fees at 322 million dollars (£276 million).
But there is no cap on punitive damages for violations of the Unfair Trade Practices Act. The plaintiffs had not asked for a specific amount of punitive damages, but under one hypothetical calculation they said such damages could be around 2.75 trillion dollars (£2.35 trillion) under the unfair trade law.
In a similar trial in Texas in August, Jones was ordered to pay nearly 50 million dollars (£42 million) to the parents of another child killed in the Sandy Hook shooting for calling the massacre a hoax.
A forensic economist testified during that trial that Jones and Free Speech Systems have a combined net worth as high as 270 million dollars (£231 million).
A third and final trial over Jones’ hoax claims is expected to begin around the end of the year in Texas.
As in Connecticut, Jones was found liable for damages without trials in both Texas cases because he failed to turned over many records to the plaintiffs.
