Alex Jones must pay $965 million in damages to families and an FBI agent ravaged by the Infowars founder’s lie that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax, a Connecticut jury found on Wednesday.
The families’ lawyers had suggested jurors use $550 million as a “baseline” for calculating damages -- roughly one dollar for every social media impression Jones’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts jointly racked up during the six years following the 2012 mass shooting.
“You have to stand up to a bully, because bullies won’t stop, especially when being a bully makes them very, very rich,” Chris Mattei, one of the families’ lawyers, told the jury in closing arguments on Oct. 6. He asked the panel to return a verdict “that makes Alex Jones realize just how devastating his conduct has been.”
“This was not just the occasional lie -- this was the use of lies to fuel a business,” the lawyers told Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis during a jury break. “It was a business plan to hurt these families and to sell things by hurting them.”
Testimony from an employee of Jones pegged his total earnings from the sale of dietary supplements, books and survival gear at $100 million to $1 billion since the shooting, with $810,000 in sales on a single day in 2020.
Jones faces the possibility of an even greater penalty if Bellis opts to award punitive damages under a state law that forbids using false statements to sell products. She previously found Jones in violation of that...
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