The Infowars conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones must pay the families of eight Sandy Hook shooting victims an additional $473 million in punitive damages for defaming them, a judge in Connecticut ruled on Thursday, bringing the total damages to nearly $1.5 billion.
Last month, a jury in Waterbury, Conn., awarded the families and an F.B.I. agent implicated in Mr. Jones’s false claims $965 million in compensatory damages. The jury also awarded the families punitive damages in the form of lawyers’ fees, to be calculated by the judge. The $473 million awarded on Thursday by Judge Barbara N. Bellis of Connecticut Superior Court represents those damages.
Earlier this year, a judge in Texas ordered Mr. Jones to pay the parents of another Sandy Hook victim $50 million, in the first of three trials to determine the damages Mr. Jones owes.
Judge Bellis also essentially froze Mr. Jones’s personal assets, issuing an order saying that he was “not to transfer, encumber, dispose or move his assets out of the United States until further order of the court.” A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Dec. 2.
Christopher M. Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families in the Connecticut case, cited the judge’s finding that Mr. Jones’s “depravity” in spreading lies about the 2012 school shooting and the victims’ families “establishes the highest degree of reprehensibility and blameworthiness.”
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