A Texas appeals court has slashed the $50m judgment to $1.5m against Alex Jones, founder of the rightwing platform Infowars, over falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut a hoax.
The ruling does not affect a $1.4bn judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a significant legal victory for Jones after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.
The unanimous opinion issued by the Texas third court of appeals found that Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis did not show sufficient evidence that harassment enflamed by Jones’s hoax claims rose to a level that would allow them to exceed the state’s $750,000 cap on damages.
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