A court in the US state of Texas has slashed a fine that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay for capitalising on false claims that the deadly 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting was a “hoax”.
The unanimous opinion by the Texas Third Court of Appeals on Friday reduced the $50m judgment to $1.5m. The court found that parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose six-year-old son was one of 20 children and six staff killed in the shooting, did not provide enough evidence of harassment to pass the state’s $750,000 cap on damages.
“The families care not at all about this irrelevant ruling which affects only two of the 19 claims they all share. Jones still faces over a billion dollars of liability, so this changes absolutely nothing. All it does is highlight the absurdity of Texas law,” said Mark Bankston, an attorney for Heslin and Lewis in Texas.
The decision does not affect a separate ruling against Jones in Connecticut that ordered him to pay $1.25bn for his claims that the shooting was a hoax perpetrated by the government to justify gun regulations.
The case centred on the allegation that Jones knowingly pushed false claims about the victims and their families – including that the children who were killed were actors – to capitalise on attention around the shooting for his Infowars platform, even as his claims led to a torrent of abuse for the families of victims. Many said they faced death threats and were forced to relocate as a result.
Jones...
A court in the US state of Texas has slashed a fine that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay for capitalising on false claims that the deadly 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school mass s...