Misinformation has made his fortune… and could be his downfall. Far-right American conspirator Alex Jones was ordered on Wednesday to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to eight families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which he has long denied happened. Jones immediately announced that he would appeal. But facing multiple lawsuits, he and his InfoWars empire could find themselves in deep trouble.
“Crisis Actors”
Alex Jones had notably claimed that the relatives of the students killed in the Sandy Hook school, in Connecticut, in 2012, were “crisis actors”. A jury in that state decided that he should pay them and an FBI agent $965 million in damages for defamation and moral damage.
These families had launched lawsuits against Alex Jones, explaining that they were harassed by fans of the conspiracy, believing firmly that the massacre had never taken place and that the grieving relatives played a role. In 2012, a young man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 20 children and six adults in Sandy Hook.
Call for donations
Alex Jones followed the verdict live on his Infowars site, shouting “yeah” and “woooh” as he clenched his fist at each damage announcement as several relatives of victims wept. “Even more, even more”, he launched, before ensuring that he had “not even two million in cash”. He promised to drag out the procedure “for years on appeal” and called on his supporters to buy vitamins that he sells on his shop or to make donations to finance his fight.
The owner of the Infowars site was recently ordered to pay nearly $50 million in Texas to a couple whose six-year-old son was mowed down in Sandy Hook. The conspirator had finally publicly admitted the reality of the killing. But he refused to cooperate with the courts, so magistrates in both states convicted him in absentia. They had left it to jurors to set the sentence.