A $50 million judgment against Infowars founder Alex Jones for falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting a hoax has been slashed to $1.5 million by a Texas appeals court.
The 3rd Court of Appeals unanimously found the trial court erred in exceeding the state’s $750,000 cap based on evidence that failed to meet the legal standard for exceeding the statutory limit on awards.
Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis was among 20 children and six educator slain, saw their award cut to $750,000 each. Jones still owes Sandy Hook parents more than $5 million in other damages set by the same court.
The lawsuit and 2022 verdict against Jones marked the first time the Austin-based conspiracy theorist was held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre, claiming it was faked by the government to tighten gun laws.
But the appeals court said Friday the lower court erred in allowing amended pleadings that led to the cap-busting damages.
Since 2023, Jones has been fighting the judgment against him over his multiple published claims that the shooting was staged and that the parents were actors. Heslin and Lewis testified that followers of the conspiracy-peddling website Infowars began harassing and threatening them in the wake of their child’s death.
It was just one of two judgments against Jones. Another in Connecticut state court that awarded the families $1.4 billion still stands.
The opinion is the latest front in a long fight to hold Jones accountable, as families say they still have received no money in the years-old disputes. Both judgments have been ping-ponging through state, federal and bankruptcy courts.
Attempts to sell or license assets of Free Speech Systems, the Infowars parent company, have been paused by the appeals court pending case outcomes.
Jones shut down the Infowars website in May, starting another website in its place.
Efforts by the owner of satirical news website The Onion, which has been attempting to purchase the company, have so far been stymied by the courts. It has launched its own Infowars-branded programming on other social media platforms, employing characters making outrageous and absurd claims, at times about Alex Jones himself.
Friday’s opinion was not all bad for the victims’ families. Jones, who had been trying to overturn the entire judgment, lost most of his appeal claims.
Judge Maya Guerra Gamble gave Jones and Free Speech Systems a “death-penalty” default judgment without a liability trial, over their “flagrant bad faith” violations of discovery rules.
She and other judges along the way have reprimanded Jones and his attorneys for obstructing discovery: deleting information from the hard drives of computers and providing corporate witnesses who were unprepared to testify. One judge called their depositions “completely useless.” At another point, Jones provided more than a thousand pages of transcripts from Infowars videos that he previously said no longer existed.
The appeals court upheld the default judgment, saying the trial court had provided ample examples of discovery violations.