AUSTIN, Texas — A Texas jury on Thursday awarded the parents of a child killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School more than $4 million in damages from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the first time he has been held financially responsible for defamation to the parents of the victims by spreading lies that they were complicit in a government conspiracy to stage the shooting as a pretext for gun control.
The ruling was the first in a series of potential awards against Mr. Jones. On Friday, a jury will consider evidence of Mr Jones’ net worth to determine how much, if any, to award the parents, Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, in punitive damages.
Two other trials of Sandy Hook parents seeking compensation from Mr. Jones are scheduled for next month, although they may be delayed because his company filed for bankruptcy last week.
Mr. Jones has become increasingly emblematic of how misinformation and false narratives have gained power in American society. It has played a role in spreading some of the most pernicious conspiracy theories in recent history, such as Pizzagate — in which an Infowars video helped inspire a gunman to attack a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. — as well as myths about the coronavirus and the lies of “Stop Theft ‘ for election fraud before the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The verdict came after several days of emotional testimony, including 90 minutes on Tuesday when Ms. Lewis personally addressed Mr. Jones, asking him why he knowingly spread lies about the death of her child, Jesse, 6, who died first along with 19 other students and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
“Jesse was a real boy. And I’m a real mother,” Ms Lewis told Mr Jones. Later, she admonishes him, “Alex, I want you to hear this. We are more polarized than ever as a country. Part of it is because of you.
But the most explosive revelation came on Wednesday when the family’s lawyer, Mark Bankston, revealed that Mr Jones’ legal team had mistakenly sent him the entire contents of Mr Jones’ mobile phone, including at least two years of incriminating text messages that are now of interest to the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. The commission is scrutinizing Mr Jones’ role in planning the events surrounding the riot and Mr Bankston is now seeking a judge’s approval to hand over the text recordings to prosecutors and the commission from January 6.
Ms. Lewis and Mr. Heslin had asked for $150 million in damages, and Mr. Bankston said he was optimistic about what the jury would award on Friday. “You can probably imagine that if the jury returned a verdict in excess of $4 million for these plaintiffs in compensatory damages, I think the penalty would probably be in that range or higher,” Mr. Bankston said. “I think it’s fully expected that we’ll see over a nine-figure verdict against Mr. Jones.”
He added: “It’s been a long journey and it’s really, really nice to be able to turn around and look at my clients and say ‘he can’t get away with this without taking offence’.” He can’t. You had a defendant come into the courtroom and say, ‘I think I should pay them a dollar.’ And that jury said no.”
Mr. Jones said in his bankruptcy filing that he has so far paid $15 million in legal fees for the Sandy Hook lawsuit. Referring to the compensation that Ms Lewis and Mr Heslin had sought, Mr Jones called the award a “big win” in a video posted on Infowars on Thursday night, although he urged viewers to buy products from his website for to prevent what he described as financial ruin.
“I admitted I was wrong,” he said. “I admitted it was a mistake. I admitted to following misinformation, but not on purpose. I apologized to the families. And the jury got it.
Last year, Mr. Jones lost a series of defamation cases against Sandy Hook after he repeatedly failed to provide court-ordered documents and testimony. Those decisions set the stage for the process this summer.
More important than the money, Sandy Hook families said, is society’s condemnation of a culture in which viral misinformation damages lives and destroys reputations.
“Speech is free, but you have to pay for lies,” Mr Bankston told the jury last week. “This is a case of creating change.”
At the heart of the trial was a June 2017 episode of NBC’s “Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly” that profiled Mr. Jones. In the broadcast, Mr. Heslin protested Mr. Jones’ denials about the shooting. He recalls his last moments with Jesse, saying, “I was holding my son with a bullet hole in his head.”
Mr. Jones and Owen Shroyer, the host of Infowars, then aired shows suggesting that Mr. Heslin had lied.
“Will there be clarification from Hesslin or Megyn Kelly?” Mr. Shroyer said on Infowars. “I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
During the trial, Mr. Jones’s lawyer, F. Andino Reynal, said Mr. Jones was essentially defending himself. After much uncertainty about whether the conspiracy broadcaster would testify, he was adamant that he would appear as the only witness in his own defence.
Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis appointed different experts. The trial began with testimony from Dan Jewis, a retired Connecticut State Police investigator who handled the Sandy Hook case; a forensic psychiatrist and the psychologist who treated Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis; and several Infowars staffers whose questionable statements allowed the family’s lawyers to present evidence damaging to Mr. Jones, including a televised version of the full interview with Ms. Kelly in which Mr. Jones made inflammatory false claims.
Mr. Jones’ audience and corresponding revenues have skyrocketed to more than $50 million a year in the decade since Sandy Hook.
His defense of the Second Amendment after the mass shooting attracted the attention of mainstream news organizations. But it was Mr. Jones’ alliance with former President Donald J. Trump, who appeared on Infowars in December 2015, moved it from the far-right fringes to the center of GOP populism.
Mr. Jones and Mr. Trump frequently repeat the same inflammatory false claims, including the racist “birther” lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States; that Muslims in the New York area “celebrated” the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; and the lies about the 2020 election that brought violence to the Capitol last year.
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