Alex Jones must pay damages to Sandy Hook families after calling shooting a ‘giant hoax,’ judge rules
Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, is responsible for all damages in two lawsuits stemming from his false claims that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a “giant hoax,” a judge ruled this week.
District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis County, Tex., issued default judgments Monday against Jones and Infowars after he did not comply with court orders to give information in a pair of 2018 lawsuits brought against him by families of two children killed in the 2012 massacre. Jones repeatedly failed to hand over documents and evidence to the court supporting his damaging and erroneous claims that the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., which killed 26 people, 20 of whom were young children, was a “false flag” operation carried out by “crisis actors.”
Gamble’s ruling, which was unsealed Thursday, lambasted Jones and his website’s parent company, Free Speech Systems, for having “intentionally disobeyed” the court’s requests and showing “flagrant bad faith and callous disregard” in not turning over documents related to this and other lawsuits filed against him. Jones has already lost several defamation lawsuits related to his Sandy Hook falsehoods and was previously ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to families who have sued him. Nine families have sued him over the years.
“An escalating series of judicial admonishments, monetary penalties, and non-dispositive sanctions have all been ineffective at deterring the abuse,” Gamble wrote.
The default judgments were first reported by HuffPost.
Mark Bankston, an attorney for the parents filing the two lawsuits, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. Bankston said in a statement to CNN that Gamble’s rulings gave the two families “the closure they deserve.”
“Mr. Jones was given ample opportunity to take these lawsuits seriously and obey the rule of law,” Bankston said. “He chose not to do so, and now he will face the consequences for that decision.”
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Jones, who has lost multiple legal battles over his Sandy Hook comments, eventually retracted his false claims on the school shooting in 2019, blaming his statements on “a form of psychosis.”
“I talk four hours a day, and I can’t remember what I talked about sometimes a week ago,” Jones said in a 2019 deposition.
Key moments from Alex Jones’s Sandy Hook deposition in 2019
On March 29, 2019, attorneys released more than three hours of Alex Jones’s deposition for the defamation suits against him. (Kaster, Lynch, Farrar & Ball, LLP)
He was ordered last year to pay almost $150,000 in legal fees after he failed to provide discovery documents for attorneys representing Sandy Hook families.
Gamble’s rulings related to two 2018 lawsuits filed by Sandy Hook parents Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, who lost their 6-year-old son, Noah, and Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, was also killed in the shooting. Pozner and De La Rosa said they’ve faced emotional distress and have been harassed for years by Infowars fans who have followed Jones’s lead and falsely claimed that the shooting was staged. Neil Heslin, the father of Jesse Lewis, also filed two lawsuits in Travis County against Jones and Infowars; those suits were not included in the judge’s rulings this week.
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