Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has asked the US Supreme Court to put on pause the nearly $1.5bn (£1.1bn) defamation judgment against him that is forcing the sale of his Infowars media company.
Jones was ordered to make the payout in 2022 for claiming the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax.
He has asked the high court to prevent Infowars from being sold to the satirical news site The Onion in order to fund judgment against him, arguing that it will cause irreparable harm to him and his audience of 30 million.
The sale to The Onion, backed by the families of victims of the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting, was rejected last year after a bankruptcy auction.
Jones is asking the justices to put the judgment on hold while deciding on an appeal he has filed. The court is expected to consider his application on Friday in private.
Attorneys for Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, characterized him as a media defendant in their court filing on Thursday.
They argued that Jones, who founded the platform in 1999, should enjoy the same free speech protections under the First Amendment of the Constitution that journalists have, according to court documents filed on Wednesday.
They also said the record-breaking payout and the shuttering of his platform would have a “chilling effect” on similar media figures.
“Jones believes this Court will unanimously recognize that a failure to reverse this case will mean all journalists will realize that they could be found liable for huge defamation awards, especially in ideologically divergent geographic regions,” they wrote.
That, in turn, could keep journalists “from publishing for fear of being hauled into court there facing a ‘trial by sanction’ in which the First Amendment is superfluous and debilitating damages can be awarded”, they added.
After a Connecticut court ruled against him in the defamation case, Jones filed for bankruptcy protection in Texas and Infowars was put up for auction so that he could pay the families of victims of the Sandy Hook mass shooting, who had brought the suit.
Last year, The Onion made a bid to buy the Infowars website but the sale was rejected by a US bankruptcy judge in December. However, the judge also rejected Jones’ claims that the bankruptcy auction was plagued by “collusion.”
In his Wednesday application, Jones told the highest court in the country that he will experience “irreparable injury” if Infowars is sold to its “ideological nemesis” and intentionally “destroyed”.
Twenty children and six adults were killed in 2012 when a gunman rampaged through the primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, firing a semi-automatic rifle before killing himself.
Jones, who positions himself as “a steadfast proponent of questioning mainstream narratives from the government and mainstream news media”, claimed for years that the massacre was a “staged” government plot to take guns from Americans and that “no-one died”.
He called the parents of victims “crisis actors” and argued that some of them never actually existed.
In a separate defamation trial in Texas, Jones later acknowledged the attack was “100% real”.
By BBC News
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