The Supreme Court declined an appeal from Alex Jones on Tuesday, brushing aside the right-wing conspiracy theorist’s effort to overturn a $1.4 billion libel judgment a lower court ordered against him over his false comments about the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.
Jones has faced mounting legal pressure after juries in Connecticut and Texas found him liable in 2022 for defamation and emotional distress over his lies about the massacre, in which 20 first graders and six educators were killed. Jones has repeatedly tried to head off the sale of his far-right platform, Infowars, to pay those damages.
“The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions,” Jones told the Supreme Court in an appeal filed at the Supreme Court in September.
The families waived their right to respond to that appeal — and the court did not order them to do so.
In a separate emergency appeal Jones filed at the Supreme Court last week, he said his platform has an average of 30 million daily listeners. Without an intervention by the high court, his attorneys wrote, “these viewers/listeners will not have just been deprived of a valued source of information, the risk is they will have been greatly deceived and damaged by operation of media source InfoWars by their ideological opposites.”
Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered that Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, be turned over to a court-appointed receiver, who would be responsible for selling the assets. The order paved the way for the satirical news outlet The Onion to revive its bid for the platform.
As is almost always the case, the high court did not explain its decision to deny the appeal.
Jones was found liable in 2022 for defamation after repeatedly claiming on air that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was a “hoax.” He has yet to pay a single cent of the more than $1 billion in damages he owes the families.
Chris Mattei, an attorney representing Sandy Hook families, said: “The Supreme Court properly rejected Jones’s latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused. We look forward to enforcing the jury’s historic verdict and making Jones and Infowars pay for what they have done.”
The Onion did not comment on the ruling.
By CNN
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