A Texas jury has determined Infowars host Alex Jones must pay the parents of a Sandy Hook school shooting victim $45.2 million in punitive damages, reported the Washington Post. The Friday decision comes a day after the same jury awarded the plaintiffs $4.1 million in compensatory damages, culminating the final phase of a defamation case first brought in 2018 over Jones’s repeated false claims that the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history was a hoax.
Jones was not in court as the jury read the
unanimous verdict.
The damages phase of the trial that ended Friday
marks the first time Jones, an influential purveyor of far-right conspiracy
theories, has faced financial repercussions in court for the outlandish lies he
told via his Infowars broadcast about the shooting. Since the early days that
followed the 2012 shooting that killed 26 people, including 20 young children,
Jones said on his program that “no one died” at Sandy Hook and that the attack
was a ruse “staged” by gun-control advocates to manufacture anti-gun sentiment.
In the case brought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, the damages hint at what Jones could face in the months ahead in his additional Sandy Hook defamation cases in Texas and Connecticut.
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