Jury says InfoWars' Alex Jones must pay Sandy Hook parents more than $4 million

An Austin jury today awarded the parents of a slain first-grader $4.1 million dollars for mental anguish caused by conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones for spreading falsehoods about the Sandy Hook school shooting.

The two-week trial became, at times, emotional as the parents confronted Jones for the first time in the courtroom.

"I am a mother, first and foremost, and I know that you're a father. And my son existed," said Scarlett Lewis, the mother of six-year-old Jesse Lewis, who was gunned down along with 25 other children and school staffers in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

"You're still on your show implying that I'm an actress, that I'm deep state," she continued, "And I don't understand. Truth is so vital to our world."

During the trial, Jones' company, Free Speech Systems LLC, filed for bankruptcy. It listed $14.3 million in assets and $79 million in liabilities. But the parents' lawyers, in the next phase of the trial, will argue that Jones is hiding millions of dollars in assets.

A new book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, states that the Infowars online store brought in $50 million in revenue in a single year selling items like alternative medicines, freeze-dried food, and survivalist gear.

On InfoWars, his radio and internet platform, Jones claimed, over and over between 2012 and 2018, that the elementary school massacre was staged by the federal government as a pretext to crack down on guns.

"Sandy Hook is synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured," he said in 2015.

The parents, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, testified that they have lived through stalking, death threats and harassment from dangerous followers of InfoWars, and that they suffered panic attacks and had to go into hiding. Their attorney said the threats continued in Austin during the trial, forcing them to travel with a security detail.

"I can't even describe the last nine and a half years," a tearful Heslin told the jury, "the living hell that I and others have had to endure because of the recklessness and negligence of Alex Jones."

In his defense, Jones told the courtroom, "I never intentionally tried to hurt you. I never even said your name until this case came to court." He also said that he eventually acknowledged the school massacre was real, not fake.

He described himself as an opinionated pundit protected by the First Amendment, and he portrayed the defamation trial as a "kangaroo court" trying to silence free speech in America.

Jones has been one of the highest-profile purveyors of conspiracies in America. He has also asserted the U.S. government was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing and the attacks on 9/11.

In 2015, presidential candidate Donald Trump told him, "Your reputation is amazing." Jones, in turn, was a huge Trump supporter, and was at the rally near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 before it turned into a riot.

Earlier Thursday, the plaintiffs' lawyer, Mark Bankston, said that he intended to turn over two years of text messages from Jones' cellphone to the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the capitol. The trove of messages was revealed in a dramatic moment in the trial when Bankston confronted Jones and told him his lawyer had mistakenly sent the incriminating messages to the plantiffs' side.

The pugnacious media personality, founder of InfoWars, has been booted off Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other mainstream platforms for promoting hate speech and lies, but Infowars is still broadcast on a hundred radio stations, as well as his website.

"I think a big award like this shows that people need to be responsible about what they say," says Bill Adair, a journalism professor at Duke University and co-founder of the International Fact-Checking Network. "I think that some people have operated under the belief that they can just lie freely and not worry about the consequences."

Adair says because of Jones' outsized reputation, the $4.1 million verdict "could serve as a deterrent to others who might go on various platforms and make wild, ridiculous, unfounded claims." [Copyright 2022 NPR]