A court in Texas, U.S., has sharply reduced the damages that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay over his false claims that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a “hoax.”
In a unanimous ruling issued Friday, the Third Court of Appeals in Texas cut the $50 million award to $1.5 million. The court found that the victims' parents, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, who lost their six-year-old son in the shooting that killed 20 children and six adults, had not provided sufficient evidence of harassment to exceed the $750,000 cap on damages under Texas law.
Mark Bankston, the attorney representing Heslin and Lewis in Texas, said, “The families do not care about this irrelevant ruling, which only affects two of the 19 claims they share. Jones still faces over a billion dollars in debt, so this changes nothing. It only highlights the absurdity of Texas law.”
The ruling does not affect a separate judgment against Jones in Connecticut, where a court ordered him to pay $1.25 billion for claiming the shooting was a hoax staged by the government to justify gun regulations.
The case centered on allegations that Jones deliberately made false statements about the victims and their families—including suggesting the dead children were actors—to capitalize on the attention around the shooting for his Infowars platform, even as those statements led to a wave of intense abuse against the families. Many said they received death threats and were forced to move.
Jones and his company have filed for bankruptcy, and he relinquished the Infowars brand in April. He continues to broadcast online and share his programs on the social media platform X.
Jones called Friday's ruling a “massive victory for the First Amendment”—the constitutional provision protecting free speech—and said he would appeal to the Texas Supreme Court to have the remaining claims dismissed.
Jones said, “I have great constitutional lawyers and they will not back down.”
