Hoax Damages

From the BBC:

“Alex Jones to pay damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim”

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $4.1m (£3.3m) in damages after falsely claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 was a hoax. Parents of the victims had been seeking at least $150m in the defamation trial against the Infowars host. They said they had endured harassment and emotional distress because of Mr Jones' misinformation. Twenty children and six adults were shot dead at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in 2012.The jury decided compensatory damages on Thursday, and must still decide any punitive damages.

 Mr Jones repeatedly argued that the shooting was a hoax organised by the government in order to strip Americans of gun ownership rights, and that the parents of the dead children were actors. Mr Jones has already lost a series of defamation cases brought by parents of the victims by default after failing to produce documents and testimony. But this is the first in which damages were determined by a jury. Ahead of the decision, lawyers for the two parents who brought the suit - Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin - revealed that Mr Jones' lawyer had inadvertently sent him two years of text messages from his client's phone. The messages could be of interest to the congressional panel investigating last year's US Capitol riot. The committee says Mr Jones helped organise a rally that took place just before the riot. Despite retracting his claims about Sandy Hook, Jones has continued to use his platform to attack jurors and the judge in this case. He also claimed he was bankrupt despite evidence that his companies were earning about $800,000 dollars a day selling diet supplements, gun paraphernalia and survivalist equipment.

^ This is great to hear. Now, anyone who continues to have anything to do with him won’t have any excuse. ^

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62427918