A jury in Connecticut has ordered right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to nearly $1 billion in damages to families of victims killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, according to Bloomberg.
Jones must pay $965 million to eight families and an FBI agent.
The families’ lawyers had suggested jurors use $550 million as a “baseline” for calculating damages — roughly one dollar for every social media impression Jones’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts jointly racked up during the six years following the 2012 mass shooting.
In his closing argument, Chris Mattei, an attorney for one of the families, told the jury:
“You have to stand up to a bully, because bullies won’t stop, especially when being a bully makes them very, very rich.”
Though Jones has repeatedly said he is flat broke and cannot pay a dime in damages, a former employee who worked for the Infowars host testified that Jones total earnings dietary supplements, books and survival gear at $100 million to $1 billion since the 2012 mass shooting that left 26 people dead, including 20 children between six and seven years old.
Just last month, Jones had his request for bankruptcy denied by a judge and a new overseer appointed, guaranteeing that the right-wing agitator will be unable to hide any of his assets, which will likely lead to a complete financial collapse of him and his company:
Judge Christopher Lopez dismissed Mr. Jones’s attorney and chief restructuring officer in the bankruptcy of Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company, and expanded the duties of a Department of Justice-appointed trustee already monitoring the case. The judge authorized the trustee to hire additional legal and other help, specifying that any new hires must have “no connection to any of these cases,” he said, citing a need to investigate “insider relationships.”
According to remarks Jones made after the Sandy Hook massacre, the dead children and their grieving families were merely “crisis actors” who performed as part of a plan he claimed was meant to aid the passage of restrictive gun control measures in the United States.
