A conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered by a Texas jury on Friday to pay $45.2 million US in punitive damages to the parents of six-year-old son Jesse Lewis who was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012
In addition, Jones was required to pay $4.1 million for the suffering he caused to the family through his claim for years that the nation’s deadliest school shooting was a hoax.
Jones’s lead attorney, Andino Reynal told the judge that he will appeal and ask the courts to drastically reduce the size of the verdict.
Attorneys for the family had urged jurors to hand down a financial punishment that would force shutting down Infowars, Jones’ website containing his conspiracy theory.
Although Jones, who earlier portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his First Amendment rights, agreed during the trial that the attack was “100 percent real” and that he was wrong to have lied about it, Heslin and Lewis told jurors that an apology would not be sufficient and called on them to force Jones to pay for the years of suffering he has caused to them and other Sandy Hook families.
The parents told jurors about a decade of trauma they endured, inflicted first by the murder of their son followed by gunshots fired at a home, online and phone threats, and harassment on the street by strangers, all of which were fuelled by Jones and the followers via his website Infowars.
It was testified by a forensic psychiatrist that the parents suffer from complex post-traumatic stress disorder inflicted by ongoing trauma.
Throughout the trial, Jones’s erratic behavior was unusual by courtroom standards, and the judge said, “This is not your show.”
#AlexJones; #SandyHookparents
