Alex Jones Adds Another Half Billion Dollars To His Free Speech Tab

Best of luck, sir, or else the opposite of that.

Pissing off judges is never a good legal strategy. And Alex Jones really pissed off Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis in the four and a half years since the families of eight Sandy Hook victims and a former FBI agent filed suit against the podcaster for lies he told about the massacre that killed 20 elementary school children and six school staffers. So it shouldn't be a huge surprise that today Judge Bellis assessed a non-compensatory damage award of $473 million, including attorneys' fees of $321,650,000, costs of $1.5 million, and $150 million in punitive damages to the plaintiffs.

Jones used his enormous platform at Infowars to call the shooting, perpetrated by a deranged 20-year-old with ready access to high-capacity weapons, a "hoax" designed to gin up to support gun control. He called the parents of the slain children "crisis actors" and handed his giant megaphone to conspiracy theorists who said the school had been closed long before the shooting, that the children were still alive, or that they'd never even existed. In one particularly vile incident, he spliced together footage of the coroner saying that he'd allowed parents to identify their children through photographs, to spare them the horror of seeing their children's mangled bodies, with footage of a father saying he'd held his dead son and said goodbye.

The inevitable result was that the families were constantly harassed, never able to grieve, and in some cases, forced to move or go into hiding. A month ago, a jury in Waterbury awarded the plaintiffs $965 million in compensatory damages.

You want to know how to make a judge incandescent with rage? Try this :

“Watching the Sandy Hook verdict live from his studio, Alex Jones makes an urgent plea to his audience for cash, and tells them that none of the money they send him will go the the families because he has filed for bankruptcy.”

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦) 1665604772 

That would be fucking stupid even if, as here, the judge wasn't in charge of determining punitive damages. Jones's lawyers were already in a foul odor with the judge, and not just because of their years-long refusal to cooperate with discovery, resulting in a default judgment against their client in multiple courts. Most egregiously, it emerged in the Texas trial that Jones's Connecticut lawyers had been passing around the plaintiffs' confidential medical records when Jones's lawyer inadvertently disclosed an image of his phone. That disciplinary issue is still ongoing in both states, and it hung like a cloud over Jones's lawyers as they tried to argue that the jury's award for compensatory damages was so high as to be punitive, and thus the court should only award a nominal amount in attorney's fees and punitive damages.

Spoiler Alert:  FUCK. OFF .

The record clearly supports the plaintiffs argument that the defendants' conduct was intentional and malicious, and certain to cause harm by virtue of their infrastructure, ability to spread contact, and massive audience including the “infowarriors.” The record also establishes that the defendants repeated the conduct and attacks on the plaintiffs for nearly a decade, including during the trial, wanton, malicious, and heinous conduct that caused harm to plaintiffs. This depravity and cruel, persistent course of conduct by the defendants establishes the highest degree of reprehensibility and blameworthiness.

You really, really never want the court to describe how your clients' "concealment of their conduct and wrongdoing, by virtue of their stunningly cavalier attitude toward both their discovery obligations and court orders regarding discovery throughout the entire pendency of the case, their unprepared corporate representative, and intentional discovery abuses, militates in favor of a substantial award of punitive damages."

Turns out, there's a price to pay for dicking the court around for close to five straight years! And that price is almost $1.5 billion dollars. Which is a shit ton of money, but, as the court points out, there's no danger of this award incentivizing other lawsuits — and not just because no one is as loud and terrible as Alex freakin' Jones.

The road to reach a verdict here was a torturous one, involving an unusual number of appeals, an extraordinary number of court filings, and numerous forays into federal court including bankruptcy court. Moreover the trial record establishes that the defendants remain in the unique position of having – and continuing to utilize – an immense media platform and audience to continue to target the plaintiffs, as well as mocking the plaintiffs' attorneys, the court, and the very jury that they selected. It is, quite simply, unprecedented in American jurisprudence, and the court reaches the inescapable conclusion that despite the magnitude of the harms caused to the plaintiffs, there is a little incentive to bring an action like this against defendants such as these, who will continue to use their platform to attack.

HOOBOY!

So, now what? Well ... it's complicated. As Judge Bellis mentioned, Jones is tied up in bankruptcy right now, and he's trying like hell to get his company Free Speech Systems to indemnify him so he can shield his own personal wealth from creditors. He's also trying to claim that he's legally entitled to be the first creditor to get paid, looting the company's assets and leaving nothing for the plaintiffs. Convenient, no? A lot will rest on whether Jones is able to execute that play in bankruptcy court. There's also the reality that Jones and Infowars aren't worth $1.5 billion. But one way or another, the plaintiffs are going to wind up squeezing all the juice out of that bitter lemon, no matter how long it takes.

 [DECISION] 

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