Late last week Infowars conspiracy theorist and bankruptcy filer Alex Jones’ lawyer felt the harsh judgement of Superior Court judge Barbara Bellis. Norm Pattis, who has represented Jones in Sandy Hook defamation lawsuits (and subsequent losses) was hit with a six-month suspension from practicing law by Judge Bellis for his sloppy handling of “thousands of protected medical and psychiatric records obtained from relatives of Sandy Hook shooting victims.”
But while the ruling is a very well-earned cherry on top of the pile of hogwash that is Alex Jones and his defamation defense strategies, it also has larger implications.
Judge Bellis told Pattis his excuse that his release of all of these confidential files was a mistake did not hold any water. Being incompetent and insensitive to the importance of your work and your responsibility to others isn’t a good defense. In a memorandum, Bellis wrote, “We cannot expect our system of justice or our attorneys to be perfect, but we can expect fundamental fairness and decency. There was no fairness or decency in the treatment of the plaintiffs’ most sensitive and personal information, and no excuse for [Pattis’] misconduct.”
Judge Bellis detailed each intentional step necessary to release Sandy Hook families’ private medical and psychiatric records, and the safeguards put in place at each point; and then how slapdash and irresponsibly Pattis and his crew of Jones’ parasites spread this private information around.
Litigants routinely turn over their most private and sensitive information to opposing counsel who are total strangers, and reasonably expect that opposing counsel will safeguard the information without even the need for a protective order. Indeed, our civil system of justice is premised on the trustworthiness of lawyers officers of the court-and we all rely on our lawyers to keep our information secure and safe.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones filed for personal bankruptcy in a Texas court on Friday after weeks on the hook for over $1 billion for pushing heinous and defamatory lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
For years, Jones, a Trump-supporting provocateur, falsely claimed on his far-right disinformation podcast, Infowars, that the Sandy Hook massacre, a tragedy that claimed the lives of 20 elementary school children and six adults, was an “inside job” instigated by the government as a pretext for the mass seizure of guns.
According to the New York Times, Jones’ websites and social media commandeered 1.4 million daily visits before major platforms like Facebook purged his content –. as Vox reported, for “glorifying violence… and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.”
Incited by Jones’ lies that the grieving parents of victims of Sandy Hook were “crisis actors,” Infowars listeners subjected the distraught families to years of violent threats and harassment, according to court testimony.
Reckoning arrived in 2018 when a group of families sued Jones and Infowar's parent company, Free Speech Systems, citing the stalking, death threats, and harassment they had endured due to Jones’ falsehoods.
In his Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the Southern District of Texas, Jones claimed insolvency due to the mostly business-related debts he said he owes to between 50 and 99 creditors, including Sandy Hook victims’ families, a value he estimated to be between $1 billion and $10 billion.
Jones said in his filing that his assets are worth between $1 million and $10 million, even though he earns up to $70 million annually peddling dietary supplements, quack cures, and other items including survival gear, reports the Times.
In a recent broadcast, the Infowars host pegged the amount at $2 million, telling his audience, "I’m officially out of money, personally,” even though a forensic economist estimated in court this summer that Jones and his business were worth up to $270 million.
An attorney for the Sandy Hook victims’ families, Chris Mattei, slammed Jones’ insolvency claims as a failed ploy to dodge accountability for his lies about the tragedy.
“Like every other cowardly move Alex Jones has made, this bankruptcy will not work,” Mattei said. "The American judicial system will hold Alex Jones accountable, and we will never stop working to enforce the jury’s verdict."
Jones' filing came a week after a Texas judge ordered him to pay $49 million in damages a jury awarded to the parents of a six-year-old killed in the shooting, a verdict Jones’ lawyer has publicly promised to appeal.
In October, before the Texas ruling, a jury in Connecticut awarded a contingent of eight Sandy Hook families $965 million in compensatory damages, the biggest penalty from Jones’ slate of legal woes.
A Connecticut jurist, Judge Barbara Bellis, pegged an additional $473 million in punitive damages to the tally early last month, bringing the bill up to $1.44 billion.
The Sandy Hook families challenged Jones’ insolvency claims, accusing the far-right fabulist of “systematically transferr[ing] millions of dollars” to himself and his relatives, according to a bankruptcy court filing in August.
“Alex Jones is not financially bankrupt; he is morally bankrupt, which is becoming more and more clear as we discover his plots to hide money and evade responsibility,” Kyle Farrar, an attorney for the Sandy Hook families, said at the time.
Jones funneled money from Free Speech Systems as the potential for damages mounted mid-trial, moving millions of dollars between August 2020 and November 2021 to business entities controlled by himself and his relatives, a Washington Postanalysis of Jones’ finances showed.
Jones claimed in his bankruptcy filing that Free Speech Systems, which filed for bankruptcy in July, owed $55 million to PQPR Holdings, a company he and his parents owned, a debt the Sandy Hook families called “fictitious,” per the Times.
Multiple media requests sent to Jones seeking comment on his filing have so far gone unanswered.
Alex Jones, who long ago demonstrated his estrangement from reality, has been putting on a brave front in the wake of last week’s jury verdict in Connecticut awarding the parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre nearly $1 billion in damages for having smeared them relentlessly after the tragedy. Going on both his Infowars program as well as other talk shows, he’s been busily mocking the verdict: “Do these people actually think they’re getting any money?” he told his audience.
His fellow conspiracy theorists, however, have registered an apocalypse-level freakout over the news, certain that the verdict is a sign that “the regime” (that is, the “globalists” they all believe secretly run the world) is about to start rounding them all up—even though this was a civil verdict. None of any of these reactions, however, bear any relationship to the complicated legal realities that are about to unfold.
The judgement—totaling $965 million for the eight families of the victims who filed the lawsuit—reflects both the real outrage arising from the facts of the case and the abysmal failure of Jones and his legal team to even attempt to mount an effective legal defense. From the very first day of the tragedy—on December 14, 2012, when a young man named Adam Lanza embarked on a shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, killing 20 children and six teachers and staff members—Jones had not only proclaimed the entire event a “false flag” operation by “globalists” intended to inspire a crackdown on gun ownership, but spent much of the following decade claiming the young victims and their parents were fake “crisis actors.”
The ensuing torrent of harassment and abuse against those families grew to such monumental proportions that Jones consequently ended up facing four lawsuits: the first two, decided in August by a Texas jury, ended with a $45.2 million judgement, which was dwarfed by the size of the judgement in the third lawsuit in Connecticut. The fourth lawsuit, filed in Texas by Sandy Hook parent Scarlett Lewis, is ongoing. Jones also faces a lawsuit filed by the families against Jones and his parent company, Free Speech Systems, claiming that he has been using shell companies to hide his assets in an effort to avoid paying the judgements against him.
As the verdict was being rendered, Jones went on his Infowars program live, mocking the huge dollar amounts as well as the families, who could be seen on live broadcasts weeping while the judgement was read aloud. He called the verdict a “joke,” saying he was only worth a few million. And then he pitched a fundraiser to help with his appeals, vowing that none of the money donated would wind up in the hands of the families.
“This is hilarious,” he said, as the separate awards were listed. “Do these people actually think they’re getting any money?”
“Ain’t gonna be happening, ain’t no money,” he told his audience as the dollar amounts were read aloud for the eight families. “Now remember, I’m in bankruptcy, we’ve got two years of appeals, the money you donate does not go to these people. It goes to fight this fraud, and it goes to stabilize the company. They want us shut down. That’s why the ambulance chasers did this, why they used these families.”
He added: “You want somebody to fight for you, I’m doing it, you see what they do. So you want to fight? That’s fine. It’s your decision. But that’s where we are, that’s the whacked-out system of the left.”
Jones told his audience the liberal Democratic establishment wanted to destroy him, and that “your pennies counter their millions.” He announced he would hold a 16-hour “emergency” broadcast to “save Infowars,” he said, and beckoned his viewers to “flood us with donations.”
“For hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can keep them in court for years. I can appeal this stuff,” he said.
Jones later talked about the verdict with Infowars host Owen Shroyer, dismissing the amounts in the judgement as unimportant. “Quite frankly, the way inflation is going, the way it accelerates towards the Weimar Republic and Zimbabwe—in 10 years, there’s such inflation a billion dollars will be like a thousand dollars.”
He added: “No, I’m not scared. I am disgusted. And I really feel proud of myself, because I’ve told the truth about this, I’ve said when I was wrong, they have created this whole synthetic identity for me, the straw man, and then they sat there and had to lie to a jury and suppress the truth and tell them I was guilty, and rid this kangaroo court. So I myself can hold my head tall.”
Jones was interviewed on the right-wing outlet Newsmax, and voiced confidence that he’d eventually prevail in court. “We are very, very sure, that this thing is such a joke, this is such a fiasco, such a kangaroo court, such a railroad job that these will be overturned, both the Texas rulings and the Connecticut rulings,” he said, indicating he would take the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court if he had to. “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t have $10 million cash,” he added.
The legal realities of the verdict, however, are much more complicated—particularly when it comes to extracting anything resembling $965 million from Jones’ conspiracy-theory media empire. The biggest complication involves determining just how much money he really has.
Testimony at an earlier defamation trial showed that Infowars raked in $165 million between 2016 and 2018. Yet Jones claimed Wednesday that he has less than $2 million to his name. He has repeatedly refused to make his financial information public.
A forensic economist who testified in the Texas trial estimated Jones’ combined net worth with his business entities at somewhere between $135 million and $270 million. Some legal experts say this is why the size of Wednesday’s verdict was so immense as to render it largely symbolic.
According to TheNew York Times, the verdict’s fallout is likely to follow one of the three paths available for attorneys on both sides. In the first, the families could end up being entitled to Jones’ future earnings and obtain garnishments to pay off the judgment, although this would also permit Jones to remain in the business of smearing them and many others. The second option would involve the families selling their claims to hedge funds or other investors—giving them cash up front, though only at a fraction of the claims’ value—while the new owners would then attempt to make profits from them by investigating Jones’ assets. The third scenario would involve the liquidation of Jones’ businesses by the bankruptcy court, selling off their assets for cash.
Attorneys for the Connecticut families have vowed to pursue Jones. “We will be active down in Texas in an action we brought to track fraudulent transfers of assets he’s made, and in bankruptcy court where we are now very significant creditors of Alex Jones and Free Speech Systems,” said Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the families. “We are going to enforce this verdict as long as it takes, because that’s what justice requires.”
Meanwhile, Jones’ longtime cohorts and enablers on the right—particularly those who have built careers like his, peddling conspiracy theories and catering to the lowest common denominator of right-wing politics—were not so cheerily brazen as Jones. Many of them took to Twitter and other social media to indulge in a panic over the totalitarian crackdown they believe the ruling portends.
White nationalist conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie—best known for concocting the risible claim, amplified by Tucker Carlson, that the FBI secretly planned and coordinated the January 6 insurrection—penned a piece for his far-right outlet Revolver News headlined: “Love Him or Hate Him, the War Against Alex Jones is a War Against All of Us.”
“It’s all about the bullhorn—that is, all about making sure that the Regime is in exclusive possession of the megaphone, and any non-approved person who dares speak non-approved narratives to the public gets crushed,” he wrote, adding: “The aggressive use of defamation law is just the latest tool in the Regime’s arsenal to silence dissent.”
Beattie also posted a warning on Twitter to “never ever question the regimes official story or we’ll fine you a billion dollars.” He then stoked paranoia that the government will “kill you” if “you have video proof.”
Benny Johnson, a conspiracist host for Newsmax, whined on Twitter: “Just like deplatforming, this isn’t about Alex Jones, it’s about silencing political enemies,” he wrote. “The regime is setting a precedent that if you speak out, they will come after you & try to destroy you.”
Florida legislator Anthony Sabatini, a Republican conspiracy theorist who earlier demanded that his state kick out the Justice Department after Donald Trump’s mansion was searched by the FBI, complained that “Beltway libertarian cucks talk about LIBERTY! but only end up defending leftist debauchery.” He had a suggestion: “Alex Jones should be appointed as next president of the University of Florida—not Ben Sasse.”
Mike Cernovich, one of the main progenitors of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories and multiple other fraudulent claims and currently an Infowars host, posted on Twitter that Jones had “killed no one” and had “apologized for his erroneous reports, of which there weren’t many.” He added: “Stalin’s ghost has returned.”
Cernovich retweeted a post from a right-wing account that asked: “How much does CNN owe us for the weapons of mass destruction allegedly in Iraq?” He also retweeted a post from the publisher of the right-wing Post Millennial, Libby Emmons, proclaiming: “[They] decided to hold Alex Jones responsible for the horrible deaths of those school children in 2012.”
Jack Posobiec, the white-nationalist provocateur, called the verdict against Jones an “obvious attack on freedom of speech.” He claimed on Twitter that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow faced a similar lawsuit in 2019 that was dismissed because “courts ruled she was obviously an opinion show and she couldn't be held liable for what she said on air, even if exaggerated.” Posobiec argued that Jones’ different outcome was “not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy.”
Posobiec’s most recent cohort, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, said Jones “owes a billion dollars for saying mean things on his show” before questioning “how much should the propagandists at CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, and The New York Times pay” for promoting COVID-19 vaccination.
“This isn't about calculating real damages from Alex Jones,” Kirk tweeted. “This is about sending a message: If you upset the Regime, they will destroy you, completely and utterly, forever.”
Kirk also posted a video in which he ruminated on the meaning of the verdict. “It is not about whether you like Alex Jones,” he said. “It is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is, do you think that the law industrial complex, in collusion with the media, can work in harmony to obliterate someone financially, for saying something wrong and then apologizing afterwards! Oh, so they’re gonna go for Mike Lindell next. Or are they gonna go for Steve Bannon, or are they gonna for this program, or are they gonna go for Tucker Carlson? The New York Times says this now holds lessons. This is practice for them. This is a spring football game. This is Spring Training.
“Alex Jones is not the destination,” he added. “Alex Jones is getting them refined to be able to do what they actually want to do to all of us.”
In reality, the verdict was simply a long-overdue measure of accountability within the framework of the nation’s longstanding network of laws designed to prevent people from being harmed by irresponsible smear artists, particularly in the media. “The judgment also sends a message to anyone thinking of deliberately deploying disinformation to disrupt people’s lives for financial gain: Think twice—or risk being hit with a similarly large damages payment,” observed Chris Stokel-Walker at Wired.
“There has to be some message sent here to people like him that this is simply not acceptable in a civilized society,” NYU journalism professor Stephen D. Solomon, the founding editor of First Amendment Watch, told Stokel-Walker.
Punishing Alex Jones is less important than destroying the business model that allows people like him to profit by pumping toxic horseshit into the national discourse. Let's hope this accomplishes both.
Conspiracy theorist, falsehoods promoter for profit, and Infowars founder Alex Jones will have to pay families of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting at least $965 million in damages after a jury returned a unanimous verdict in a consolidated case. Jones for years had falsely claimed the 20 young children and six adults slaughtered while in their elementary school were “crisis actors.”
The Associated Press reported the total damages, which include amounts for emotional distress and slander. He will also have to pay attorneys fees, which will be awarded by the judge later.
Attorney Paul Butler said on MSNBC the punitive damages are about sending a message about the depravity here, and try to measure in dollars the depravity in such that anybody else who’s thinking about spreading lies like this can’t hide behind the First Amendment.”
MSNBC also reports Jones has gone back to denying the fact that Sandy Hook was a mass shooting, reporting he has recently said it is “synthetic as hell.”
CNN reports the “decision marks the culmination of a years-long process that began in 2018 when the families took legal action against Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, the parent of the fringe media organization Infowars.”
“Jones baselessly said again and again after the 2012 mass shooting, in which 26 people were killed, that the incident was staged, and that the families and first responders were ‘crisis actors.’ The plaintiffs throughout the trial described in poignant terms how the lies had prompted unrelenting harassment against them and compounded the emotional agony of losing their loved ones.”
Jones has reportedly made millions off his false claims.
Earlier at trial Jones told the court he was “done” apologizing, and claimed that he believed the false “crisis actor” claims he had made.
Jones was not in the courtroom as the damages were being read, but NBC’s Ben Collins reports on his radio show he said, “This must be what Hell’s like, they just read out the damages. Even though you don’t got the money.”
Jones also vowed, said, according to Collins, “We’re not going away, we’re not going to stop.”
