On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request from far right podcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was seeking an appeal of a $1.4 billion judgment against him after he lost a defamation lawsuit brought by family members of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting of 2012.
Jones and his legal team submitted a writ of certiorari to the high court last week, arguing that his past defamatory statements were mere “reporting” on the school shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six adults. The event, Jones wrote in his filing, was “the subject of reporting and debate” and was discussed by “scores of journalists worldwide,” including himself.
Jones also claimed that, were the Supreme Court to decide against hearing his case, it would mean that “all journalists will realize that they could be found liable for huge defamation awards, especially in ideologically divergent geographic regions…and therefore [will] refrain from publishing for fear of being hauled into court” to face a “‘trial by sanction’ in which the First Amendment is superfluous.” He further described the sanctions he faced as being a “financial death penalty by fiat,” stating that the words he was being punished over were “lifted out of context.”
The far right media mogul also complained about his InfoWars website potentially being sold off as a means to help pay for the $1.4 billion in judgments that have been made against him — including the possibility that it could be purchased by the satirical news website The Onion, which Jones described as an “ideological nemesis.”
Jones’s doomsday predictions and other concerns were not enough to persuade the Supreme Court to rule in his favor, as the court decided on Tuesday, without explanation, to deny the writ, thus ending the last avenue available to him to avoid having to pay the families.
Jones’s legal filings disregarded how vitriolic and consequential his statements were toward those family members.
Jones was found liable in Connecticut and Texas courts of having made numerous (and continuous) false statements about the Sandy Hook shooting — including falsely asserting to his listeners that the entire thing was a hoax meant to garner support for gun control measures. He also repeatedly described family members of those who were killed as “crisis actors.”
Jones’s arguments against being found liable for his defamatory speech rested largely on First Amendment speech protection claims. But the First Amendment protects against censorship, not repercussions for how you use your speech, and defamation laws allow for individuals who are harmed by another person’s statements — particularly false or careless ones — to file lawsuits seeking civil damages.
During the trials, the victims’ family members proved to juries that they had indeed faced significant emotional and personal harm due to Jones’s falsehoods. Many parents, for example, recounted how they were stalked and harassed relentlessly for years by people who believed the podcaster’s conspiracy theories regarding the shooting. Others described disturbing pieces of mail they received from Jones’s followers, including death threats and correspondence in which the letter-writers claimed to have desecrated their children’s final resting places.
Later on Tuesday, Chris Mattei, an attorney representing the families of Sandy Hook victims, said the high court had made the correct decision.
“The Supreme Court properly rejected Jones’s latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused,” Mattei said. “We look forward to enforcing the jury’s historic verdict and making Jones and Infowars pay for what they have done.”
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