Supreme Court Rejects Alex Jones’ Appeal in Sandy Hook Defamation Case

The Supreme Court today declined to hear an appeal from Alex Jones, upholding a $1.4 billion libel judgment against the right-wing conspiracy theorist for his false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

Juries in Connecticut and Texas found Jones liable in 2022 for defamation and intentionally inflicting emotional distress on the families of the 20 first-graders and six educators killed in the shooting. Jones has repeatedly attempted to block the sale of his Infowars platform to cover the substantial damages. He argued to the Supreme Court that the judgment amounted to a “financial death penalty” imposed on a media outlet reaching millions, as reported in his September filing.

The families impacted by Jones’s statements chose not to respond to the appeal, and the court offered no explanation for its decision. A federal judge previously ordered Jones’s company, Free Speech Systems, to be placed under the control of a receiver tasked with liquidating its assets, potentially opening the door for entities like The Onion to bid for the platform. This ruling underscores the legal consequences for spreading demonstrably false information that causes significant harm.

Jones has yet to pay any portion of the $1.4 billion owed to the families. “These viewers/listeners will not have just been deprived of a valued source of information, the risk is they will have been greatly deceived and damaged by operation of media source InfoWars by their ideological opposites,” Jones’s attorneys wrote in a separate emergency appeal filed last week, claiming his platform reaches an average of 30 million daily listeners. Further legal proceedings regarding the asset liquidation are expected to continue.