Supreme Court rejects Alex Jones appeal over $1.4B Sandy Hook shooting defamation ruling

WASHINGTON, DC: The US Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Infowars founder Alex Jones, leaving in place the $1.4 billion defamation judgment awarded to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

The decision, listed without explanation in the court’s Tuesday, October 14 orders, ends Jones’ last major legal avenue to challenge the historic penalty.

The far-right conspiracy theorist had sought to overturn the ruling that found him liable for spreading false claims that the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre, which left 20 children and six adults dead, was a staged hoax.

Victims' families claim Alex Jones' lies fueled years of harassment

Alex Jones repeatedly claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was orchestrated by “crisis actors” to advance gun control laws. The victims’ families said those lies triggered years of threats and harassment from his followers, compounding their trauma and obstructing their healing.

In a statement to CNN, Chris Mattei, attorney for the victims’ families, said: “The Supreme Court properly rejected Jones’s latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused. We look forward to enforcing the jury’s historic verdict and making Jones and Infowars pay for what they have done.”

Alex Jones calls ruling ‘financial death penalty’

In his September appeal, Alex Jones argued the court had violated his rights by finding him liable without a full trial, calling the $1.4 billion judgment “an amount that can never be paid.”

He described it as “a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcast reaches millions.”

Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, declared bankruptcy in 2022 following the massive defamation judgments in Connecticut and Texas.

A 2023 New York Times investigation revealed that Jones had transferred millions in assets beyond the reach of creditors as lawsuits and court sanctions accumulated.

In June, the trustee overseeing his personal bankruptcy case accused him of hiding more than $5 million. With the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene, legal experts say the ruling clears the way for the Sandy Hook families to begin seizing Jones’s assets and enforcing the award.

In the filing, Jones stated that the court's immediate involvement is needed because his website, InfoWars, is on the verge of being turned over to the satirical news site 'The Onion' to help fund payments to family members of the Sandy Hook victims.

If the case is not put on hold, "InfoWars will have been acquired by its ideological nemesis and destroyed," Jones' lawyers wrote.

The Sandy Hook tragedy occurred in December 2012, when a gunman killed 20 first-grade children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Connecticut.