Supreme Court refuses to hear Alex Jones appeal of Sandy Hook judgment

Oct. 14 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday refused to hear the appeal of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who wanted his judgment of $1.44 billion overturned in his libel case brought by the families of victims of the Sandy Hook, Conn., elementary school shooting.

Jones, who owns InfoWars, had repeatedly claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting wasn't real and the events were staged by crisis actors. In reality, 20 first-graders, six teachers, the shooter Adam Lanza and his mother died in the 2012 school shooting.

A Connecticut court in 2022 ordered Jones to pay $1.44 billion to the families of the victims.

The families sued Jones for defamation and are preparing to take control of InfoWars, which they plan to turn over to the satirical news site The Onion. Jones then asked the Court to review the judgment in September.

Related

• Alex Jones asks Supreme Court to pause $1.44B Sandy Hook payments
• Judge rejects The Onion's purchase of InfoWars
• Judge to hear Alex Jones' challenge to The Onion's bid for his Infowars website

In a separate emergency filing on Thursday, Jones said he needed a pause in payments to prevent his site from being "acquired by its ideological nemesis and destroyed," NBC News reported.

He said in Thursday's appeal that his InfoWars platform has an average of 30 million daily listeners. And unless the court intervened, "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."

"The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions," Jones told the Supreme Court in an appeal.

He argued that he should have had a trial before a judge found him liable for defamation and emotional distress. But the judge ruled that he was liable by default because he wouldn't follow court rulings or turn over evidence. A jury decided the damages.

Jones has yet to pay any money owed to the victims' families, CNN reported.