On Thursday, a Texas jury told Infowars host Alex Jones to pay Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis $4 million in damages. They are the parents of a 6-year-old girl who died in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school, in which gunman Adam Lanza killed 28 people. Most of the people who died were kids.
Alex Jones is known as a conspiracy theorist because he thinks that several mass shootings were faked by the government. Jones says that the people who died were “crisis actors” who were used to make people upset so that gun laws would be tightened. Jones said that the government thought up these elaborate hoaxes to make it easier to control the American people.
Alex Jones’s claims that the children who died in the Sandy Hook shooting were just tools used by the US government caused several people to protest.
Parents like Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis have asked for money because they say the Infowars host downplayed their loss and caused Jones’ supporters to harass them.
USA Today says that Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis asked for $150 million in damages for the false things Jones said about the Sandy Hook school shooting.
Heslin told the judge in court how bad the parents’ harassment was
“I can’t even begin to describe the last nine and a half years, which have been a living hell for me and other people because of Alex Jones’s recklessness and carelessness.”
On Wednesday, it came out that the trial had taken a sharp turn. Jones’ lawyers had sent the other side two years’ worth of text messages and emails by mistake.
From what the texts say, Jones made a lot more money from Infowars than he first said. This was surprising because he had said before that the $150 million the parents asked for would put him out of business.
Jones told the court on Wednesday that he didn’t think Sandy Hook was a fake. But that’s not the end of it. Several parents, survivors, and even an FBI agent have filed lawsuits against Jones, saying that he should be punished for spreading so much misinformation and false information.
“We aren’t done folks. We knew going into this case that we had to aim for the stars if we wanted people to know we were serious and committed. He will owe a lot more after tomorrow.”
From 2015 to 2018, according to court documents, Jones made $165 million selling tactical and survival gear on the Infowars website. It is said that at least some of his customers became his customers because he spread conspiracy theories, like the ones about the Sandy Hook shooting.