Lawyers representing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his business said Jones “believes all or substantially all” Supreme Court justices will rule in his favor as he appeals a judgment for false claims related to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Why It Matters
Jones faces a judgment of nearly $1.44 billion ordered by a Connecticut jury in 2022, after he falsely claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged using “crisis actors” designed to lead to gun control.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newton, Connecticut, resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six adults.
During the defamation trial, relatives of victims described threats and harassment from Jones’s followers who believed the claims.
What To Know
Jones and his business, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy protection after the billion-dollar judgment.
At one point, the satirical news site The Onion tried to purchase InfoWars at a bankruptcy auction, but the court refused to approve the sale. The plaintiffs, families of Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent, remain poised to claim InfoWars and other assets in order to collect damages.
Jones asked the Supreme Court to review the case in a petition for a writ of certiorari filed last month. The plaintiffs said in a waiver filed last month that they do not intend to file a response unless requested by the Court.
On Thursday, lawyers representing Jones and his business submitted an application to stay collection, arguing that, absent a stay, “InfoWars will have been acquired by its ideological nemesis and destroyed — which Jones believes is the Plaintiffs’ intention. Hence, Jones will clearly experience irreparable injury if a stay is not granted.”
Jones’ attorneys said he has an average of 30 million daily viewers and listeners, and if the stay is not granted, “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.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, assigned to emergency appeals from Connecticut, can address the matter alone or refer it to the full Supreme Court for a vote, The Hill reported. The judges were scheduled to review the case at a closed-door conference on Friday, according to the outlet.
What People Are Saying
Ben C Broocks, Alan B. Daughtry and Shelby A. Jordan, attorneys for Jones and his business, in an application to stay collection: “The Plaintiffs here are on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum and do not want money for their judgment. Their initial motivations were to get Jones’s message off the air.”
Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the families, in a statement obtained by the Associated Press last month: “There is no legitimate basis for the U.S. Supreme Court to accept this last gasp from Alex Jones and we will oppose it in due course.”
What Happens Next
The Supreme Court has not yet agreed to grant certiorari or stay the collection of assets.