Authored via Stacy Robinson via The Epoch Times,
A Texas appeals court on Aug. 21 drastically reduced a judgment owed by Infowars host Alex Jones, shrinking the amount from $50 million to around $6 million, over his commentary falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut a hoax.
Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems LLC, appealed the multimillion-dollar settlement after a jury in 2022 found him liable for “defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress” after the shooting in which 20 children and 6 faculty were killed.
The Texas Court of Appeals for the Third District denied many points of Jones’ appeal, and did not reverse a previous $4.2 million judgment for one of the plaintiffs.
But it did side with his argument that Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, died in the attack, should not have been allowed to alter their lawsuit after the jury verdict in order to seek more damages.
The parents had amended their suit to say the hoax claims caused them to be “disabled” by “severe emotional disturbance.” That meant Jones would be liable for “injury to a disabled person,” and the normal $750,000 cap would not apply.
“Concluding that the trial court erred by allowing the parents to amend their pleadings after the trial, we will modify the judgment by limiting their exemplary damages awards to a total of $750,000” per parent, Chief Justice Darlene Byrne wrote in the three-judge panel’s unanimous decision.
The panel said a trial court “abuses its discretion” when it allows plaintiffs to amend their claims after a jury verdict, because then the defendant “could not anticipate or defend against the pleading.”
Jones called the decision a “massive victory for the First Amendment” in an Aug. 21 post on X. His legal team intended to take the case to the Texas Supreme Court to reclaim the rest of the judgment, the post also said.
The parents were part of a group that brought multiple suits against Jones based on statements he made after the event.
The court summarized the parents’ accusation against Jones: They alleged he said that “Sandy Hook parents were participating in a sinister manipulation plan to fool the public or that a shadowy cabal of elites pre-planned the murder of their children and controlled the coverage of the event through the media manipulation.”
Parents testified that they were harassed and received death and rape threats as a result of his statements.
Mark Bankston, who represented Lewis and Heslin in Texas, said that the ruling doesn’t make a big difference in the case.
“The families care not at all about this irrelevant ruling which affects only two of the 19 claims they all share. Jones still faces over a billion dollars of liability, so this changes absolutely nothing. All it does is highlight the absurdity of Texas law,” Bankston said in a statement.
Last October, the U.S. Supreme Court also rejected an appeal by Jones to overturn a separate $1.4 billion judgment against him. He filed for bankruptcy in 2022, and satire news outlet The Onion has purchased Infowars.