AUSTIN, Texas — A Texas court on Friday slashed a $50 million judgment to about $6 million against Infowars founder Alex Jones after he falsely claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting was a hoax.
The court found that Heslin and Lewis did not show evidence that harassment that resulted from Jones’ hoax claims rose to a level that would allow them to exceed the cap. The unanimous opinion by the Texas Third Court of Appeals left intact more than $4.1 million in compensatory damages awarded by a jury to Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis for defamation and emotional distress. But the court slashed more than $45 million in additional punitive damages down to $1.5 million to comply with the state’s $750,000 cap for each plaintiff. Heslin and Lewis’s 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis was among 20 children and six educators killed in the attack in Newtown, Connecticut. The lawsuit and the 2022 verdict against Jones marked the first time he was held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre, claiming it was faked by the government to tighten gun laws.
It also said the trial judge improperly allowed the parents to seek higher damages after trial. Jones, who portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his First Amendment rights, conceded during the trial that the attack was “100% real” and that he was wrong to have lied about it.
However, on his streaming show Friday, he called the Texas ruling “a gigantic victory for the First Amendment,” and said he will continue to appeal the case to the state Supreme Court to get the remaining damages thrown out. Mark Bankston, an attorney for Heslin and Lewis in Texas, shrugged off the appeals court ruling as “irrelevant” given that Jones still faces massive financial judgments.
