Alex Jones Says He Won’t Pay $965 Million Verdict: ‘They’re Gravely Mistaken’

Alex Jones during trial at the Travis County Courthouse in Austin, Texas, on Aug. 3, 2022. Briana Sanchez/Pool via Reuters

InfoWars founder Alex Jones said that he will appeal the $965 million verdict and indicated it’s unlikely he will pay the full amount.

Jones was sued by Sandy Hook victims’ families over public claims he made about the mass shooting.  A jury in a Waterbury, Connecticut, state court found that Jones and the parent company of his Infowars website must pay $965 million to numerous families of 20 children and six staff members who were killed.

Jones has said he will fight the verdict on appeal and use the recent bankruptcy of his company, Free Speech Systems LLC, to avoid paying. It is unclear if he and his companies could ever pay the verdicts in full, but attorneys for the plaintiffs have vowed to prevent him from shielding any of his assets.

“So, look, nobody’s talking about the appeal,” Jones told Newsmax on Friday morning. “We are very, very sure—like 99 percent—that this is such a joke, this thing is such a fiasco, such a kangaroo court, such a railroad job that these will be overturned, both the Texas rulings and the Connecticut rulings, at the Supreme Court of Connecticut and Texas, if not the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Jones stipulated that the verdict “doesn’t matter at the end of the day” because “I don’t have $10 million cash.”

“I got a couple of houses, a couple million bucks in the bank,” he remarked. “It’s a total joke. And so if they think they’re gonna get 900-plus million dollars, they’re gravely mistaken.”

Jones further noted that he “didn’t kill their kids,” adding that former NFL star O.J. Simpson “was found civilly guilty of murdering two people” in the 1990s. But he only paid $33.5 million to those families, Jones remarked.

“I just question the public event. I didn’t send people to harass anybody—hardly ever even talked about it,” he added.

‘InfoWars Will Continue’

Jones told Newsmax that he is currently in Chapter 11, subchapter 5 bankruptcy, “which is not a liquidation. It’s a reorganization.”

“So as long as I want to work, basically for free, I mean, instead of making $2 million a year, and a half million dollars a year under it, I’m happy to do that,” Jones remarked. “InfoWars will continue on because the bankruptcy is going to be successful, as long as listeners and people support us.”

But Chris Mattei, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told Reuters that he’s confident that he'll recover a significant amount of the verdict.

“We’re confident we will recover as much of the verdict as we can in the near-term, and in the long-term, this verdict isn’t going anywhere,” he said, according to Reuters.

Reuters contributed to this report.