The parent company of InfoWars on Monday agreed to face a second defamation trial linked to the false claims of the program’s host, Alex Jones, that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
FSS had at first asked U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Christopher Lopez to deny the Connecticut families’ request for FSS to participate in the state trial. Companies which have filed for chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code are typically shielded from ongoing lawsuits without the court’s permission.
The state trial, scheduled for September, may result in FSS and Jones being liable to pay more in damages than was awarded earlier this month by a Texas jury.
The size of the damages was aimed at sending a message after the parents of the children killed at Sandy Hook elementary school were harassed for years by people who believed Jones’s claims about the incident.
Lawsuit
An attorney for Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the separated parents of a slain 6-year-old boy, urged the jury to decide on a cash figure that would “stop Alex Jones” and shut down InfoWars.“Send the message to those who desire to do the same: Speech is free. Lies, you pay for," Wesley Ball, an attorney for the parents, told the jury on Aug. 5.
Federico Andino Reynal, Jones’s lead attorney, appealed to the jury for leniency and noted that the InfoWars host had become an example for “talk show hosts” to be more responsible in what they say.
“You’ve already sent a message,” Reynal told the jurors. “A message for the first time to a talk show host, to all talk show hosts, that their standard of care has to change.”
Heslin and Lewis originally sought $150 million in damages.
Jones was not in the Texas courtroom to hear the verdict when the 12-member jury determined that Jones and FSS had to pay $45.2 million in punitive damages.
Jones’s attorney immediately told the judge he would appeal and ask the courts to drastically reduce the size of the damages.
Heslin and Lewis’s son was one of 20 children and six adults killed on Dec. 14, 2012, in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Judge Maya Guerra Gamble presided over the Texas state lawsuit in Austin, where Jones’s program is based.
Jones conceded during the trial that the Sandy Hook mass shooting was “100 percent real” and told jurors that it was “crazy” of him to repeatedly make the false claims about the shooting.
Specifically, he had previously spread the claim that the mainstream media and gun-control activists worked together to fabricate the mass shooting, and that crisis actors were involved in staging the shooting.
