(AFP) – The US Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an appeal by far right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of the $1.4 billion in damages he has been ordered to pay for falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. The top court turned down Jones’s appeal of the defamation judgment without comment.
Jones, founder of the website InfoWars and host of a popular radio show, has been found liable in multiple lawsuits brought by relatives of the victims of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 20 children and six teachers dead. Jones claimed for years on his show that the Sandy Hook shooting was “staged” by gun control activists and that the parents were “crisis actors,” but has since acknowledged it was “100 percent real.”
Sandy Hook families maintained that Jones’s lies and denialism, coupled with his ability to influence the beliefs of thousands of followers, caused real emotional trauma. Jones filed for personal bankruptcy in his home state of Texas after losing the defamation case. Free Speech Systems, the Texas-based parent company of InfoWars, also declared bankruptcy.
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