Right-wing troll Alex Jones has come to the end of his rope.
On Tuesday (Oct. 14), the Supreme Court declined an appeal from Jones, who wanted to overturn a $1.4 billion libel judgement from a lower court over his false comments about the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.
“Jones has faced mounting legal pressure after juries in Connecticut and Texas found him liable in 2022 for defamation and emotional distress over his lies about the massacre, in which 20 first graders and six educators were killed. Jones has repeatedly tried to head off the sale of his far-right platform, Infowars, to pay those damages,” CNN reports.
“The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions,” Jones wrote in his Supreme Court appeal filed at the Supreme Court in September.
Jones filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court last week, claiming that his platform has 30 million daily listeners. And, without an intervention by the Supreme Court, “these viewers/listeners will not have just been deprived of a valued source of information, the risk is they will have been greatly deceived and damaged by operation of media source InfoWars by their ideological opposites,” CNN reports.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied that emergency appeal on Tuesday.
That means the federal judge’s order issued earlier this year — directing that Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, be placed under a court-appointed receiver to liquidate its assets — remains in effect. It also means that the Onion, the satirical news outlet that made a complete joke out of Jones’ site, can revive its bid to take over the platform.
In 2022, Jones was found liable for defamation after repeatedly claiming on air that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was not only a “hoax,” but that the children who lost their lives in the shooting were crisis actors. Jones was ordered to pay the families $1 billion in damages, and, CNN notes, he’s not paid anyone a single cent.
“The Supreme Court properly rejected Jones’ latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused,” Chris Mattei, an attorney representing Sandy Hook families, told CNN. “We look forward to enforcing the jury’s historic verdict and making Jones and Infowars pay for what they have done.”
