The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear Alex Jones’ appeal to overturn the massive $1.4 billion defamation judgment levied against him for spreading false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.
The decision, announced Tuesday, effectively ends Jones’ latest legal effort to escape financial responsibility for years of conspiracy-driven lies about one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings. The justices offered no comment or written explanation for denying his petition – a common practice when the court declines to take up a case.
Jones, the founder of the far-right media outlet Infowars, has been under intense legal and financial scrutiny since 2022, when juries in both Connecticut and Texas found him liable for defamation and emotional distress. The cases stemmed from his repeated on-air claims that the massacre, which killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, was a government “hoax” staged to promote gun control.
In his September appeal, Jones’ attorneys argued that the lower court’s rulings amounted to “a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions.” His legal team urged the justices to intervene, claiming the verdicts violated Jones’ First Amendment rights and would cripple his ability to operate Infowars.
The Sandy Hook families who sued Jones chose not to respond to his petition, and the Supreme Court did not request any reply.
Separately, Jones filed an emergency appeal with the high court last week, emphasizing the scale of his platform and arguing that shutting down Infowars would harm its audience. His attorneys stated that without judicial intervention, “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.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor swiftly denied that emergency request on Tuesday.
Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, to be placed under the control of a court-appointed receiver. The move authorized the sale of the company’s assets to compensate the Sandy Hook families. That decision also allowed The Onion, the satirical news outlet, to revive its tongue-in-cheek bid to purchase the platform – though no progress has been made on that front.
Jones, who built his career on conspiracy theories and misinformation, has yet to pay any portion of the more than $1 billion owed to the victims’ families. Despite claiming financial hardship, he continues to broadcast and raise money through his show and affiliated websites.
Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Sandy Hook families, praised the Supreme Court’s decision, saying, “The Supreme Court properly rejected Jones’s latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused. We look forward to enforcing the jury’s historic verdict and making Jones and Infowars pay for what they have done.”
The Onion declined to comment on the ruling.
For Jones, the rejection represents another major setback in a years-long battle that has left him financially cornered and publicly discredited. With the court’s refusal to intervene, legal experts say the path is now clear for families to pursue collection of damages – potentially marking the beginning of the end for Infowars as it currently exists.
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