Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to put on hold $1.4 billion in damages a judge ordered him to pay some of the families who lost children in a shooting in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
The families were awarded the money after suing Mr. Jones for defamation. For years on his Infowars show and website, Mr. Jones falsely claimed that the shooting was a hoax and that family members of the victims were actors in a plot to enact extreme gun control legislation. Twenty children, all of them first graders, and six educators died in the shooting.
The request to the justices is the latest development in the long-running litigation, as Mr. Jones seeks to put off any payout to the families. Mr. Jones and his company Free Speech Systems have separately asked the Supreme Court to review his appeal in the case. At their closed-door conference on Friday, the justices will consider whether to take the case.
Mr. Jones’s lawyers told the justices that he should be afforded special First Amendment considerations because of his large audience of viewers and listeners.
“Failure to reverse this case will mean all journalists will realize that they could be found liable for huge defamation awards, especially in ideologically divergent geographic regions, as Jones was and therefore refrain from publishing for fear of being hauled into court there facing a ‘trial by sanction,’” his lawyers told the court in their Thursday filing.
During the defamation trial in Connecticut, the families showed that Mr. Jones ignored demands to stop airing falsehoods about the Sandy Hook shooting because they increased Infowars’s sales. Witnesses shared stories of harassment by conspiracy theorists who believed Mr. Jones’s lies, including death and rape threats.
The Sandy Hook families were awarded damages in the Connecticut case in late 2022, and in a separate defamation lawsuit in Texas earlier that year. Mr. Jones and his business declared bankruptcy shortly afterward, and the families have yet to receive any of the money awarded them.
Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
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