The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to review an appeal from Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, leaving in place a lower court judge’s order that he pay $1.4 billion in damages to some of the families who lost children in a 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
In turning down Mr. Jones’s appeal, the court gave no reasons, as is its custom in issuing such orders.
The families were awarded the money after suing Mr. Jones for defamation. Mr. Jones for years falsely claimed on his Infowars show and website 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 Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the case clears the way for Mr. Jones to pay the families as a result of the long-running litigation. Mr. Jones and his company Free Speech Systems had asked the justices to put off any payout until the court had determined whether to review his appeal.
In response to the court’s action Tuesday, an attorney for the families said the justices “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,” attorney Chris Mattei said in a statement.
Mr. Jones’s lawyers told the court that he should be afforded First Amendment considerations because of his large audience of viewers and listeners. The $1.4 billion order, his lawyers said, is believed to be the largest judgment in American libel case history and “is an amount that can never be paid.”
In court filings, they asserted that the 2022 judgment against Mr. Jones violated his constitutional rights in part by holding him responsible for the statements of his listeners. The result is “a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions,” his lawyers wrote.
An attorney for Mr. Jones did not immediately respond for comment on Tuesday.
During Mr. Jones’s defamation trial in Connecticut, the families showed that he had 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 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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