By Jack Queen
(Reuters) - A Connecticut appeals court on Friday largely upheld a nearly $1.3 billion defamation verdict against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in a case accusing the Infowars founder of spreading lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting.
A three-judge panel of the Connecticut Appellate Court found that a jury's October 2022 decision to award $965 million in damages plus attorneys fees and costs to families of the shooting's victims was not unreasonable given the mental anguish they suffered due to the lies by Jones about Sandy Hook.
In affirming the verdict, the judges found fault only with a portion awarding $150 million in damages under a state unfair trade practices law, finding that should be thrown out because it did not properly apply to the facts of the case.
Jones claimed for years that the 2012 shooting deaths of 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, were staged with actors as part of a government plot to seize guns from Americans. He has since acknowledged that the mass shooting occurred, but plaintiffs said Jones cashed in for years off his lies about the massacre.
An attorney for the Sandy Hook families, Alinor Sterling, praised the ruling.
"The jury's $965 million rebuke of Jones will stand, and the families who have fought valiantly for years have brought Alex Jones yet another step closer to true justice," Sterling said in a statement.
Jones' lawyer Norm Pattis said in a statement that the jury was falsely led to believe Jones made millions of dollars off the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories and that Jones was to blame for the families' anguish.
"We had hoped the Appellate Court would have seen through the charade and farce that this trial became. It didn’t," Pattis said, adding that he plans to appeal to the Connecticut Supreme Court.
Jones and the parent company of his Infowars site, Free Speech Systems, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2022 after the verdict in Connecticut and another in Texas, where a jury in a similar case awarded other Sandy Hook parents $49 million.
In November, the Onion parody news website announced that it would purchase Infowars in a bankruptcy auction, though a losing bidder connected to Jones is challenging the sale.
A bankruptcy judge will consider whether or not to approve the Onion's purchase of Infowars at a Monday court hearing in Houston.