Alex Jones liable for $50 million, but is it enough?
Mark Honeychurch - 8th August 2022
Alex Jones has been sued by parents for his claims on his TV show that the Sandy Hook school massacre was faked by the government as a way to take away people’s gun rights. These parents are suing because, as a result of Jones’ rhetoric, they have spent years dealing with abuse up to and including death threats - and this is after they lost their children in a massacre that Jones has been telling people never happened.
The current case has been to decide how much Jones should pay in damages, after he defaulted on several court cases last year because he refused to turn over all the requested evidence, stating that he’d given over everything he had - which, from what I can tell, was not much at all.
But all this has now changed, thanks to a slip up on the part of Jones’ lawyers. Here is audio of the gotcha moment in court where the plaintiff’s lawyer tells Alex Jones that his own defence lawyers accidentally sent them years of messages from his phone proving he’s been lying to the court, and that his lawyers then failed to request that they should be deleted when told about the mistake - meaning that they became admissible in court:
So, what did the messages say?
Basically, Alex Jones has been telling courts that he’s never had a text conversation about Sandy Hook, and that searches of his digital devices have brought up no results. Of course, these texts that were sent to the prosecution show that he’s absolutely been talking with people about it. He said that he never uses email, because he hates it - and the dump of data contains emails he sent to his lawyers and staff members. He’s also been telling the court that he makes very little money and is bankrupt, but the messages show he makes up to a million dollars a day, and he transferred 61 million dollars out of his company’s account and into his personal account, under the pretext of it being part of his remuneration, before declaring his company bankrupt.
And, in a case of poking the bear, Alex Jones has skipped several days of court proceedings, appearing instead on his InfoWars show and trash talking the judge - showing a picture of her going up in flames, and accusing her of being connected to human trafficking.
Interestingly, the messages that were accidentally handed over showed that, on a good day (such as when the Conservative Political Action Group holds their annual conference), Alex Jones’ online store can make as much as US$800,000 - that’s about NZ$1.25 million. Even though the average is a little less than a quarter of that, it’s still meant a revenue of US$135 million for Alex over three years - and I can only presume that his costs for these products are much less than he sells them for. And yes, it should come as no surprise that Alex Jones has an online store - he’s not just using his TV show to try to warn people about Chemtrails and other nonsense because he’s a civic-minded individual, he’s making money off of his channel - very good money.
It’ll also not be a surprise to hear that the things he’s selling are nonsense. His shop has a mixture of alternative medicine products that don’t work and survival gear that people will likely never need.
The survival equipment feels awful, because Alex Jones instils fear in his viewers by telling them that the government will soon be rounding them all up and placing them in concentration camps, the Illuminati are planning to abduct them, the government is stealing their votes, and civilisation is about to collapse.
On the alternative medicine side of things, I’ve been subjected to some disturbing and hilarious advertising from Alex Jones recently because our own local online disinformation show, Counterspin Media, is now hosting their videos on Alex Jones’ Infowar TV website - and every video starts with a short advert of Alex Jones shouting at you to buy products such as BodEase (a turmeric pill), Diet Force (Alex Jones’ advert for this one hilariously starts off with him saying “I’m still a fat ass, but…”) or InstaHard (no prizes for guessing what this one is).
It’ll come as no surprise to hear that none of his products are actual medicines, and there’s no evidence that any of them do anything useful. Diet Force contains Green Tea, Caffeine, Cayenne Pepper and Black Pepper, and InstaHard has over 20 ingredients including Kola Nut, Maca Root, Nettle Leaf, Zinc and Cayenne. I suspect some of these may have one or two exploratory studies backing them, likely in mice, and showing mixed results, but no proper, rigorous studies will have been completed for any of them.
So, what’s the result of the court case? Thankfully Alex has been ordered to pay over $4 million in costs, as well as around $45 million in punitive damages.
Will this be the end of Alex Jones and InfoWars spreading misinformation? Unlikely. For starters, as I said earlier, Jones has “re-structured” his finances, and the court will have to untangle that before they can get to the money. But the likely next step is that Alex Jones will appeal, and will try to drag his appeal out for as long as possible, asking that he not have to pay until the appeal process is completed. He may well see a reduction in the sum awarded during the appeal process, even if he doesn’t get the decision overturned, and then when it comes to paying he may well just refuse to pay, claiming that his company InfoWars media has no cash.
However, there are two other trials related to Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook claims that have yet to be completed. Given this precedent, it seems likely he’ll lose these too, despite his claim that his right to free speech has been impinged upon.
The only good thing I’ve ever seen come from Alex Jones is when he tried to be the voice of reason at the January 6th insurrection attempt in the US - but only after he’d worked the crowd up by chanting “1776” (the year of America’s independence) and “stop the steal”. And it turns out that these text messages may be useful to the House January 6th committee, who are currently piecing together the events of the event and have already asked Alex Jones for his text messages around that day. The lawyers have confirmed that they will be happy to provide the committee with a copy of the texts.
Alex is a truly odious man, and I really hope that eventually one of his court cases ends with a custodial sentence. I assume there’s nobody at InfoWars who’s brazen or loud enough to fill his shoes if he ends up in prison, and I like to imagine that his misinformation machine would slowly fade from existence.