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Alex Jones with private security guards after appearing at his Sandy Hook defamation trial last week.
As Alex Jones was being ordered by a jury in Connecticut to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to the families of eight Sandy Hook victims and an F.B.I. agent he accused of being actors, he scoffed live on his show: “Do these people actually think they’re getting any money?”
Broadcasting in tandem on Wednesday with the court hearing, which he did not attend, Mr. Jones called the $965 million judgment against him a “joke.” He then tried to convince his audience to send him money.
Mr. Jones, a fabulist who was ruled liable for defamation over his lies about the 2012 massacre being a hoax, told viewers that the Democratic establishment was out to get him and that “your pennies counter their millions.” The top headline on his website, which was covered in ads for the diet supplements he hawks, was about the verdict, and linked to an appeal to buy his book.
He planned to hold an “emergency” broadcast for more than 16 hours to “save Infowars,” he said, urging people to “flood us with donations.”
“For hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can keep them in court for years. I can appeal this stuff,” he said.
Mr. Jones repeated the contested claim that he and his company, the Infowars parent Free Speech Systems, were “almost completely out of money” and that the plaintiffs “can’t get blood from a stone.” He has placed Free Speech Systems into bankruptcy, which the Sandy Hook victims’ families have challenged in court as an attempt by Mr. Jones to avoid paying damages.
During the trial, Mr. Jones said he needed $80,000 for security to travel to Connecticut to testify. He arrived in Waterbury on a private jet and stayed with an entourage in a rented villa with a pool and tennis court. During an earlier damages trial in Texas, a financial expert testified in August that Mr. Jones and Free Speech Systems were worth somewhere between $135 million to $270 million.
Mr. Jones, who has conceded that the massacre was “100 percent real,” returned on Wednesday to casting doubt on other school shootings, while also voicing other false narratives. The verdict, he said, was an attempt to “scare us away from questioning Uvalde and what really happened there, or Parkland or any other event.”
He continued: “We’re not going away, and we’re not going to stop.”
Source: nytimes.com
