Recently, Alex Jones agreed to a Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy for himself and his company to pay for defamation judgments.
It was a good day.
Alex Jones is a right-wing personality who has made millions promoting conspiracies and creating lies. He is good television, amusing, outraged, and you never know what he is going to say. He is an excellent source of disinformation. But he went too far when he denied the Sandy Hook catastrophe and picked on a very sympathetic group of people.
A recap, at 9:30 on December 14, 2012, a mentally ill shooter went into the Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered 26 first graders and staffers, firing over 80 rounds before turning the gun on himself. Twenty children and six courageous staffers died trying to protect the children.
Within two hours of hearing about the shooting, Alex Jones surmised that this could be a false flag. Over the next 10 years, he was a leader in pronouncing the Sandy Hook massacre an elaborate hoax. At one point, 24% of the population believed that Sandy Hook was (or could be) a created story to take their guns away. That is the power that Alex Jones wields.
Jones claimed for years that the school killings were staged as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns.
No one can imagine the pain of losing a child, especially in a mass shooting. The pain of regret (for sending your child to school), the pain of loss of a 6-year-old, the pain of living with the grief. Yet these parents had to endure even more than grief, an intense level of harassment, mocking and stalking. Followers of Alex Jones Infowars began harassing the parents. They mocked their news conferences, they called them poor actors, they harassed the town’s leaders, the school, and everyone that they believed was part of the “conspiracy.”
Some parents tried to respond, but the deniers were relentless and vicious. The deniers insisted that the children were not dead. They demanded that the parents exhume their children’s bodies to prove they died from gunshots. The ten-year campaign against the Sandy Hook parents was brutal, cruel, and unrelenting. Parents were harassed on the streets; one woman was at a conference for mothers of children killed by gun violence and a participant told her she didn’t belong there because Sandy Hook didn’t happen. Parents had to defend themselves while grieving the death of their child.
Imagine.
Alex Jones was probably the biggest marketer of the conspiracy, and he had a very good reason…he sold more products when he talked about it. (He became rich by selling supplements, like colloidal silver, and vitamins.)
Fed up, some courageous parents decided to sue. Knowing that they would be harassed even more during the lawsuit, they went ahead because, as one parent said, they needed to prove “the importance of truth.”
Alex Jones remained the irascible character he is on his show and over 4 years, refused to give the plaintiffs their discovery to the point that both judges in Texas and Connecticut declared a summary judgment against Alex Jones and his company. A summary judgment was awarded because Alex Jones and his legal team abused the legal system to the point where the judges had to act.
In Texas, two plaintiffs were awarded $50M; in Connecticut, 20 plaintiffs were awarded $965M. Alex Jones declared bankruptcy for himself and his company. While bankruptcy can be used to wipe out debts and legal judgments, the judge overseeing Jones’ case ruled in October that most of the defamation verdicts cannot be legally discharged because they resulted from “willful and malicious injury.” This means that Jones’ decision to pursue a Chapter 7 liquidation doesn’t alter that ruling, he still owes the money. The court-supervised liquidation will allow the families to be awarded some compensation, with access to any wealth Jones may accrue in the future. While they won their defamation suits against Jones in 2021, to date they have yet to receive compensation.
This is a victory for truth. (Even Jones has finally acknowledged that the massacres occurred.)
On his InfoWars website, Jones said that he expects to lose everything except for his home. This could mean the end of InfoWars, but others will pop up, hopefully, they will not have as compelling a spokesperson as Alex Jones.
But the scarier question that isn’t answered here, is why were 75 million Americans willing to believe him.
No lawsuit will fix that.
Angela Rieck, a Caroline County native, received her PhD in Mathematical Psychology from the University of Maryland and worked as a scientist at Bell Labs, and other high-tech companies in New Jersey before retiring as a corporate executive. Angela and her dogs divide their time between St Michaels and Key West Florida. Her daughter lives and works in New York City.
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