An attorney for the families of several Sandy Hook victims vowed that they will “make Alex Jones pay every last dollar that he has,” after a jury ordered the conspiracy theorist to pay $965 million for spreading lies that the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax.
“We are going to chase Alex Jones to the end of the earth,” attorney Joshua Koskoff said Thursday in an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” one day after the decision by a Connecticut jury to award nearly $1 billion in combined sums to a series of plaintiffs.
Jones has repeatedly been sued for falsely claiming that the 2012 massacre never took place and that the victims’ families were merely crisis actors. In testimony, the families described being regularly harassed by Jones’ followers, who they said threatened to dig up a child’s grave, physically protested at victims’ funerals and homes, and sent photos of dead children to one grieving mother whose 6-year-old son was killed in the shooting.
“This has been a long, torturous road for the families who never asked for any of this,” said Koskoff, who called the judgment “a very just and sound and reasonable verdict.”
“The families hope that with this verdict, it will dissuade others from trying to take up the Jones mantle,” he said.
Jones this summer backpedaled on his conspiracy claims about the shooting, admitting that the attack that killed 20 students and six teachers was “100% real” and insisting he wasn’t to blame for the actions of others. The Connecticut judge still found him liable for defamation, infliction of emotional distress, invasion of privacy and violating Connecticut’s unfair trade practices law.
A Texas court in August also found Jones liable in a related case for defamation and ordered him to pay $45.2 million to a Sandy Hook family, though legal experts have said he is unlikely to pay that full amount due to a state limit on punitive damages.
On his Infowars show on Wednesday, Jones mocked the jury’s verdict and said he doesn’t have the money. He requested donations but said they would go toward his legal defense and saving his company. None of the money would go to the victims’ families, he said.
