Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.
I’m not really in the loop on this but can someone ELI5 why Alex Jones is the only one that’s being forced to pay money for the shit that comes out of his mouth? It seems like everyone else is doing whatever they want with no repercussions.
He made very specific defamatory statements accusing fellow citizens / parents of murdered children of participating in a government conspiracy and those people were able to prove they experienced harm as a consequence of his words.
The plaintiffs also had enough financial backing from (understandably horrified) strangers, and a high enough chance of winning for lawyers to want to represent them. Those factors allowed the plaintiffs to survive the legal system long enough to get a ruling, and the severity of the situation maintained their motivation to keep pushing for it instead of accepting settlement so they could somewhat move on with their lives.
Sometimes, the planets align to create the trifecta of enough energy, money, and evidence to force the justice system into enforcing justice. And I am grateful that can sometimes still happen, as rare as it feels.
I prefer to think thusly:
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
But I can certainly understand people’s pessimism, looking at the world around us…
That’s fair, I’m not a flat-bow conspiracy theorist, even if the curve looks real flat right now from down here.
I wonder if MLK ever read Hegel. I know he got a doctorate so it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Nothing’s been enforced though. Jones is proceeding with his life pretty much unchanged.
Because it’s still in process. This stuff goes slow but he will lose everything.
Jones isn’t important enough to the machine that they’ll expend any energy or resources sheltering him. I bet this does get him in the end.
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Alex Jones and/or his lawyers were too stupid to show up to court and defend themselves, so Jones automatically lost a defamation lawsuit without anyone even proving that Jones lied.
Wow, you might be thinking, that’s great for these plaintiffs but surely nobody else would be dumb enough to ignore a defamation lawsuit and thus instantly lose! Well, let me introduce you to a certain Donald J Trump.
Yeah, his lawyers were super incompetent. They pretty much proved to everyone he was lying.
It went even further than just sending the messages. Jones’ attorneys sending those could maybe have been a mistake. Had opposing counsel just gone and used them it could have bogged the whole process down horrifically. They’d likely appeal and fight that hard. So opposing counsel did the ethical thing and informed Jones’ attorneys multiple times seeking clarification and basically covering their own ass a bit. Jones’ attorneys didn’t respond. They could have said “that was a mistake and privileged so you can’t use them”, but they didn’t. Jones first found out in court while being cross examined. It was hilarious.
The video I saw of the lawyer telling AJ in court that he had all that and his lawyer did fuck-all to fix it is FANTASTIC.
Edit - Its in the link! WATCH IT
I saw it live and laughed my ass off.
I loved the legal commentary around it that Perry Mason moments don’t happen, except this time, it did.
I think they were afraid of discovery revealing even more malicious information than what’s being assumed.
After listening to all of the Knowledge Fight podcast’s 70+ hours worth of coverage of both cases (including multiple interviews with the plaintiffs lawyers)… I don’t believe for a minute that Alex Jones’ lawyers are competent enough to attempt a devious strategy.
Fun fact: they actually just fined Alex $1 for each time he said “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall that” during the depositions and that’s how it got up to over a billion.
And Dan testified for the plaintiffs as an expert witness! Pretty incredible
Minor correction, Dan didn’t testify. He was present for some of the depositions of Alex in the TX case, being there to help guide Mark Bankston’s questioning. Mostly mentioning cause Dan was pretty clear he didn’t want to actually testify
Oops, you are right! Thanks for catching that
Only for his lawyers to send the prosecutors a copy of every text message that he sent and received for the last 2 years. Haha
There’s a proto-fascist idea out there that authoritarians can find all the best people and put them in positions to do their best work. What actually happens is that they select people for personal loyalty first and competence a distant second. This is why Trump and Jones have such shit people on their legal teams.
You literally described Putin aswell lmao
Alex Jones got himself into this position via a trifecta of pure stupid.
First of all, he made claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. This turned public opinion against him severely, because Sandy Hook was a lines-crossed kind of event. Although school shootings are common in America, these tended to happen in colleges and high schools. Sandy Hook was an elementary school, meaning the victims were much younger
Secondly, he called the victims of the aforementioned shooting ‘crisis actors’, people who are paid to portray victims during emergency drills. These lies by Jones directly led to harassment campaigns against families that were already grieving the loss and extremely violent deaths of their very young children. This also got national attention, and many people pitched into the responding lawsuits raised by the grieving families against Jones’s media company.
Thirdly, and perhaps a big reason why the punishment is so severe, Jones treated court hearings and depositions as optional, and skipped a huge amount of them. He didn’t even seriously attempt to defend himself in a court of law, and when he did try, his lawyers were either idiots or actively working against him, leaking text messages (EDIT: and emails) that contradicted his own testimony. This led to a lot of default and highly punitive judgements against him.
To the third point, if they had done the minimum, they were more or less fine. The burden lied with the plaintiffs. He handed them a default judgement dream.
He also platformed several “journalists” who were actively harassing the Sandy Hook families, repeatedly claimed one of the parents was autistic, and during the trial shared a photoshop of the judge as a demon or something. He was bragging the entire time that he was “bankrupt” and they wouldn’t see a dime, while his series of weird shell corporations (lots of money hidden with his parents) was unfolded before the court.
He was in Hawaii like two months ago on vacation/looking for Zuckerberg’s secret hideout lol.
I hear ya. There are at least some other recent examples. The settlement between Fox News and Dominion. Giuliani is being held to account for libeling the Georgia poll workers. And of course all the Trump cases. But yeah, feels like a drop in the ocean.
Because most public figures leave themselves some wiggle room.
Like “just asking questions” or being careful to qualify their statements.
“Some people are saying that Sandy Hook was a fabrication, and I think they make a pretty convincing case. Are the parents hiding something?” vs “these parents of so called victims are lying, they’re actors hired by the government to take away our guns”
Plus I think Alex Jones included some calls to action that led to harassment of these grieving families - he didn’t leave himself any way to wiggle out of it. Especially since his exposed communications made it obvious he had no valid basis to assert he believed it , and he showed contempt for the legal process
Because Jones is a fat sausage greaseball who was just a useful idiot. His usefulness has run its course.
Don’t pretend Jones was just an innocent victim in all of this. He wasn’t used. He knew what he was doing. That’s why he’s made so much money off of it.