A Texas appellate court has significantly reduced a damages award against Alex Jones and his company Free Speech Systems, cutting a $50 million judgment down to $1.5 million. The ruling stemmed from Jones’s false statements characterizing the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, as a hoax.
The Texas third court of appeals issued a unanimous decision finding that plaintiffs Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose families were affected by the shooting, had not presented sufficient evidence that harassment stemming from Jones’s claims met the threshold required to exceed Texas’s $750,000 statutory cap on damages. The decision does not affect a separate $1.4 billion judgment against Jones issued by Connecticut courts.
Jones has been engaged in ongoing legal proceedings related to the Sandy Hook judgments since a 2022 verdict initially found him liable. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the larger award in a decision that included no stated reasoning. In 2024, Jones filed for bankruptcy, acknowledging an obligation to pay the Sandy Hook families.
Efforts to satisfy the judgments have remained complex. Earlier this year, the satirical publication the Onion announced plans to lease Infowars through its parent company Global Tetrahedron, a Chicago-based entity, under an agreement provisionally approved by a Texas court. Monthly lease payments of $81,000 were proposed to be directed toward satisfying the judgments, though the deal has faced legal complications.
Jones has maintained that the lawsuit represents an infringement on his First Amendment rights. During trial proceedings, he acknowledged that the Sandy Hook attack was “100% real” and stated he had been wrong to promote false claims about it. His attorney had predicted immediately after the initial verdict that the damages award would be reduced to approximately $1.5 million.
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