A Texas appeals court on Friday sharply reduced a $50 million award against Infowars founder Alex Jones, lowering the damages to $1.5 million in a case tied to his false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.
The decision does not affect a $1.4 billion judgement entered against Jones in Connecticut. Still, it marks a major legal win for Jones after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for spreading falsehoods about the massacre and the families of victims.
In a unanimous ruling, the Texas Third Court of Appeals said Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis had not presented evidence showing that harassment fueled by Jones’ hoax allegations reached the threshold needed to surpass Texas’ $750,000 damages cap for each plaintiff.
Heslin and Lewis’ 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, was one of 20 children and six educators killed in the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Their lawsuit, and the 2022 verdict against Jones, represented the first time he was ordered to pay damages for promoting lies that the attack was staged by the government as part of an effort to restrict gun rights.
Jones had framed the lawsuit as an assault on his First Amendment rights. During the trial, however, he acknowledged that the Sandy Hook attack was “100% real” and admitted he was wrong to lie about it. Heslin and Lewis told jurors that an apology was not enough, urging them to hold Jones accountable for the years of pain they said he inflicted on their family and other Sandy Hook victims’ relatives.
Jones’ trial lawyer, Andino Reynal, said immediately after the verdict that Jones would challenge the size of the damages award on appeal. He also predicted at the time that the amount would be cut to $1.5 million.
Jones and Free Speech Systems have both filed for bankruptcy, with those proceedings still ongoing. Separately, the satirical news site The Onion sought to take control of Jones’ Infowars platforms and recast the conspiracy-driven outlet as a network of parody sites.
Jones gave up the Infowars brand in April and moved to a new location, switching his shows to new websites and posting them on his personal X account. The Onion, meanwhile, has set up its own parody version of Infowars, running videos of shows spoofing Jones and donating some of its funds to the Sandy Hook families.
