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.
No single defamation case against an individual should have 1 billion dollars in damages. If this was anyone other than a widely hated political actor people would rightfully say that its an excessive amount.
jones did this to himself.
You could say that about anyone. There is not a world in which 1b in damages from defamation against a private individual makes sense.
I guess the question is, how much money did Jones and his company make from said defamation. Personally I think if a company profits illegally then the fine should be at a minimum a close estimation of what they profited.
Sure, totally fine, that would be pretty typical. But we all know it was not 1b dollars.
Maybe the death threats from his fans and having to go into hiding because of his rhetoric bumped up price. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’m sure there were many parents in the jury that have had enough of the bullshit.
Death threats are illegal, but Alex Jones did not make the death threats. Does he share some responsibility? probably. But he was not the one making death threats and did not instruct his followers to make them. That changes it from “intent” to just being irresponsible.
Surely you followed the trials, since you have an opinion. Jones had so many opportunities to make that case, and didn’t. Stalling, lying, and fighting with the courts did not work out well for him. Calling the judge names outside of court and denying everything also did not work for him.
Reviewing the income statements and the effects it had on everyone’s lives, the jurors came up with a number that was the sum. In two different cases as well.
It is not as cut and dry as “he shouldn’t be punished, and this was too much”
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Conservative estimates put his companies earnings at 300 million a year. So ya I’d say it was pretty close since he went on about it for quite awhile. Also don’t forget that during the lawsuit he hid money, lied in court, hid evidence and even refused to show up to court. I think his punishment is more than fitting. This guy knowingly lied about families who were devastated to make money, affecting those families lives to the point that they had to move and go into hiding. Fuck Alex Jones, he’s a shit human being and I hope he spends the rest of his life mopping restrooms in a truck stop somewhere.
I find it very hard to believe he was earning 300m a year in profit. I would like a source on that.
Civil courts are not in the business of handing out punishments btw. Once again proving my point that you hate the guy so much that you overlook the abuse of the civil court system to put him in debt for life through a completely irrationally outsized amount of damages.
This one shows his companies net worth https://apnews.com/article/alex-jones-sandy-hook-shooting-bankruptcy-0d127381842dde05e7753870463e338e
This one shows his companies estimated earnings per year based off an email he tried to hide from the courts. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115414563/alex-jones-sandy-hook-case
if you read the article, they are extrapolating a single day over a year, despite it being said that the day was “the best day of sales”. So no, they are not making 300m a year. It’s extremely misleading to claim that he was earning 300m a year in profit from that one statement.
It was not just one lawsuit, I believe that may be the combined total of all the lawsuits to date. Rest assured though the judge said his fake bankruptcy may cover the 324 million in lawyers fees.
this one lawsuit is responsible for 965m, which is pretty much 1 billion.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/jury-begins-third-day-deliberations-alex-jones-sandy-hook-defamation-trial-2022-10-12/
He’s not paying 1billion for a single defamation case. For one thing that’s the sum of multiple cases against him, and the more significant thing is that he lost because he did not fight it through the legal process and got a default judgement entered against him, and the most significant thing is that this amount is awarded due to punitive damages.
The amount is not simply meant to compensate the aggrieved party. That would have been capped to a much smaller amount. However because of a continuous series of intentional deceit and fraudulent actions during the lawsuit itself, punitive damages were awarded instead, where the point is to set an example against such behavior in court cases.
That extra punishment is for the benefit of the legal system rather than the aggrieved, it was something he could have simply avoided by just fighting the court case through the normal legal process. He would have simply lost and would only have had to pay a fraction of that amount.
The point of the ability to punish subversion of the legal process is that otherwise, no legal consequence for ignoring the court, would mean that anyone could completely ignore the legal process (which is what he was attempting to do).
https://www.reuters.com/legal/jury-begins-third-day-deliberations-alex-jones-sandy-hook-defamation-trial-2022-10-12/ this seems to imply it was 965m in one case, which is close enough to a billion to say it is.
Multiple plaintiffs in a single case, similar to a class action. I think OPs point still stands.
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It was still a single case, ruled by a single judge. It’s much different than many different cases adding like like was suggested. One case, 1b in damages.