Judge Orders Alex Jones and Infowars to Pay $100,000 in Sandy Hook Legal Fees

The ruling was part of a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones, who has promoted conspiracy theories that the 2012 school shooting in Connecticut was a hoax

... Incredulously, only a week (2012-12-21) after the Connecticut massacre (Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings), remarks by the executive director of the National Rifle Association -- Wayne LaPierre -- delivered in Washington DC insisted that more guns would have prevented that tragedy. ...

A Texas judge has ordered the InfoWars founder Alex Jones to pay $100,000 in legal fees in a defamation case brought against him by the father of a Sandy Hook school shooting victim, the latest court setback for the conspiracy theorist. In a Dec. 20 ruling, Judge Scott Jenkins of Travis County District Court said that Mr. Jones and his lawyer intentionally disregarded an October court order to produce witnesses and other materials to the plaintiff in the lawsuit, Neil Heslin.

Judge Jenkins said the defense's failure to cooperate "should be treated as contempt of court." In two separate orders issued the same day, the judge told Mr. Jones to pay $65,825 and $34,323 in lawyer fees incurred by Mr. Heslin. He also denied Mr. Jones's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which argues that Mr. Jones and InfoWars defamed Mr. Heslin by calling his account of his son's death a lie. Mr. Heslin lost his son, Jesse Lewis, 6, in the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, Conn., in which a heavily-armed gunman killed 20 first graders and six educators before taking his own life. "Mr. Jones is learning that he cannot treat the courts with the same contempt he showed my clients," Mark Bankston, Mr. Heslin's lawyer, said in an email on Monday night. "In disobeying court orders, Mr. Jones has shown how desperate he is to ensure nobody finds out how Infowars really operates, or the lengths the company went to carry out its five-year campaign of malicious harassment against these parents."

The Daily Beast first reported the ruling against Mr. Jones, who is facing lawsuits on a number of fronts filed by several families of the victims. A lawyer listed for Mr. Jones and his Infowars website did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday night. Mr. Jones has used his platform to spread the false narrative that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax or "false flag," an event staged by the government as part of an effort to confiscate Americans' firearms, and that the parents of the children killed were "crisis actors." Mr. Bankston said he expected a trial in the defamation case to be scheduled before the end of next year.

Alex Jones must pay legal fees for 'frivolous' Sandy Hook appeal

The 3rd Court of Appeals on Wednesday denied conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought against him by a Sandy Hook parent and ordered Jones to pay $22,500 in attorney fees for what the court found to be a frivolous appeal. That means that Jones has now been assessed nearly $150,000 in legal fees in two cases -- one for defamation and another for intentional infliction of emotional distress -- brought by Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, was one of the 20 first-graders killed along with six school staff members in the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Jones and others on his InfoWars conspiracy news site have portrayed the mass shooting as a hoax.

Heslin's lawsuit contends that a June 2017 report by InfoWars reporter Owen Shroyer -- which claimed that Heslin could not have held his dead son in his arms as he has said -- was based on a deceptively edited interview with a medical examiner and was intended to buttress the InfoWars narrative that the mass shooting was not what it appeared to be. Shroyer is also named in the suit. The other sanctions against Alex Jones were imposed last year by state District Judge Scott Jenkins, who had denied motions by Jones' attorney to dismiss the cases. "The latest ruling from the Texas Court of Appeals shows that InfoWars continues to waste everyone's time with factual misrepresentations and frivolous arguments," said Houston attorney Mark Bankston, who is representing Heslin and Sandy Hook parents in two other lawsuits against Jones and InfoWars. "It is rare to see a legal defense so incompetent and disrespectful to the rule of law that it causes a defendant to rack up $150,000 in fines during preliminary motions before even reaching trial," Bankston said.

Austin attorney T. Wade Jefferies, Jones' most recent lawyer on the case, did not reply to a request for comment late Thursday afternoon.

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