Judge orders Jones to pay $1M in fees to four parents

NEWTOWN — A Texas judge has ordered Alex Jones and his companies to pay $1 million in legal fees to the parents of two slain Sandy Hook children and a Norwalk native falsely accused of being the shooter in a Florida high school massacre.

The order is from the same Texas judge who is overseeing two upcoming trials to determine damages from defamation lawsuits Jones lost to Sandy Hook parents, and comes one day after three Jones-controlled businesses filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

According to the order by Travis County District Court Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, Jones and his businesses have 30 days to pay the attorney fees and expenses for Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of slain Sandy Hook first-grader Jesse Lewis; for Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of slain first-grader Noah Pozner; and for Marcel Fontaine, a Norwalk native who was falsely accused on Jones' InfoWars site as the perpetrator behind the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., in 2018.

Meanwhile Guerra Gamble has scheduled a conference on Wednesday to discuss whether the first trial to award defamation damages will begin as scheduled on April 25. The question is complicated even though a bankruptcy filing automatically delays a civil proceeding, because neither Jones himself nor his Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy protection. Both Jones and Free Speech Systems are defendants in the lost defamation suits.

In Connecticut, where Jones lost a third defamation lawsuit to an FBI agent and eight families whose loved ones were slain in the Sandy Hook massacre, Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis called off a conference planned for Wednesday after learning Jones had filed a separate motion in bankruptcy court “which appears to remove the entire case, including the plaintiffs' claims against the other defendants.”

“Therefore, this court will take no further action unless and until all or part of this matter is remanded back by the bankruptcy court,” Bellis wrote.

The first hearing in Texas Western Bankruptcy Court is on Friday.

If it seems like Jones has been in the news a lot recently, he has.

Jones made national headlines when he refused to attend court-ordered pretrial depositions and was sanctioned in Connecticut with heavy escalating daily fines, only to fly into the state the following week for two days of testimony in Bridgeport, where Jones spoke out both days against the system.

Jones, who called the massacre of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax,” and “completely fake with actors,” has been saying publicly for the last several years that he now believes the massacre happened and that he has a right to be wrong under the First Amendment.

Jones also made headlines recently when he offered the 19 people involved in the three defamation cases he lost in Texas and Connecticut $120,000 each to settle, and they refused.

At the same time, Jones was the subject of a new lawsuit brought by the parents in the two Texas defamation cases that accused him of transferring “millions of dollars from his fortune” to shield assets from them at the damages trials.

On Sunday, Jones made national news again when three entities he controls — InfoWars, IWHealth, and Prison Planet TV — sought Chapter 11 protection in federal bankruptcy court, which automatically “stayed” the lawsuits where those entities are defendants.

The same tactic was used by Remington in 2020 after eight families that filed a wrongful death lawsuit won a string of pretrial victories against the former gunmaking giant. Remington was eventually sold off, and its insurance carriers settled with the Sandy Hook families for $73 million.

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