New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
What the Alex Jones trial means for disinformation, Sandy Hook parents
A Texas jury's decision to order Alex Jones to pay nearly $50 million to two Sandy Hook parents has left the fate of his Infowars empire on uncertain terms and raised questions about what the verdict might mean for other prominent peddlers of misinformation — and his other trials with Newtown families.
A lack of clarity around Jones' finances has fed this discussion among legal experts about what impact, if any, the damages awarded to the family members of Sandy Hook victims defamed by Jones' “hoax” theories will.
Jones himself has said that any verdict above $2 million would be enough to “sink” his company, a claim dismissed by opposing attorneys and many experts.
“I don't think the sum total [of damages] will be able to take down
Infowars,” said Rich Hanley, a professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University. “He is going to continue to sow disinformation out there as he had during the trial. So I don't expect it to hurt him long-term.”
The only likely change from Jones and other online conspiracy theorists, Hanley said, will be that they will avoid targeting private citizens — who generally enjoy greater protections from defamatory speech — and instead will mostly focus their wildest claims on public figures such as politicians.
Amanda Crawford, a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut who is writing a book about the spread of misinformation around Sandy Hook, said that more victims of conspiracy theories and misinformation campaigns are likely to seek remedy through the courts as a result of the cases filed against Jones and other Sandy Hook “hoaxers” such as Jim Fetzer, a former professor who was ordered to pay $450,000 to Newtown parent Leonard Pozner after co-writing a book called “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.”
However, she said it is unlikely that similar actions will trickle down to the thousands or millions of followers who help spread conspiracy theories across social media. “I think Alex Jones' cases send warnings to people who have resources, platforms, and money they want to protect,” Crawford said. “Will this change the behavior of Joe Blow Twitterwriter, or blogger? Who knows, but those kinds of folks right now, they're harder to hold accountable.”
Ironically, Jones' legal troubles could even inspire others to follow in his footsteps, Hanley said, after it was revealed that Infowars has made Jones worth as much as $270 million, according to expert testimony.
“The financials released at the trial showed how profitable it is to traffic in disinformation,” Hanley said. “Folks are looking at that, and it will not be surprising to see that many new outlets such as Infowars, sprout because of the money to be made there.”
Jones’ finances
Complicating the issue, Jones' attorneys have presented seemingly contradictory assessments of his finances.
On Friday, Jones sought to stave off one of two remaining trials in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Connecticut, where his attorney Robert J. Shannon argued that Jones lacks the funds necessary to pay his legal fees — including the cost of his high-profile defense attorney, Norm Pattis. His parent company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy mid-way through the Texas trial.
“The debtors simply don't have the funds to be able to do that right now,” Shannon told the court of the prospect of Jones going forward with his next jury trial, set to begin on Sept. 6 in Waterbury. “We didn't have it in the budget being able to pay Mr. Pattis for at least two months as this thing moves along.”
Just hours earlier, however, another one of Jones' attorneys in Texas told a different bankruptcy judge that product sales are surging on his Infowars website following his much-publicized trial in Texas.
In fact, during the first week of his trial, Jones sold $961,918 worth of supplements, survival gear and other products through his online store, according to a legal filing in Texas reported by the Wall Street Journal. The attorney who wrote that filing, Raymond Battaglia, sought permission from a bankruptcy judge to raise Infowars' shipping budget in order to fill the rush of orders that he said continued into this week.
Future trials
The Texas case was the first of three defamation suits in which Jones has already been found liable by default for failing to comply with the rules of discovery — meaning the only question left for the two remaining juries is to decide how much Jones should have to pay for his lies.
The second case, the one scheduled to take place next month in Waterbury, was the subject of the court hearing on Friday to determine whether it can proceed as scheduled despite Jones' attempts to delay by placing his company under federal bankruptcy protection. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Julie A. Manning took the matter under advisement on Friday without issuing a formal ruling.
Meanwhile, a third case that was also set to begin next month back in Austin — before the same judge who presided over Jones' first case and $49.3 million verdict — is likely to be pushed back due to bankruptcy, according to Mark Bankston, an attorney for the families suing Jones in Texas.
Bankston said that he was not opposed to the delay, citing the short time frame between the bankruptcy filing, in addition to what he described as the likelihood that Jones could find himself in additional trouble as attorneys and federal officials comb through his finances in bankruptcy. “I think there is a level of financial scrutiny that may be applied to him that he's not ready for,” Bankston said Friday.
Attorneys for the other Sandy Hook family members engaged in lawsuits against Jones declined to make them available for comment this week.
One of the plaintiffs in the first case against Jones, Scarlett Lewis, told Hearst Connecticut Media Group prior to last week's verdict that she was hopeful that the case would prompt a change at Infowars. Lewis is the mother of Jesse Lewis, a six-year-old boy killed at Sandy Hook. She and Jesse's father, Neil Heslin, were the first parents to testify after taking their case against Jones to trial.
“I believe that we made a connection,” Lewis said. “I absolutely believe that if our lawsuit is successful, that it will change the way that he does business, and I believe that it will change the way others do business as well. If people think that they're going to be held accountable for lying about someone, then they won't do it.”
Experts say there is a potential for the initial verdict in the Texas case to be dwarfed by future awards for compensatory and punitive damages in his two remaining cases, particularly in Connecticut where jurors are likely to be much more familiar with the details of the shooting that killed 20 children and six adults on Dec. 14, 2012.
The size of the initial verdict has also been clouded by the fact that Texas' limits on punitive damages could drastically lower the amount that Jones is ultimately forced to pay the plaintiffs, Heslin and Lewis. In Connecticut, however, there is no such cap on the damages Jones could face.
Leslie Levin, a professor at the UCONN School of Law, said that Jones' insistence upon taking the stand at his first trial in Austin likely did him few favors with the jury, who were able to hear tapes in which Jones ridiculed them on his show as “people [who] do not know what what planet they are on.'” Any decision to testify in the future is likely to weigh heavily on the outcome of Jones' other cases, Levin said.
“He doesn't come across as a very likable witness,” Levin said. “The jury's probably going to hate him, especially in Connecticut.”
Still, Levin said juries will likely have to deliver crippling verdicts — and have them upheld on appeal or through the bankruptcy process — in order for the cases to serve as an effective warning to others seeking to profit through the spread of misinformation.
“If they see that he doesn't have to pay very much because of this, I don't know how it will deter people,” Levin said. “I'm not optimistic that they will be a lot more careful.”