The US supreme court has refused an appeal from Alex Jones and left in place his $1.4bn defamation penalty that was awarded to the families of victims from the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.
The Infowars founder and conspiracy theorist had sought to overturn the judgment, which he was ordered to pay after he made false claims about the massacre.
Jones had previously claimed the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were killed, was a hoax staged by crisis actors to promote stricter gun control. The Sandy Hook victims’ survivors reported that Jones’s lies spurred threats and harassment from his followers, making it impossible for them to heal from the mass murder.
The supreme court did not provide a reason for its decision, according to its orders list released on Tuesday.
As part of his appeal filed in September, Jones argued that a judge was wrong to find him liable for defamation and infliction of emotional distress without holding a trial. Jones maintained that the $1.4bn judgment “is an amount that can never be paid”, adding that “the result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcast reaches millions”.
Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, declared bankruptcy in 2022 after the huge judgment stemming from lawsuits filed in Connecticut and Texas.
A year later, a New York Times investigation into Jones’s financial and legal documents found that he had transferred assets worth millions of dollars outside the reach of creditors as lawsuits from the victims’ families along with court sanctions stacked up against him over the past years.
Meanwhile, in June, the trustee overseeing Jones’s personal bankruptcy case accused him of trying to hide more than $5m from creditors.
In a statement to CNN on the supreme court’s ruling, Chris Mattei, an attorney representing the victims’ families, said: “The supreme court properly rejected Jones’s latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused. We look forward to enforcing the jury’s historic verdict and making Jones and Infowars pay for what they have done.”
