According to court records Tuesday, Infowars presenter Alex Jones offered to pay $120,000 per plaintiff to settle a lawsuit filed by family of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims who claimed he defamed them by claiming the murder never happened. The families swiftly turned down the offer.
According to the families’ lawyers in Connecticut court filings, the so-called offer “is a transparent and desperate effort by Alex Jones to avoid a public reassessment under oath with his duplicitous, revenue campaign against the petitioners and the cognition of their beloved lost at Sandy Hook.”
The rejection on Wednesday provides a framework for the two parties to meet at trial. A jury will decide how much Jones will pay for falsely claiming that the Newtown, Conn., shooting, which killed 20 elementary schoolkids and six adults, was a “giant hoax.”
The defamation lawsuit has already been decided in the families’ favour. Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis adjudicated in November that Jones was liable by insolvency after he and his conglomerates refused to turn over documents that are required by the court, the latest in a string of legal humiliating defeat for the far-right respondent over his Sandy Hook falsehoods.
She found him in contravention on Wednesday after he failed to appear for two depositions scheduled in his hometown of Austin last week. His attorneys blamed an undisclosed illness, claiming that doctors had ordered him to not work or sit for questioning. Yet, while they were making their case, Jones was in the middle of a four-hour broadcast of “The Alex Jones Show” from his studio.
Lawyers for the families had requested that he should be arrested.
A judge has ruled that Alex Jones must pay Sandy Hook families damages in another defamation case.
Jones stated on his website prior to the hearing that he had a “genuine and long-standing” desire to settle the lawsuit, noting that the Sandy Hook shooting was “almost a decade behind us.” He portrayed the lawyers for the families as “ambulance chasers,” implying that their goal is to destroy “Infowars.”
“We are not going to be driven out of business by ambitious lawyers or those who hate dissent,” he said.
The families that filed the complaint, who include relatives of four students and two educators slain in the massacre, as well as a first responder who was present at the time, have been fighting Jones in court for years.
They claim in court documents that he has benefited from spreading “outrageous, nasty, and extremely painful statements” that he knows are incorrect by claiming the shooting was a “false flag” operation carried out by “crisis actors.”
They claim that his illogical theories have had real-world effects.
According to the case filed in 2018, “as a result of Jones’s campaign, the families and victims of the Sandy Hook shooting have been forced to undergo vicious and brutal treatment at the hands of ruthless and unscrupulous people.” “The families and survivors have been subjected to physical confrontation and intimidation on a regular basis.”
In a 2019 deposition, Jones apologised for his Sandy Hook remarks, blaming them on “a type of psychosis.” Mr. Jones extends his heartfelt apology for whatever grief his remarks caused, according to the settlement offer he offered on Tuesday.
The families and their lawyers, on the other hand, were unsatisfied. Jones’s absence from the previous week’s scheduled depositions was slammed by attorney Christopher Mattei as “a shameful display aimed to defraud the plaintiffs of their right to put him under oath and ask him questions,” according to Connecticut Public Radio.
Jones’s “plan of obfuscation and delay tactics is now all too familiar territory,” according to the families’ attorneys.
“Sandy Hook Mafia Calls For Alex Jones’ Arrest: Legendary Talk Show Host Responds,” Jones commented on “Infowars.” He said in it that he was treated “worse than someone on death row.”
In court papers, his lawyers stated that he had readily taken depositions in other Sandy Hook cases and was only “listening to his doctors.”
Reuters stated that Bellis decided that he had “willfully and in bad faith disobeyed many explicit court orders ordering his attendance at his depositions without justification.”
He can clear the contempt ruling if he completes the deposition by April 15, she noted. He will be penalised $25,000 for each weekday he does not comply beginning Friday.
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