Alex Jones Held Liable in Sandy Hook Defamation Cases

Alex Jones, the radio host and right-wing provocateur, will be financially responsible for damages to parents of two children who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, a Texas judge ruled this week.

Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble issued three default judgments against Mr. Jones Monday after the Infowars host failed to follow court-ordered requests for documents and information in three defamation cases over his claims the school shooting was a hoax, the rulings said.

Judge Gamble said Mr. Jones had consistently shown “flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules” and cited public threats from the Infowars host.

How much Mr. Jones owes the parents in damages will be determined either in a hearing or in a trial with a jury, said Bill Ogden, a partner at Farrar & Ball LLP who represented the plaintiffs in the three cases.

“The court finally got tired of Alex Jones and Infowars and their attorneys not taking this seriously,” Mr. Ogden said in an interview Friday. “This has been the most egregious discovery abuse I’ve ever been a part of.”

A statement from Mr. Jones and Norm Pattis, an attorney for Infowars, called the decisions stunning.

“Nothing less than the fundamental right to speak freely is at stake in these cases,” they said in the statement, released Thursday night. An attorney representing Mr. Jones in the case didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Mr. Jones frequently uses his platform to tout discredited conspiracy theories, most notably claiming as a hoax the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. In recent years, social-media companies like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. banned Mr. Jones from their platforms.

The judgments for the three cases were made public Thursday and Friday. Parents of two 6-year-old boys who were killed at Sandy Hook sued Mr. Jones in 2018 for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, saying Mr. Jones repeatedly called the massacre a hoax or claimed it didn’t happen or was staged by the government. One of the lawsuits involved plaintiffs Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, who lost their son Noah in the 2012 massacre. The second and third involved plaintiffs Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of Jesse.

The two boys were among 20 children and six educators killed in the mass shooting. Following the tragedy almost a decade ago, parents of the children killed on that day have been targeted by conspiracy theorists with threats, claims the attack never happened, or that the parents were lying about having children. The harassment and threats have forced parents to move multiple times, Mr. Ogden said.

“It is a sigh of relief,” Mr. Ogden said of the rulings this week. “It was a five-year campaign of making them relive the most horrific experience a parent would ever have to do, which is bury a child.”