As someone who's been closely following the Infowars/Free Speech Systems trials (watched all the depos, trial footage, etc.), all I can say is that I'm glad these families are finally getting justice. Even though I'm sure it'll be tied up in appeals for awhile (and reduced on appeal), hopefully it'll prevent future harassment campaigns against families when tragedies occur.
And before anyone says "but why wasn't Jones given a trial to determine his guilt? The first amendment is under attack!", Infowars has repeatedly failed to prepare its employees for depositions, refused to respond to discovery requests, and has perjured itself numerous times. The default judgements received in both this and the Texas cases were well deserved, and anyone with a less explosive personality and media presence would have been given far fewer chances to comply.
First amendment isn’t under attack. Alex Jones isn’t being punished by the govt. Ge attacked people, they responded back. Defamation law has always existed and people can always sue you for libel and slander.
Jones wasn’t awarded anything because he dropped the suit a few months after filing it.
Defamation cases are civil, so ending up in jail isn’t one of the possible outcomes.
Finally, defamation cases in the US are almost never resolved by determining whether or not a statement was factually accurate, so in general it is a mistake to infer anything from the result of a case alone (you always need to know the details of the decision).
For sure. I think the “was he awarded billions bit” just triggered me. It’s like, if we’re going to fight some stupid political proxy war via this court case, maybe we should take 10 seconds and actually find out the details of David court case.
You might be forgetting OJ was found guilty in Civil Court.
How can you be guilty in Civil Court and not guilty in Criminal Court? Easy. Two different criteria for guilt. In Criminal Court it must be shown beyond reasonable doubt that you committed the crime. In Civil Court it must be shown that it's more likely than not that you committed the crime. In the case of OJ what this means is it's more likely than not that he murdered his wife but it's not beyond reasonable doubt that he did so. OJ was acquitted of murder in Criminal Court and forced to pay his wife's family for damages in Civil Court since it's more likely than not that he murdered his wife.
Whether you think this is a great system or not is subjective but that's how the system works.
The standard for acquitting is reasonable doubt. You're presumed innocent until proven guilty, so in theory you aren't necessarily required to prove your innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt. While it may work differently in practice at times, that idea IS actually a great one.
So yes, it may still be possible that someone who is acquitted is in fact guilty, but the prosecution isn't allowed a second chance.
The courts are part of the government, and Constitutional limits on government power apply to civil liability; the First Amendment, quite notably, restricts the conditions in which defamation liability can be applied.
The Constitutional right to free speech has been construed to protect your right to criticize the government (generally) and those who hold governmental posts. The Constitution doesn't mention defamation directly, but the doctrine that your rights end where anothers begin means that if you should actually injure someone through your untruthful speech or writing, then you should pay restitution to them and possibly punitive damages. The laws vary depending on the state, of course.
Since Jones is seen to have intentionally caused these plaintiffs emotional distress, the plaintiffs are being awarded compensatory damages nearing $1 billion, however punitive damages will be considered next because of a Connecticut law that bars using false statements to sell products. (A hearing set for Nov. 7 will determine the amount of those damages.)
According to the law, all the plaintiffs had to prove was that Jones (1) knowingly made false statements that would cause the claimants emotional distress and (2) such distress and injury could be proved or substantiated. In this case, the government served primarily as a mediator between the private citizens on both sides.
Right, but that is not how the law is applied. In a civil lawsuit, court or the government is not the plaintiff or the defendant, and therefore first amendment protections do not apply. There are first amendment protections when public officials are involved in the defamation suit. But beyond that, it is well established that first amendment does not protect this kind of speech.
> Right, but that is not how the law is applied. In a civil lawsuit, court or the government is not the plaintiff or the defendant, and therefore first amendment protections do not apply.
It absolutely is, which is why thr First Amendment limits the conditions in which civil defamation damages can be awarded, see, e.g., Times v. Sullivan.
EDIT: In fact, Times v. Sullivan rejects this specific argument, saying: “Although this is a civil lawsuit between private parties, the Alabama courts have applied a state rule of law which petitioners claim to impose invalid restrictions on their constitutional freedoms of speech and press. It matters not that that law has been applied in a civil action [...]. The test is not the form in which state power has been applied but, whatever the form, whether such power has in fact been exercised.”
> There are first amendment protections when public officials are involved in the defamation suit. But beyond that, it is well established that first amendment does not protect this kind of speech.
This is completely wrong. Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case applying the 1A to defamation, and subsequent cases elaborating the Constitutional limits of defamation liability established both basic 1A rules for all defamation cases, and additional rules for public figures (not just public officials, but also others who seek public attention), and matters of public concern. Among the rules applicable to all cases, not just public figures and public concern are:
(1) Opinion is Constitutionally protected and cannot be defamation (as it could be in some jurisdictions before),
(2) Falsity is required element of defamation and must be proved by the plaintiff, it cannot be presumed with the truth as a defense (as, again, it was in some jurisdictions)
(3) Fault (at least simple negligence) is a Constitutionally-required required element; defamation cannot be strict liability (as, again, it was in some jurisdictions prior to the Constitutional rule being articulated by the Court),
I didn't say anything one way or the other about the public figure rule except (1) noting that the heightened standards concerned public figures and not only public officials as had been claimed in the post I was responding to, and (2) noting, again unlike claimed previously, it wasn’t the only Constitutional restriction on defamation liability.
You are correct that it is about the target, its just odd that you read something contrary to that into my comment.
For this compensatory damage award, that probably depends a lot on whether the trial judge and later the state appeals court think that the numbers returned by the jury for daamages are reasonably supported from the evidence, its possible either at trial or on appeal for the judgement to be different from tbe jury verdict. (There are also punitive damages to be determined later.) I haven’t followed the evidence closely enough to have an opinion on that.
Sure it is. The jury literally just found those damages. These aren't punitive damages, they're compensatory. Punitive damages are the next phase of the case.
Punitive damages in Connecticut civil cases are awarded in a later phase of the case. The jury recommends that punitive damages be assessed, and the number is worked out later. These are compensatory damages.
That's not obvious to me at all. Can a 9-figure media and supplements company inflict 25-50 million dollars on an individual? Sure they can. Selling the memory of a parent's murdered child and defaming them to the point where they are followed into different states by lunatics threatening their lives seems to easily cross that threshold. How disruptive would it be to my life if that happened to me? Over how many years? It's a huge amount of baseline injury, and then it's multiplied by the demonstrable profits earned by Free Speech Systems at their expense.
Remember, it's almost a billion dollars because twenty children were murdered at Sandy Hook, and Jones' company managed to target all of the parents. If only one parent had sued, we wouldn't be batting an eyelash at the resulting damages. But Jones built an immensely powerful media machine, and then aimed it very carefully at his own testicles. Play stupid games, &c &c.
Well, to be frank, it doesn't matter. Some people probably think any kind of damages for defamation are ridiculous. Others probably think this wasn't enough. It doesn't matter though, because you weren't selected to serve on the jury at the trial. You didn't see the evidence, you didn't get to observe jones' conduct, you didn't sit through days and days of testimony about how horrible and traumatic it was for the families of sandy hook to lose their children and then be called 'crisis actors' by Alex Jones repeatedly. His followers were literally harassing the parents in public.
These damages may be above average and the highest ever in a defamation trial, but Alex Jones really took being a defamatory piece of shit to a new level.
People seemed to have no problem with the idea that Oberlin could have inflicted $36MM against a family. I didn't either! That's how tort damages work.
The Oberlin case had damages of $25 million, not $36 million, and that was the combined award to number of individuals plus a company that suffered a significant loss of revenue.
Apples & oranges again? Hogan is a public figure who might actually lose out on a hundred mil due to reputation damage. A average middle class USA family, not so much.
Anyway if it isn't punitive shouldn't there be some kind of account for how the number was arrived at? I don't see it in the article.
> If only one parent had sued, we wouldn't be batting an eyelash at the resulting damages.
This is not really a convincing response to my comment on the per-family damages:
>> Nobody involved had a reputation that was worth $100 million dollars.
You can't lose value you never had.
> How disruptive would it be to my life if that happened to me? Over how many years?
However disruptive it was, the damages could not reach $100 million unless you either (a) spent $100 million dealing with the disruption, or (b) forwent $100 million of earnings in order to deal with the disruption. (Or any combination.) Again, that hasn't happened. You can't deal $100 million of economic damage to someone who doesn't possess assets worth $100 million. That is a major reason for the concept of punitive damages.
"You can't lose value you never had" isn't a coherent argument. People are routinely awarded damages far greater than their net worths for all sorts of torts. By the logic you're using, if I go to Starbucks and steal the eyeballs out of the barista, I'm only asymptotically on the hook for a lifetime's worth of barista earnings.
I think you'd find --- criminal liability aside --- that you'd be on the hook for more than the lifetime earnings of a Starbucks barista and the cost of medical care and a seeing eye dog.
You sound very sure of this, but I am less sure. Disgorgement is a remedy, in US law, for torts in general. Damages are especially constrained in defamation claims, because of the first amendment, but defamation is just one of five claims against Jones, all of which he was found guilty of --- intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, false light invasion of privacy, and, most notably, violating the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices act.
I'm not saying I'm sure these numbers will hold up (punitive damages under CUTPA are uncapped, though!), but I think the story about how the jury could have reached these numbers is a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be.
In particular:
(1) It's not just defamation.
(2) You do not in fact need to make a "claim for unjust enrichment" to recover profits earned through an intentional tort.
> You do not in fact need to make a "claim for unjust enrichment" to recover profits earned through an intentional tort.
I would need a lot more than your assertion to be convinced of this. Here's Ward Farnsworth introducing his book, Restitution: Civil Liability for Unjust Enrichment:
> Restitution is the mirror image of tort law. You sue in tort to recover for losses that you have suffered. You bring a restitution claim to recover gains that another party has obtained. In some cases it makes no difference which claim you bring, because your losses and the other side's gains are the same. Or you might prefer a tort claim because your losses are bigger than the defendant's gains, as usually is true when you suffer damage in an accident. But sometimes going after the defendant's gains will allow a much bigger recovery, or is the plaintiff's only way to recover at all.
> Restitution is the great overlooked topic in American private law. In this country most students can't learn about it even if they want to; few schools teach the subject. Students only hear about restitution as the name of an occasional remedy in contract cases. But restitution is the name of a claim, not just a remedy. So lawyers often overlook restitution and sometimes try to use tort and contract to solve problems that restitution law would handle better. Missing or misunderstanding the right to go after a defendant's gains can be a very expensive oversight.
(From the piece: "The jury awarded plaintiff $500,000 for defamation, and $1,345,477.25 on the unjust enrichment theory.")
Why would he do that, if it were just part of how all torts are handled? What would be unusual about it? (And why would Ward Farnsworth introduce the subject by pointing out that "tort claims and restitution claims are opposite things"?)
It’s not about what the reputation was worth, it is about what he made off it. The point of the justice system is to set a precedent, if the damages are too low, you just set a precedent where lawsuits are just business expenses and you can still make money off these things.
Comparable damage? Can you imagine your young daughter one days goes to school, never comes back because she bled to death in a corridor there, and then for years you get attacked by strangers claiming you made it all up and are a fake?
One thing I really don't understand about the US of A is, while it is abominously violent, still, a pork like Alex Jones hasn't been physically attacked by anyone. It's like there's a complete split in society somehow. In my books comparable damage would be everything and all money he owns, plus any he will, minus maybe $9 per day. Couldn't the jury have voted for such a verdict, why does it have to be an amount, why not an "everything"?
He was just on his live show telling viewers to send money without worry: nothing they sent now would ever go to these families because he is declaring bankruptcy.
Whatever bankruptcy judge he ends up before might not be amused by such antics.
Bankruptcy doesn't allow you to hide money. The families are added to the list of creditors seeking relief and the judge will order them accordingly. The families are likely to be the top creditor and will get every penny from his estate.
I’m not suggesting he can hide money. He gives up everything he has of bankruptcy date, and then starts fresh with a new company and the same followers and same advertisers paying him to lead those followers.
I think his greatest asset is his personality and following, and he’ll be able to monetize that post-bankruptcy. The longer he drags out the court cases, the longer he delays that, so hopefully he just gets on with him and pays out everything he has.
> Can you imagine your young daughter one days goes to school, never comes back because she bled to death in a corridor there, and then for years you get attacked by strangers claiming you made it all up and are a fake?
Sure, we have a scenario in three parts:
1. Your daughter goes to school.
2. She bleeds to death in a corridor.
3. You get attacked by strangers claiming you are a phony.
Don't you think the damage occurs in step 2? What did Alex Jones have to do with that?
Can you imagine meeting an alien who reveals to you a better way of life, founding a religion according to his teachings, attracting followers, and then for years you get attacked by strangers claiming you made it all up? What would they owe you?
That's not a conclusion you can reach by reading this comment thread. People are falling over themselves to point out that these families lost their children. Why?
> People are falling over themselves to point out that these families lost their children. Why?
Because that's what Alex Jones targeted to abuse these people. He didn't kill their children, but he did take people whose children were killed, and lie about that fact in order to attack these people for money.
They are, they're just usually handled in a separate phase. In CT, judges apparently work them out after a jury recommends that punitive damages get handed out; in TX, the jury deliberates twice, once for compensatory and once for punitive damages.
The judge threatened to throw Alex in jail for saying he was innocent to the jury. You can't really get more dystopian than that. Imagine if that happened during your own trial, what would you do? Would you still want to testify.
There were a few other things the judge barred him from saying during his testimony, yet the prosecution spent days talking about them. How is that even remotely fair. Ridiculous verdict from a ridiculous show trial. Kangaroos ashamed everywhere.
The concept you're upset with here is "the rules of evidence". You'll find that in a variety of ways, your freedom of expression is intensely curtailed in a court of law, and you cannot in fact make any argument you'd like. In particular, when you've lost a trial by deliberately defaulting it, you cannot re-raise the issues the trial settled in the damages phase of the trial. You lost, and those issues are now off the table. That's how trials work.
People are Big Mad about the fact that Jones wasn't allowed to proclaim his ignorance on the stand. But I'm guessing that if you surveyed those people, fewer than 50% would be aware that he was tried and found liable already, and that the "trial" we're discussing is simply the damages phase of the trial he lost.
Imagine being accused of murdering someone. You ask for a jury trial. The prosecution asks you to turn over the murder weapon. You plead that you don't have the murder weapon because you are innocent. The judge tells you you have 5 days to turn over all the knives you ever bought. You don't, because you don't know where some of them are. The judge doesn't believe you.
The Dystopian Part:
The Judge finds you guilty of murder by default, without hearing any evidence of your guilt, and denies you your jury trial, based on the justification that you did not turn over a couple of the knives.
Guilt and Punishment:
The judge proceeds to hold what amounts to a memorial service, as family member after family member is called up to the stand by the prosecution and they cry in front of the jury over their lost loved one. Your lawyer can't effectively question a crying family member as that makes them seem like a cruel psychopath.
Should you take the stand in your defence, the judge threatens you and your lawyer with contempt, and by implication jail, if you go up there and say you're innocent. There's a list of things you're not allowed to talk about because they would imply your innocence. And you were already found guilty! Therefore, saying you're innocent would be perjury.
You're only allowed to answer with "yes", "no" or "I don't know" when the prosecution calls you up to the stand. After they berate you for half a day, and your defence lawyer objects to the judge losing control, the judge ends the day by yelling at your lawyer that she won't stand for any nonsense from now on. That she hasn't found a lawyer in contempt in all her career, but she's ready to do it now. The next day is when you're supposed to testify in your defence.
You decline to take the stand.
Final Instructions:
The judge tells the jury it isn't allowed to question or speculate on what basis you where found guilty, just that there are only here to determine your punishment.
This is what I'm upset with. This was a political show trial, engineered for a specific verdict.
But that would be a criminal trial. This was a civil trial. I'm not even American and I understand the difference! The two processes work completely differently, and comparing them like this doesn't make sense.
As to the points you've made:
* Default judgment: If you repeatedly do not show up for a trial, then at a certain point the trial needs to still continue. You should not be able to indefinitely put off a case just by refusing to turn up. If this were a criminal case, Jones would be forced to be there, as it's a civil case this is the alternative (as I understand it).
* Not having evidence: would work a lot better as a defence if (a) you genuinely contested it, and (b) you didn't send all the evidence that you supposedly couldn't find to the opposition lawyer halfway through the case by accident
* The civil case was split into two parts: one to determine fault, and the other to determine damages. As previously mentioned, Jones refused to take part in the trial that would have determined whether he was guilty or not, and therefore a default judgement was given. If he wanted to claim he was innocent, he should have done it then. Again, this is, as I understand it, standard practice for a civil trial.
* During a discussion of how much damages you should pay, given you were found guilty, you cannot argue to the jury that you are innocent. This has already been decided - typically with your involvement, assuming you don't just refuse to turn up - so this is just not in question any more.
I make the comparison because the judge denied Alex a jury trial, based on him not turning over evidence, and not him missing court dates. Some of the evidence he failed to turn over is financial data. The argument made was that the lack of this evidence would prejudice the jury from finding Alex guilty. The judge sided with the prosecution on this so she defaulted him. Specifically the prosecution was making the argument that Alex would see his google analytics go up when he talked about Sandy Hook, and responded to it. While plausible, it hasn't really been proven that he ever even looked at his google Analytics. He blabbers on like a radio talk show host. As a percentage of all he said, Sandy Hood was a very small part of his coverage.
This gets even more murky because the financial evidence, such as his earning, is relevant to damages, and not really to guilt. And really, in the end the prosecution was able to estimate his earnings by expert testimony during the damages portion. So was it actually critical. Yet Alex was found guilty based on failing to provide it. And if it was critical, at most it established damages, not guilt.
Also, can you imagine how much the prosecution is prejudiced in a criminal trail where the defendant fails to hand over the murder weapon. Yet a jury trail is still allowed proceed.
* Default Judgment:
I'm not aware of Alex missing any days where he needed to be there pretrial. He sat through 10 days of depositions. Any specific articles you can link where he missed a pre-trial date he had to be there for?
* Not having evidence.
a) What does genuinely contested really mean?
b) That did not happen. The prosecution found an email with an attached screenshot containing a keyword. This was the gotcha moment in his previous trial. Just very dubious. Since attached screenshots are not easily searchable for keywords, and could have been easily missed without any malice by his lawyer.
* Jones was never allowed to take part in a "take part in the trial that would have determined whether he was guilty or not". Every interview on the subject, Jones decries not being allowed do process. He wanted to be able to state facts of his case to a jury, his lawyers wanted to make constitutional arguments to the jury, and so on.
In a criminal case, this is equivalent to standing in your doorway and physically blocking the police from executing a lawful warrant. Except, in that case, the police have recourse -- they can push you aside and execute a search. That isn't possible in civil cases; the only power a court has to compel cooperation with discovery is threatening a default judgement. This is why responding to discovery is important, and it's why the punishment for failing to do so is "you lose". Otherwise, all plaintiffs in all civil cases would simply ignore discovery and the courts would be mostly useless.
Jones failed to EVEN RESPOND to multiple discovery requests by the plaintiffs. Quoting from the order [1]:
"One month after remand, plaintiff wrote to the Defendants inquiring about overdue responses. Plaintiffs offered defendant an additional 14 days... More than three weeks later, with no response provided, Plaintiffs brought the motion". The order goes on to explain that refusing to even respond to discovery requests is a pattern of behavior and not a one-off mistake.
Again, he didn't refuse to turn over discovered documents. He didn't even say "I don't have that". He just straight up ghosted opposing counsel's request. Didn't respond!!!
You. Cannot. Ignore. Discovery.
You can respond and say "I don't have that". Of course, if you and your counsel knowingly and brazenly lie about not having a document, then civil damages are probably the least of your concerns because you will end up in prison and your lawyer will be disbarred. But, assuming "I don't have that" is true (or at least cannot be proved false beyond a reasonable doubt), then "I don't have that" is an acceptable response.
What you CANNOT do is simply ignore the request and expect a trial to proceed normally prior completion of discovery.
Ignoring discovery requests is a wildly insane thing for a lawyer to do. Failing to even respond to a discovery request after a reminder and extension from the opposing counsel -- and doing so multiple times over several trials -- is literally unfathomable to me.
There are only three reasons to do this. The first is that the discovered documents would be even more damaging than a default judgement in plaintiff's favor. The second is WILD incompetence. The third is mental instability. Those are the only three reasons, because... You. Cannot. Ignore. Discovery.
This isn't an overdue homework assignment or some procedural snafu. Discovery is a core part of a trial, and messing around with it is a huge deal. Ignoring discovery is, in most cases, way worse than a guilty verdict. You lose, you piss off the judge, and any jury will most likely assume you have something to hide that is even worse than a guilty verdict.
I might ignore a discovery request if I felt that the documents in question would likely result in criminal prosecution or additional, much more serious, civil cases. That's the only rational reason that I can think of to ignore discovery. Because, seriously seriously seriously, You. Cannot. Ignore. Discovery.
It's possible that this was just wild incompetence. It's possible that Jones is arrogant enough to think he is above the court. I do not know. But the behavior of him and his lawyers in these cases is beyond baffling. If they aren't hiding something criminal, and aren't hiding the most damning possible evidence, then they are either incompetent or insane.
Thank you for putting this more eloquently than I could. To say the judges have been lenient with Infowars is an understatement - if you or I were in a civil suit, we would have been defaulted far quicker than Jones was because the judges wouldn't have to worry about a media circus spiraling out from it. Jones did not just throw out a discovery request assuming it was junk mail one time, this was completely intentional and forced the court's hand.
In the Texas trial, I believe Andino Reynal (the counsel at trial) was the 13th attorney they had retained. Yes, 13. At this point, I'm convinced Alex Jones is right up there with Faketoshi as the worst client you could ever have.
> To say the judges have been lenient with Infowars is an understatement
The man was fined more than any other person in the history of humanity for saying words. A billion dollars! pharmaceutical companies that knowingly and willfully killed people have not been fined to such an extent.
And yet Alex was denied the ability to say words in his defence during his trial. "words" like "I'm innocent".
Citizens respect the outcomes of trials not because they follow a some set procedure, but because they think justice happened.
In major political case, in which a a populist talk show host, questioned the official narrative around an event. The state would not allow him to have his say, to raise constitutional issues. While the prosecution spent days talking about things he wasn't allowed to, and opened the trial by telling the jury this is their opportunity to take away Alex's megaphone, to silence him forever.
Alex might need to leave America, like Snowden, and continue his talk show abroad. Will the freest country in the world confiscate his passport to prevent that from happening.
This is a battle for public opinion. You might think you won this, but you haven't really.
>>Citizens respect the outcomes of trials not because they follow a some set procedure, but because they think justice happened.
I'm following this discussion as it's educational, but fwiw, dear God no. I trust trials, inasmuch as I do, because I believe they follow a known, afore-indicated and public procedure, which is the only remotely meaningfilul thing that can try to provide equality of treatment and a sane outcome.
> The state would not allow him to have his say, to raise constitutional issues
I could just quote thwayunion's comments on not being allowed to re-litigate issues that were already decided on in an attempt to derail the damages phase of the trial, but Jones already attempted to argue that what he was doing was protected speech. (In fact, I wasn't even going to respond until I remembered his TCPA motions where he tried just that.)
In De La Rosa v. Alex Jones et al, (D-1-GN-18-001842, 345th District Court of Travis County, Texas), Infowars filed an anti-SLAPP motion, which is implemented in Texas under the Texas Citizens Participation Act (TCPA). From [0]:
> "The [TCPA] protects citizens who petition or speak on matters of public concern from retaliatory lawsuits that seek to intimidate or silence them." In re Lipsky, 460 S.W.3d 579, 584 (Tex. 2015) (orig. proceeding). The protection comes in the form of a motion to dismiss a suit that would stifle the defendants' exercise of those rights.
In the anti-SLAPP motion, Jones' attorneys argued the case on its merits - that is, at this point in the trial, they weren't attempting to delay and obstruct by any means necessary, they were actually cooperating with the court.
And yet, despite actually working with the court, their motion was denied, meaning the lawsuit was not dismissed for infringing upon Jones' first amendment rights. And this is extremely notable since the TCPA is one of the most aggressive anti-SLAPP statues in the country - that is, if you lose an anti-SLAPP motion in Texas, your speech is so insanely out of line that basically no court would consider it to be defensible under the first amendment. Again, from [0]:
> CONCLUSION
> Having determined that the parents established a prima facie case for defamation per se that was not subject to the defense raised by Appellants, we affirm the district court's order denying Appellants' motion to dismiss.
His other anti-SLAPP motions also failed.
In summary, Jones already tried the first amendment defense, and lost. Therefore, even if he cooperated and wasn't defaulted on, he would still be barred from presenting a free speech defense during the damages hearing, because the court had already decided that his speech was not protected by the first amendment.
> You lose, you piss off the judge, and any jury will most likely assume you have something to hide that is even worse than a guilty verdict.
Also note that in a civil trial you do not have a right against self-incrimination. You can refuse to testify but your opponent can use your lack of testimony against you.
The contention from his lawyers was that no other libel case again a media company resulted in them having to turn over as much data as Alex had to. That he turned over multiple gigabytes of data.
So to say he "ignored discovery" is probably not what happened here.
Just the fact that he sat through 10 days of depositions, imagine getting interrogated for 10 days. Has to be close to torturous.
Turning over all your email/phone data, your financial records, email and phone data from all your employees, and still being asked for more and more. I doubt the NY times, or CNN would ever be forced to turn over all their employee emails in a libel case.
Eventually he wasn't going to able to turn over something. For example he may have not had google analytics to his youtube channel that youtube took down.
You yourself might assume that Alex was going to get a fair trial if he cooperated more with discover. But is that even a reasonable assumption. His own lawyers may have know that this was a political case he was going to lose no matter what, if the discovery process was already unusually intrusive.
You are correct that in a criminal case Alex's obstruction of the discovery process would have had different outcomes.
In a criminal case, the prosecution does not typically rely on a defendant's cooperation with a discovery process. Instead, the state obtains a warrant to search the defendant's property and gather the evidence required to build their case. If this were a criminal trial, the police would have shown up at Alex's house and place of work. If Alex refused to let the police search his property, they would have used whatever physical force was necessary to remove Alex and execute a lawful search of his property. Then a trial would have happened using any lawfully discovered evidence. Jones cannot ignore a warrant; guns and battering rams and overwhelming force will compel him to comply.
This sequence of events is not possible in civil cases, because civil courts do not typically use force to compel discovery. Instead, they have only the threat of a default judgement to compel discovery. The state has less power to compel discovery, so in cases of obstruction the recourse to the aggrieved party is different.
The common denominator is that proper trial cannot happen if one party can arbitrarily withhold key evidence from the other party. You CANNOT simply refuse to let the police execute a lawful warrant and expect to proceed with a normal trial. The state will execute the warrant. Similarly, you CANNOT simply refuse to share evidence with the plaintiff and expect to proceed with a normal trial. The state will not bring a battering ram to your home, but it will find you guilty by default.
This wasn't a show trial, and Alex wasn't "refused" a trial. He had a right to a trial to determine innocence or guilt. He chose to give up that right by repeatedly and willfully refusing the comply with discovery requests.
Ah yes, we should let the government decide that some people are "highly impressionable" and therefore not human beings with agency or rights. That's definitely not a terrifying precedent to set, nothing to see here
If I tell you to harass families and you go ahead and do so, both you and I ought face legal risk. And that's what's happening here. As this is an entirely private tort between private individuals, it is up to the individuals involved to decide which of the many responsible parties they wish to sue.
As it happens, Alex Jones is also enjoying his prerogative to sue others for defamation. And it's going to come down to a jury that decides whether those being sued by Alex Jones are liable for his stated damages.
No, we let the courts decide and they did. Jones isn't being sent to prison, he is just being forced to compensate the people his blatant lying harmed. I bet if Jones had spent the last 10 years constantly saying that you ate babies and this caused people to track you down and harass you then you would want him to stop and compensate you.
The only terrifying precedent is to allow shameless grifters like Alex Jones to lie with complete impunity no matter how much harm his lies cause.
This is what the erosion of personal responsibility and accountability looks like. Alex Jones isnt responsible if stupid impressionable people watch his show and do stupid things. That is absurd and absolutely chilling in regards to free speech. Perhaps it even sets a new precedent that everyone who posts a comment/video/podcast online is now responsible for any illegal actions that any of their viewer commit.
Free speech isn’t simply the ability to say anything at anytime.
If you lie under oath don’t expect a free speech argument to work. Similarly if you personally spread damaging lies, free speech doesn’t help etc etc.
Free speech is most protected when when you take a political or religious stance, but the boundaries shrink dramatically when you talk about someone specific especially if they are simply a member of the general public.
You can see that this isn’t the case with a trivial example, like if your significant other or a family member was killed and I or someone else riled you up and enabled you and lied to you and convinced you to go kill someone else who didn’t kill your family member not only would I be held legally/criminally accountable but we intuitively understand this as morally wrong as a society.
No free speech is harmed here and the First Amendment protects you from the government silencing your speech.
These are the legal hot takes of our times; on HN no less.
There aren't laws against defamation and libel because it's super meany. It's because the damages people sustain from having lies spread around town about them.
Spewing hatred and demonstrably false utter bullshit and stirring up people knowingly is what he has and continues to do. Just like any number of other sociopathic fuckwits out there and through the ages.
“Personal responsibility and accountability “ is exacty what he’s being held accountable for because /his/ actions, /his/ drivel, /his/ psychotic vitriol was /knowingly/, /willingly/, and /joyfully/ used to cause these problems.
Your logic would dictate that no one is ever at fault for causing anything. It’s the dipshits who are dumb enough to go with them who are at fault.
I mean, step back and listen to yourself for a moment.
Unless you are too far gone you MIGHT recognize the absurdity of your views.
I am so fucking tired of human trash like him, Glenn Beck, Joe Rogan, Trump, insert hundreds of other pieces of shit getting to do literally whatever they want because “personal accountability” dictates that what they said was just words and free speech and they aren’t at fault.
Alex Jones wasnt the mastermind who created this conspiracy theory. The crisis actors conspiracy theory was already popular on the internet a couple days after the incident, months to years before Alex Jones covered it. There were numerous people speculating at the time about some strange discrepencies in the official narrative and footage which was able to convince some otherwise very reasonable people that there was a possibility that it was a hoax. So no, it cant be said for certain that he knew it was false. And no, he cant be blamed for covering a popular conspiracy theory on his show when its well known that he performs a conspiracy theory talkshow. I dont understand why this whole conspiracy which already existed is being attributed to Alex Jones. Perhaps just because he has a popular show? This is a clear case of punishing a citizen for having the wrong opinion.
I'm pretty sure it's a clear case of punishing a citizen for building a hundred million dollar supplement business on false allegations about the parents of dead children that were made so repeatedly they had to go into hiding, and then boycotting the resulting defamation trial. But tomato, tomahto.
Five minutes of research shows that this isn't true and that he knew.
I'm not sure anyone is seriously attributing the conspiracy theory to him, they are attributing to him that he spread it, publicly attacking the families while making money doing so.
Seems like a word that needed to be invented to attribute responsibility to someone who isn't actually responsible. Would be a great tool for a totalitarian state to abuse.
There's quite a few passages in the bible (among many books) that, if recited, could be described as "stochastic terrorism". That is, they could "inspire violence". However, I'm sure double standards would be applied rigorously - to make sure it's not a problem for "the right people".
If that's his actual "crime", I don't like the way this is going. What goes around, comes around.
No but this still establishes a scary new precedent; that any podcaster/videomaker is now legally responsible for any illegal actions that their viewers commit on their own accord. I can imagine how this will result in people being scared to criticize any leader or person in power because their comment/video might inspire some crazy person to harass them for which they will be found legally responsible.
Omg no it doesn’t. You know damn well that some random streamer or podcaster isn’t the same as some of these heavy hitters of insanity.
And even ignoring that then YES, YES they should be held accountable if they are knowingly spewing falsehoods and stirring up people and it causes shit like that.
“Free speech” != “I can be a total fuckwad and say whatever so want without any repercussions!”
I dont think different standards should apply to someone just because they have a popular show.
Sue the individuals who actually committed the acts of harassment, not Alex Jones. The people actually responsible for the harassment are getting away with it unscathed here, while a performer is punished. This isnt justice.
It's not a different standard for having a popular show. It's the same standard, scaled by the reach and impact of his show. It's like the difference between plowing into a crowd of people on a dirt bike and plowing into a crowd of people with a semi truck. And, I assure you, Alex Jones is culpable under US law for the harassment these parents endured, just as someone who destroys your professional reputation is culpable from the losses you endure when unrelated people incorrectly refuse to hire you.
It’s like there is this wall between US people’s understanding of free speech and a usual EU residents’. The same way Holocaust denial should be punishable, there are sane rules that must be abided, otherwise only chaos ensues. It won’t take you down an Orwellian dystopia any time soon, if anything, allowing these criminals selling an alternative reality will.
American right-wing authoritarians have a weird relationship with the slippery slope fallacy. On the one hand, holding someone accountable for making claims which they admitted they knew were false, leading to demonstrable harm to the victims' families, then failing even to comply with court procedure or instructions, is such a slippery slope that clearly the entire first amendment (which isn't even relevant in this case) at risk. See also: gun laws. On the other hand, draconian anti-abortion laws supposedly aren't a slippery slope at all, even though they have already resulted in thousands of women being denied life-saving medications for completely unrelated medical conditions. It's almost like the they're picking and choosing when to use these arguments (see also: originalism) based on something other than logic or morality.
What's really abhorrent is that people are invoking "freedom" (in this case of speech) to defend someone who is a major player in the movement toward authoritarian control over literally every part of our lives. If I hadn't lost all respect for such people decades ago, I certainly would now.
>wall between US people’s understanding of free speech and a usual EU residents’
If the split so nicely mirrored political boundaries we wouldn't be having this discussion. We're having this discussion because incompatible ideologies are fighting for control of one country.
This is a good verdict - defamation in the media is a very serious problem. It's unfortunate that it took a person like Alex Jones to convince people of it. If anything he should not be taken seriously. Those who are taken seriously have gotten away with much worse by merely apologizing or correcting themselves (as he did as well).
As for the amount - the highest fine paid by Wall Street firms for the 2008 crisis was less than $100M. One of those numbers is unjust for sure.
I think there's a strong case that Alex's apologies were not genuine nor would result in changes in future behavior on air. Even as the first trial was wrapping up Alex was calling one of the plaintiffs "slow" and "manipulated by some very bad people."[1]
In fact he was just doing his show, showing the verdict being read, and mocking the father of one of the slain children's reaction. I can think of no stronger proof that any apologies given were not genuine.
This is the problem with BBC Breaking News: headlines can change. "Alex Jones to pay $965M to Sandy Hook victims" was the actual headline when I submitted, but it's now been amended to "Alex Jones told to pay $965m damages to Sandy Hook victims' families". I literally copy and pasted the original, unedited, into the "title" field on the submission page, but there's no way for me to update it to reflect the BBC's amended headline.
In an ideal world the title field would auto-populate from the page title, which would (at least mostly) work fine on BBC News because they're pretty disciplined about keeping page titles and rendered titles on the page in sync. But we don't live in an ideal world: not all sites do that, and there's no hard requirement for them to do so. Plenty will, for example, SEO the heck out of the page title such that it doesn't match the title rendered in the page. You wouldn't want to use the page title as the HN title in these cases.
So we're left with the current situation where an article's title can be updated, but the title on HN isn't. Can't really blame either HN or article submitters for that.
Articles report on fines, salaries, etc all the time, often with an element of payment in the future. "Facebook fined..." and "Facebook told to pay a fine..." have little difference, and I don't see many arguing the semantics of those articles.
The fines for opioid producers and various enablers are in excess of $26 billion and still counting. Not nearly enough, mind you, but still -- much higher than the amount being discussed here.
There are also two important distinctions:
1. The American court system is inherently adversarial and judges/juries have a lot of discretion. The strategy employed by the defense does matter and a bad strategy can be expensive. If the lawyers in the opioid cases had employed the strategies used by Jones and his lawyers -- instead of working hard to get a settlement -- their damages would likely have been an order of magnitude larger than $26B & the executives behaving like Jones would be in jail. Jones, in many ways, has only himself to blame for the size of these damages. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
2. The $26B and counting will actually be paid. I would guess that Jones will only ever end up paying a small faction of the <$1B.
> The fines for opioid producers and various enablers are in excess of $26 billion and still counting.
Note that gp said "people who released opioids upon the American public". How much of those $26 billion fines are towards individuals that profited from those opioids rather than some fictional entity that can just be re-created as needed.
How much of the $1B will be paid by Jones vs by Free Speech Systems? Free Speech Systems is a co-defendant in the Jones case and is likely the entity that will pay out the vast majority of the damages.
The Sackler family was listed alongside Purdue pharma. More importantly, personal liability in opioid cases goes FAR beyond civil damages. Dozens of physicians have received fines comparable in net worth to that fine Jones received. Much more important, those physicians have also received prison sentences. Opioid litigation is still ongoing, so the $26B is a floor not a ceiling, and the settlement didn't preclude further prosecution or litigation against a large number of potential defendants.
Jail time and additional financial penalties remain on the table and a real possibility, including for individual drug company execs and major shareholders. In fact, at least one drug co exec has already been charged criminally, found guilty, and received a prison sentence.
If any drug company exec or investor acted as brazenly as Jones has, they will certainly receive a huge financial penalty and a stiff prison sentence. Unfortunately, most of those people are much smarter than Jones so prosecution won't be nearly as open-and-shut.
So that money gets paid to the states to cover medical costs related to smoking? Is there any documentation of people getting free healthcare for their smoking related illnesses? I sure as heck haven't ever heard of this.
Adding some numbers: [1] gives ~480k cigarette deaths, [2] gives 107k drug deaths with ~80k of those from opiods which is an approx 6:1 ratio (close enough!)
that is true but they also aren't allowed to advertise, have massive additional taxes placed on them, and huge public information campaigns against their use
If you look at the fine, you will see that many families were affected. There is nothing unreasonable about that amount of money awarded from that perspective.
The jury in the Texas case awarded the family around $50M, and the $965M in this case is a bit over 2x that, at $120M per family. So it's definitely a lot higher and I'm curious to see if there's anything that caused that.
More importantly, though, is that the Texas damages were split into ~$4.5M as compensatory damages (this is the part where you make amends for the harm you've caused), and the remaining ~$45M as punitive damages (the part where you). Texas has a cap on how much you can _actually_ be forced to pay in punitive damages, and it is specifically forbidden to instruct juries on the existence of this cap, so as to avoid tempting the jury to tack their actual punitive damages onto the compensatory damages number.
The amount in this case will almost certainly going to have a similar-ish split, and Connecticut is likely to have similar-ish laws in place. I'm not sure how this all works, but there's also the interesting detail that, if this was just one judgment, the punitive damages cap might apply to the aggregate amount rather than per plaintiff (So: if there is a $1M cap, does that mean he pays no more than $1M, so each family gets $125k, or each family can't get more than $1M, and he pays $8M).
No. In the Texas case, Jones lawyers successfully convinced the jury to award relatively low compensatory damages and to hammer him, if that's what they wanted, in the punitive damages phase. In Connecticut, Jones lawyers failed catastrophically to accomplish the same thing. The entire $965MM in this case is compensatory; we haven't reached punitive damages yet. Notably, the torts involved in this case don't appear to have capped damages in Connecticut.
(I have no particular reason to believe this verdict will stand unchanged, but whatever happens to knock the damages down, it will be something very different than what happens in Texas, where state and federal law caps punitive damages in relation to the underlying compensatory damages).
The other obvious difference between this case and Texas is that there are many more plaintiffs here.
> Connecticut is likely to have similar-ish laws in place
NAL, but according to the New York Times, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
> This case presented the greatest financial risk to Mr. Jones, because he was found liable of violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, by using lies about the shooting to sell products on Infowars. There is no cap on punitive damages under that law.
Can somebody explain the statement from the lawyer, as reported by Axios:
> «We disagree with the basis of the default, we disagree with the court’s evidentiary rulings. In more than 200 trials in the course of my career I have never seen a trial like this», Pattis added. «Today is a very, very dark day for freedom of speech»
given that another bullet states
> claimed the shooting was a "false flag" operation planned by the government using "crisis actors" to undermine gun rights
It's a statement of opinion which perfectly fits under the guise of free speech.
I can claim that McDonald's hamburgers are made of cat meat to lower prices and it's the exact same thing. It's only because it's political (and Jones is a perennial example to be paraded about as the standard for "evil far-right conservative extremist" thought) that it gets contorted into what it has.
This will predictably bite people in the cheeks later when this case is used as pretense for going after someone those chastising Jones agree with.
No. If you built a multimillion-dollar media enterprise and used it to state that you had actual knowledge that McDonalds used cat meat in their Quarter Pounders, McDonalds would likely end up owning your media enterprise, and might also erect a PlayPlace(tm) on the ground your house stood on. We just saw this happen to Oberlin a few weeks ago: you can do tens of millions of dollars of damage by materially misstating facts, and "McDonalds Quarter Pounders Meow Instead Of Moo" is a statement of fact, not opinion.
(The numbers in the Oberlin case also flatly refute your argument as well; there, a conservative-friendly plaintiff won a number comparable to what the Sandy Hook parents won here. The big distinction is that there were many more Sandy Hook parents than there were defamed Oberlin candy store owners.)
Right, but did he make a specific claim that he had specific, direct knowledge of Sandy Hook being a hoax (e.g., his usual trope of "we've got documents")?
A parent (individual) isn't a corporation with profits to be damaged. I don't doubt a claim of emotional distress, but it's a stretch to say every single parent's character was defamed. As far as I saw from trial clips, one nutjob lady claimed Info Wars radicalized her into going after parents.
Defamation in that case doesn't make much sense based on the stuff I saw presented.
Yes, that was well established --- as it has to be in any defamation case, lest the case be dismissed. Moreover, it doesn't much matter, because he deliberately defaulted the trial itself, so the only question for the jury was damages. If you haven't followed this case at all, it's pretty easy to quickly Google the background, and you'll immediately fine that "defamation in this case doesn't make much sense" is probably not a coherent thing to say about the Jones case.
> Moreover, it doesn't much matter, because he deliberately defaulted the trial itself, so the only question for the jury was damages
Which seems to indicate that his end game is to hope for the broader political winds to shift so radically rightward that this judgement against him is somehow unenforceable, perhaps because the very enforcement apparatus has been destroyed by that shift.
They were harassed by his followers across state lines, so yes, even a broke person’s life can be made orders of magnitude more difficult than it should be under normal conditions.
Also, let’s not walk this eggshell here of “did he make any specific claim”, this is the same bullshit that defends trump from calling covid hoax and whatnot.
Those are individuals who should be tried independently of Jones. By that standard, anybody who goes and commits a crime because of song lyrics should find the artist tried as an accomplice.
It's not "walking on eggshells," it's a matter of legal accuracy. You may not like it, but it's important for maintaining a fair courts system (without which, we forfeit a civil society and revert to tribalism).
So far no part of the argument you've presented has had anything to do with US defamation law, just for what it's worth. If you're trying to be persuasive, that might be the part of your argument you should opt to shore up. In the alternative, you could adopt the somewhat more popular strategy of "the entire edifice of US defamation law is incongruous with the Constitution and should be thrown out". That argument is wrong too, but it'll get you farther.
later edit; I wrote the following I think as the reply below was being written
If you watched the Texas Jones trial, you saw the jury be instructed in some detail on what forms of damage they could and could not attribute to Jones. But you can also just look this up; there's no shortage of documents on the Internet that lay out the procedure for attributing damages to a proven case of defamation.
Long story short: if you damage somebody's reputation with false statements and, following causally from that damage, they suffer losses because lunatics start harassing them on the street, you are in fact liable for those losses.
We were editing at the same time. When I finished editing my comment, I noticed you'd replied, and so I went back and noted that, so it wouldn't look like you'd ignored the last two paragraphs of my comment in your response.
There’s criteria for defamation. Jones likely met them, but it didn’t matter here because he lost by default in the trial due to his overwhelming failure to engage with the legal system in his own defense.
If an artist published songs with lyrics that met the criteria for defamation, and then people heard the song and committed crimes, the artist would be liable for defamation and the listeners who committed crimes would be guilty of those crimes (notably, defamation is civil, not criminal).
It is a statement of my opinion, that rglover is a pedophile, that has personally been involved in sodomizing children in the greater New York metropolitan area, and does so frequently while working on plans to do terrorist activities in that city with a shadowy cabal of mostly (insert ethnicity here) figures.
Now, my kind viewers on Hacker News, I have to attest that these are just my opinions, and as such, I cannot strongly recommend that this viewership immediately find out rglover's personal information and regularly and constantly forward that information to the New York City Metropolitan Police Department's phone numbers for anti-terrorism or crime prevention (available here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/investigative/investi...).
Thank god, where we live in a type of society where, as rglover describes, I am free to make any statements I please, in any manner I please, and claim protection under the right to free speech, and things like defamation and libel law simply do not exist.
I understand your response, but thankfully this community doesn't have to take the word of a terroristic pedophile truthfully. Thank god for your interpretation of the 1st amendment!
Nearby, somebody submitted a - very interesting - article about the breakthroughs of Brian Eno in Ambient Music. A train of thoughts brought me to check some lyrics from Sébastien Tellier (who may be also known for the contributions from Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo).
I did not know about his album /Politics/, for which a most amazing sleeve is conceived:
There is opinion, there is lying; there is good faith and there is bad faith. And there is an image of "politics" with hypertouched re-imaging of reality.
See Taco Bell suing for defamation about the makeup of their taco meat. You might get away with a claim about McDonald's burgers that is wrong, it would only be because you were to small to notice.
"CIVIL-RIGHTS LAWYER NARRATOR: But punitive-damages awards aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy. So Alex Jones will be paying off these debts from wage garnishments, attachments, & sheriff’s sales of his stuff for the rest of his wretched, pathetic, worthless life."
These aren't punitive damages, though the bankruptcy code cite there seems really to be about damages from any intentional tort. My understanding --- someone has been following this part of the case more closely than me and can correct --- is that the bankruptcy stuff isn't as much about shielding Jones or Free Speech Systems directly as it is about facilitating moving most/all of Jones and FSS's assets off their books.
Counterpoint: Alex Jones' life is now valued at minus a billion dollars. So "worthless" would be an inaccurate statement because it should actually be "less than worthless".
But less tongue in cheek, I think Hamuko's comment has the right idea.
What side do you imagine he's on? I haven't seen a poll, but I haven't heard any of the same nonsense out of Republicans. Their main point of difference with Democrats on the issue seems to be how to respond to the real thing that everyone agrees happened.
This is great news, but we should temper our expectations: It's likely that Jones will appeal and keep this tied up for years before he has to pay anything. Even if he is eventually obligated to pay some amount, it is unlikely to be what the jury just decided. And even if it is what the jury just decided, Jones' company is already "bankrupt" (yet still on the air) and he will almost certainly avoid liability through all the useful tools and entities available to a person who has hundreds of millions of dollars in the first place. And through all this, he will probably remain on the air spouting his lies - as he is literally right now as I write this post.
In sum, it's good to know that we're trying to hold him to account, but it seems unlikely that this stops him in any material way from just continuing on the way he has been.
Our system is not setup for situations that involve faith as bad as Jones', on the part of people who have not themselves committed an obvious violent crime.
Remarkably, I think this is all economic damages --- they haven't reached the punitive damages phase. Furthermore, Connecticut doesn't have caps on compensatory damage for emotional distress.
So this isn't quite like the Texas situation, where Jones attorneys successfully convinced the jury to award relatively small compensatory damages and large punitive damages --- those Texas punitive damages will get knocked way back, because there are local and federal caps on the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages.
By making millions of dollars by deliberately amplifying the pain of a murdered parent, so that they're harassed and threatened, face to face, even when they visit states across the country from where they live. It's not complicated. Jones really did fuck these people's lives up, and he did so knowing that their lives had already been devastated. It's hard to even think of a way to profit from the mass murder of first graders, but Alex Jones literally found a way to do it; he might be the only person to have done so successfully.
His profit isn't "actual damages" though. They haven't even decided punitive damages yet.
I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million. The US government values a human life at $10 million, is this 6x worse than what the killer did?
> I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million.
You're massively underestimating both the impact of Jones's behavior and the value of a lifetime of earnings for many two earner families.
Assume both parents were the equivalent of senior SWEs at google and now cannot work. The assumption that they can no longer work is not an unreasonable assumption; their children were slaughtered and then they were threatened by angry mobs for years (and still are). I wouldn't be able to hold down a job.
$64M * 2% = $1,300,000 per year safe withdrawal. (The 4% rule is good if you are retired, but 2% is more realistic if you're eg in your early 30s.)
$1,300,000 / 2 = $640,000 income per earner.
Subtract $20,000 per person to compensate for typical healthcare and retirement benefits [1]. Actually that's a lower bound because of tax implications. We're now at $620,000 per earner.
I'm actually surprised that there aren't at least a few families for whom the number is higher; eg two surgeons, a surgeon and a lawfirm partner, a principal engineer and a VP, etc. would all have lost far more than $640K/yr/earner. These aren't typical pairings, but they're also not particularly rare, and the Sandy Hook community's family median income is nearly 2x the national average so it's the type of place you might expect to find these sorts of people over-represented.
So anyways, we are already within the Senior FAANG salary range and haven't even considered the various serious damages caused by Jones's behavior, beyond his victims' inability to hold down fairly normal upper middle class jobs. Many of them had to move multiple times, probably now have serious and life-long mental health issues from the harassment piles on top of trauma, etc. Once you include those damages, you probably end up with that $64M principal translating to something that is not far from the median family income for Sandy Hook.
He made money from lying about them. That's what the market paid for the plantiff's reputation. When the market pays a price for something, that's it's value. By lying he was harming their reputation without their consent, they bore the costs of it, while he made the profit. That looks similar to theft. I don't see why the damages shouldn't be for the demonstrable value of the harm.
> How does one possibly cause $64 million in straight damages per plaintiff? This isn't even the punitive yet.
I think people in this thread are massively underestimating the value of a lifetime of labor. This number is perfectly compensatory for eg a married couple that are both MDs, biglaw lawyers, FAANG engineers, finance professionals, or any number of other well-paying white collar jobs.
Being threatened the way that these families have -- after losing my child -- would absolutely wreck my mental health. There's no way that I or my wife would be able to live a normal life after the type of harassment incited by Jones. Certainly not hold down a job while looking over our shoulders and processing the trauma of losing a child and being hunted down by wackos in the aftermath.
The safe withdrawal rate on $64,000,000 when you're decades away from retirement age is probably closer to 2% than 4%, which puts us at $1,280,000 per year. That's $640,000 per earner. As a Senior at a FAANG -- which probably isn't my terminal level -- my income + benefits are north of this number.
Now allocate 1/3-1/2 of that $1.2M/yr to personal security and the cost of not having employer-sponsored healthcare and retirement benefits and you're already down to the equivalent of perhaps $250,000 - $400,000 per earner. That's fairly believable. And my only operating assumption is that this sort of trauma makes maintaining a white collar career path difficult/impossible.
And there are lots of other recurring expenses even aside from personal security associated with being hounded by a mob of armed wackos. I'd bet we would get down to $100,000 - $150,000 per earner per year of safe withdrawal income after extraneous expenses.
If I had to guess, the judge isn't going that much further than simply compensating these families for the cost of losing a lifetime of two normal incomes and compensation for other things that are necessary due to Jones's behavior.
You can probably divide the number you're working from roughly in half, because probably half the damages in each case are for emotional damages, which don't compensate lost earnings but rather mitigate suffering already undergone or that will continue to be undergone. It's a distinction big enough that the IRS taxes those damages differently.
Thanks. The point is that it's not at all hard to see how purely compensatory damages can get into the $64M range for two middle class or especially upper middle class people.
I'm less certain. It looks like this mostly hinges on the bankruptcy filings, which weren't going great for Jones (as, of course, they should not, as they seem pretty bogus).
Bankruptcy notwithstanding, he almost certainly does not have $1B. He's a celebrity figure of sorts, but pretty fringe. It's a symbolic victory. He'll have to liquidate the bulk of whatever assets he may have, and the plaintiffs will get a few dollars when it's all said and done.
No, it seems like he has personal assets in the high tens of millions of dollars, and that Free Speech Systems was probably worth into the 9 figures. If the verdict stands, all of that will get wiped out, and the question remaining will be whether the damages, which stem from an intentional tort, will be dischargeable when Jones is forced into bankruptcy non-ironically, rather than using it as a ploy.
This always confused me, if someone is wiped out in this way how are they able to survive in the aftermath? Isn't this effectively sentencing them to homelessness forever, or is there a floor value in these wins that's always respected which accounts for some minimal cost amount of food+rent?
And doesn't the responsibility to pay up remain for money made after the bankruptcy event? Or does declaring bankruptcy ensure a clean slate such that income from new ventures is safe from being confiscated?
Yes, there is usually a floor value. Most states enumerate some types and amounts of property, and some amounts of income, that are exempt from civil judgment collection. It's the same thing for bankruptcy: there are exemptions that allow you to keep a certain amount.
A bankruptcy discharge does usually ensure a clean slate for new ventures. However, some types of debt are "nondischargeable" and can survive a bankruptcy. That includes "intentional torts" like these instances of defamation. So, it's likely that these plaintiffs/creditors will be able to go after his new ventures.
I think if I was in law school and I was being told about these defamation laws and the potential for someone to be sued out of virtually their entire wealth, that would not have sat well with me. But here we are, and Alex Jones' antics prove to be an excellent rejoinder to those doubts.
Still however, I wish the laws were more selective about which funds are ripe for being taken from. E.g., Alex Jones should have to pay up for money that was made from the source of the problem (the podcasts in this case), if he had, say, funds attained from a side-business of roofing, those should be untouched. And if he continues with his roofing business, maybe we shouldn't be taking all of those funds. Otherwise, I fear we are really just erecting disincentives for them to be good and upstanding contributors to society. As losing defendants of these battles are likely to be a perilous group, the issue probably deserves more careful handling. What are your thoughts?
That's an interesting point about the disincentive. I fear, though, that rules around this wouldn't be feasible to administer; it could open a whole new world of hiding assets, which is already pretty easy to do.
I'm no expert but I think the general flow is that you wipe out all the debtor's assets, and then you arrange with the bankruptcy court to garnish their earnings until the matter is settled. That's for instance how it worked out with OJ.
>effectively sentencing them to homelessness forever
Not if you have lived in Florida for the past 40 months[0], which is why many professional athletes change their residency to Florida and start the clock on the day they sign their professional contract. It appears Alex missed a trick here.
Yeah I think the object here is not to enrich the families but to make the costs actually matter instead of being a line item on his annual financials.
> And even if it is what the jury just decided, Jones' company is already "bankrupt" (yet still on the air)
I was under the impression the courts were "unwinding" (perhaps not the correct technical term) some of his bankruptcy efforts for precisely this - being illusory efforts to avoid consequences, rather than functional lack of solvency.
I am under the same impression. Everything I've heard re: the bankruptcy filings suggests that none of his machinations will protect his assets from the courts.
I live in Texas, but I'm (distantly) familiar with California: when the defendant loses & is a complete turd, judges have (delightedly) "peered through the corporate veil".
> In sum, it's good to know that we're trying to hold him to account, but it seems unlikely that this stops him in any material way from just continuing on the way he has been.
It depends on if your goal in a trial about the horrible damages done to the parents of murdered children was only to compensate in some way those suffering parents for that defamation. If your goal was to attack Alex Jones because you don't like him (you're an anti-fan) and you don't like people who like him, then this will be disappointing. Really anything other than summary execution would be disappointing.
BBC reports that Jones asked live on air for financial donations during the proceedings. He will be bringing money in over this long before paying any out. He's proved himself to be utterly shameless.
The only organ of society that really could hold him to account (and historically has held those such as him to account) would be broadcasters. Jones airs on the Genesis Communications Network, which could choose to cease to carry his content if it wanted. He'd drop into the obscurity of online self-publishing almost immediately.
The key here will be if they can attach any of his assets despite his pleas of poverty and filing for bankruptcy. The victims may end up owning the studio he is currently broadcasting from (and his cars, home and anything else of value).
Alex got financially destroyed because he blatantly and repeatedly failed to comply with court orders. Simple orders like "show us your financials".
He was defaulted because he and his lawyers chose not to participate in the civil legal process.
As for "wrong words" if you watched, it was not just a few "wrong words" it was YEARS of vilifying the sandyhook parents. It was hiring "reporters" to go harass them. It was sending someone on a mission to disrupt a fun run.
And further, because it brought in customers, he ignored anything that countered the narrative of "sandyhook was fake" Even as recently as last week he was calling sandyhook staged.
He then went on to lie, repeatedly, in court and deposition (which was shown multiple times).
But finally, free speech does not mean "I can say whatever I want whenever I want". Libel and slander have been a part of the civil code since literally the foundation of the country. Lie, knowingly, in a way that harms people, and you'll pay a price. It was WELL demonstrated that Jones and his crew knew they were lying but continued anyways.
I normally would agree with you - I'm very pro free speech - but what Alex Jones did was not just "the wrong words", it was blatant slander that permanently ruined the lives of these people. I understand why you're concerned, but we've had slander laws forever, and this is exactly what it's used for.
>whose life has been ruined permanently, and how? genuinely curious.
Imagine losing your child in a mass shooting, and then having someone get up on their soapbox in front of a massive audience and, repeatedly, drum up outrage from their audience towards you. Why? Because they say that no kids were killed in that mass shooting. That it was bogus. Your child never existed, and you are a liar and a crisis actor.
The audience gets angry, hits you up on social media. Googles you, starts calling you. Some people start showing up at your house, harassing you at your place of work. You want it to stop, but this dude on his soapbox just keeps going, getting himself angrier about it, and his audience angrier. They keep calling. They keep hounding you in public. You change jobs, but they find you. You move, but they find you.
You lost your child, but you always - year after agonizing year - have people coming up to you and telling you that that's not true and that you're a horrible person. Grief is a hell of a thing to deal with, but society won't even let you properly fucking process your loss.
>whose life has been ruined permanently, and how? genuinely curious.
I hope you're trolling.
You want to know whose life has been ruined? The 26 elementary school kids whose heads were blown off by a deranged asshole.
You want to know whose life has been ruined? The parents who had to move 5-6 times because Jone's deranged followers kept stalking them and actively engaging in some of the most inhumane, heartless and disgusting behavior I've ever seen from one human to another. I'm a native of Fairfield County and have seen some of these assholes firsthand, and it is truly disturbing.
You know whose life wasn't ruined (until now)? The guy who went around harassing the grieving parents and inspiring a legion of paranoid internet tough-guys to do the same, and profiting over $815k a day for over a decade by doing so.
$815k a day? Wow. I would’ve never thought that Infowars could make so much money. I’ve seen some others in the thread mention Jones’ millions, are his financials available? I thought he’d lied and obfuscated them in order to go bankrupt.
> A lawyer for Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis died in the 2012 attack, presented records on Wednesday showing that Infowars made more than $800,000 a day at one point in 2018 (Mr. Jones said the amount stemmed from a particularly lucrative period during the Conservative Political Action Conference).
> Bernard Pettingill, Jr., a forensic economist and former economics professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, testified on Friday that Mr. Jones “is a very successful man” and that his and Free Speech Systems’ combined net worth likely fell between $135 million and $270 million.
> Business records released during the proceedings indicate Mr. Jones has reaped more than $50 million annually selling diet supplements, gun paraphernalia, body armor and doomsday prepper gear by hawking conspiracy theories to millions listening to his radio and online show. Jesse Lewis’s parents are requesting $150 million in compensatory damages. More important than money, Ms. Lewis said on Tuesday, “I hope to accomplish an era of truth.”
The $815k/day appears to be the average of a peak reporting period. A more reasonable number is that it was getting $125k/day profit overall and it had one week were it made 6x that amount.
> The $815k/day appears to be the average of a peak reporting period. A more reasonable number is that it was getting $125k/day profit overall and it had one week were it made 6x that amount.
Great point - thanks for the clarification!
As for the total amount of profit, yeah, that's still absurd - $125k a day in profit for a sustained period of time.
I think that's nearly as much as the highest paid soccer player in the world makes in pre-tax salary. Think about that for a moment. A guy who spreads conspiracy theories in one country aimed at a small portion of the population makes more in a day than the highest paid athlete in the world's most popular sport.
The families are being stalked, harassed, and threatened with violence by Infowars viewers who think the victim's families are crisis actors that faked their children's deaths, and that will likely continue forever. It's not people like you, it's the psychos that follow Alex Jones.
Do you have a source? I've both never heard this, or seen the clips. And I know a lot of people who HATE Jones and his fanbase, so I can't believe it would slip by them.
The common law has been developing for hundreds of years. It is an extraordinary institution and an important part of Western traditions.
At its best, the common law has allowed a finely balanced rule to develop - not in a vacuum, but incrementally and iteratively proven in thousands of real-world cases.
Some of the best minds of our civilizations have tussled over these guidelines, and the more lawsuits that have occurred, the better-developed that area of law, in general.
The United States' approach to the common law of libel and defamation has been strongly shaped by the First Amendment - and that Amendment was not nearly as strong a century ago, remember. It has been accorded more respect and power over time, and that is a wonderful thing.
All of this to say: you're ignoring the entire edifice of law concerning free speech, libel, and defamation. The balance of free speech vs libel and defamation is a defining feature of the success of our society, not its failure.
I don't know much about it, but many great countries agree with you in practice and so it must have a lot going for it. Still, I like the bottom-up approach the common law provides.
You couldn't lie in the 1970s or 1980s. If you did, you would be sued for libel or slander (depending on how exactly you lied).
In the 90s, 00s, and 10s, we somehow forgot about libel / slander laws. I'm happy to see that something as egregious as Alex's Jones's lies here are finally getting punished, but I'd like to see more protection from libel/slander in modern 2020s era America.
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Lies, traditionally speaking, have NEVER been covered by the 1st Amendment. I dunno why we stopped punishing them as a society. But its a good thing that we're remembering about them today.
At risk of being pedantic, the bar for defamation is considerably higher than “lying”. Very relevantly for cases like this, the plaintiffs were required to show that the false statements caused them harm, where the easiest kind of harm is financial harm (like losing your job because of the lie).
Notably, I can put up a billboard in my town that says “All of dragontamer’s code is buggy and it makes your computer smell bad”, and we’d be a long way off from you successfully suing me for defamation.
> the plaintiffs were required to show that the false statements caused them harm
IIRC, only for public figures.
The bar is far lower for private figures btw. A lot of libel/slander that would pass for public figures (ie: Politicians) are absolutely illegal and would be charged if levied against private figures instead (such as me, or the Sandy Hook victims)
> Notably, I can put up a billboard in my town that says “All of dragontamer’s code is buggy and it makes your computer smell bad”, and we’d be a long way off from you successfully suing me for defamation.
Hmm... I think the bigger issue here is whether the suit would be enough reputational damage to even get to damages. IIRC, there's minimum amounts of damage done before any suit is even considered (me lawyering up would cost more than the reputational damage in that case, so it just wouldn't be worth it).
The bar is set at a certain level of damages that I expect to get awarded (and courts also reject any case where the damages are too low). This is more due to pragmatism / the innate inefficiencies of court cases that make it less likely for all cases to be considered... rather than what is strictly legal or illegal.
IE: Even if we were to make it easier to sue for smaller amounts of reputational damage, no one would do it because of the high costs of lawyers in general (and high costs of a full court case).
Harm is required in all defamation. Public figures additionally must prove “actual malice” on the part of the defendant, which is a term of art distinct from the common usage of “malice”
Per se defamation establishes that harm has occurred whether or not it is specifically proved. I was going to well-actually the same comment you did, and instead bided my time to well-actually the predictable response.
At any rate: per se defamation isn't at play in this case.
Much appreciated. I should have spelled this out more directly in my original comment, but this is what I meant about some kinds of harm being more obvious. Defamation per se exists largely to handle cases where harm occurred but it’s tough to point to a specific instance or assign it an easy dollar figure.
But it would naturally lead to lawyers letters and probably your apology and a costs settlement on the steps of the courthouse. The settlement might be zero sum, but you would expect a competent lawyer to advise you to back down gracefully all things being equal, assuming you lacked any evidence for a truth defence.
Oftentimes, the outcome isn't about winning in court. It's about the restitution of the potential harm.
It's not what you said. You said successfully suing. Most suits don't go to a win in court, they terminate before that, and terminate in lawyers letters before paperwork hits a court.
I am continuing to assert you're just wrong. I'm not a lawyer btw.
It's honestly pretty hard to work out what you're trying to assert here. The parent commenter is trying, reasonably, to establish the distinction between "lying" and "defamation". It seems like you're saying "being sued is so expensive the distinction doesn't matter". Ok, sure? That doesn't have anything to do with what they're saying, and, in the context of the grandparent comment --- about libel laws being tightened up --- isn't responsive there either.
(A distinctive feature of modern libel law is SLAPP, which permits fee recovery for defamation suits that aren't well-founded, but that works against the I argument I think but am not sure you are trying to make.)
For others' curiosity: A SLAPP is Strategic lawsuit against public participation, a strategy for plaintiffs to silence opponents by way of burdening them with an onslaught of lawsuits and hoping they are scared away by potential legal costs of mounting a defense thereby resulting in them just giving up. The potential for this strategy to have chilling effects gave rise to anti-SLAPP laws.
If anybody has made it this deep in the thread and has curiosity left to spare, I’d like to recommend https://legaltalknetwork.com/podcasts/make-no-law/ , which is no longer active but whose episodes remain highly valuable in understanding first amendment law.
I think in theory he's still making these, but what you really want to do is subscribe to "Serious Trouble", Ken White's (same guy) podcast with Josh Barro.
Curious: when are you guys listening to these podcasts? While driving? While out for a run or something? Certainly not when on the computer right - cause god knows I couldn’t do that kind of multitasking. I’d love to go through the archive of past Ken White podcasts but I don’t know how to make the time for it. Are you listening to them at 2x speed?
I have a 1 month old, so I suddenly have both a ton of time spent driving to the store to get supplies and a ton of time spent just sitting and rocking back and forth.
I don’t think this is the most efficient way to carve out time for podcasts :D
Anyone can sue anyone at any time. I can sue you claiming that this comment you made is defamatory towards me.
I’m saying that the suit wouldn’t end with a settlement or an apology or me doing anything; it would be thrown out for not meeting the standard for defamation. Tort is relatively boring, IMO, but the standards for various suits are well defined and publicly documented.
Lies are covered by the first amendment. There is a rather narrow exception for lies that can be proven to have harmed somebody, and you can prove that they knew that they were acting negligently (i.e. knew that it would case harm and knew that it was false). Those are very high bars to meet.
Beyond that, you can lie your head off. Jones has been lying for decades. This is the first time that it was so egregious that somebody managed to drag it across the finish line for a civil judgment.
"Lies are covered by the First Amendment" is not good legal analysis. Material misstatements of fact that cause damages are all actionable, regardless of how egregious they are. Statements of opinion, or unintentional misstatements of fact regarding public figures, or misstatements of fact that cause no provable damages are "protected", in the same sense all speech is protected.
Wrong. The bar for negligence is "should have performed X, but failed to do so".
Ex: A toddler dying by falling off a deck is negligence. The homeowner "should have repaired the deck", but failed to do so. (This bar would lead to negligent homicide or manslaughter, depending on jurisdiction).
Similarly, a journalist "should have done basic research", but failed to do so, is negligence. Its a much easier bar than "malice" (ie: knew it was false, but lied anyway).
EDIT: According to LII on libel: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/libel, there seems to be different awards for negligence, recklessness, and malice. Negligence is capped at actual injury, while recklessness and above can have punitive damages.
EDIT: Alex Jones's $965M penalty here is likely punitive? (I don't know for sure), which suggests that it was at least of the reckless level and proven so in court?
(1) No, again, the damages announced today are compensatory, not punitive.
(2) If we're talking about the "actual malice" standard, then the standard is recklessness, not negligence.
(3) None of that matters here, because Jones lost the trial by default (the evidence would have clearly shown Jones to have met the actual malice standard, but it's a moot point).
> (2) If we're talking about the "actual malice" standard, then the standard is recklessness, not negligence.
My understanding is that "actual malice" only applies to public figures. Not private figures?
EDIT: I should note that I'm working off of roughly high-school journalism + high school law levels of analysis here. I recognize I'm no expert in this subject, but we were forced to study this topic in my Journalism class before we were allowed to publish the school newspaper. I can believe it if my teacher was being extra-conservative with regards to the subjects we were allowed to cover.
Jones lawyers attempted to claim that the Sandy Hook parents were in fact public figures (again, this is all mooted by Jones eventual default of the defamation cases themselves; the conduct standards we're talking about apply pretty much entirely to the question of whether you're culpable in the first place, not what the damages are.)
I haven't followed the full details of this case specifically. And it seems like there's multiple different cases of defamation vs Alex Jones for Sandy Hook... and my own memories could be getting mixed up between them.
Good to discuss these various details in any case. Reckless vs negligence (and other such details) are very important to understand the case.
As I understand that’s not correct. Recklessness is “I did something I knew I shouldn’t have done” and negligence is “I didn’t do something I knew I should have done”.
The only thing worse than Godwin's Law on the internet is discussions of the first amendment. I've seen the exact same arguments and misunderstandings repeatedly.
It's a highly subtle right that does not mean what most people think it means. Trying to apply it in this case won't bring any value to your argument.
The reason why libel and slander laws worked was in part due to broadcasters having contributory liability that would hold them liable for broadcasting someone else's libel or printing someone else's slander. This long-standing principle - that the law does not chase pointers - is something the Internet was exempted from. CDA 230 created a new category of entity that is neither speaker nor publisher and thus exempted from defamation liability[0].
Also, the law itself is actually quite weak for very obvious 1st Amendment reasons. It has built-in exceptions designed to keep it from becoming a censorship tool. However, the context in which that law exists has made the exceptions wide enough to drive trucks through.
You see, CDA 230 alone would not have dynamited the foundations of libel or slander law. Back then, the entities shielded by these safe harbors were supposed to just be web hosting providers. But technology moves on, and now we have Facebook and Twitter, which act almost identically to broadcasters except without the liability. And since they've pushed everyone to make everything public, that makes everyone a public figure[1].
If you are a public figure, it is harder to be defamed. This should be obvious, if I say Donald Trump has a narcissism problem or just mis-state the size of his wealth I should not have to defend a multi-million dollar lawsuit from him[2]. However, if I, say, get defamed by someone and respond to them on Twitter, that makes me a public figure now - which means the bar is also raised for me as a plaintiff. This is how Elon Musk got away with calling one of the Thai cave rescue divers a pedophile, for example.
[0] DMCA 512 does the same with contributory copyright liability, though with the extra step of having to give anyone with a registered copyright total censorship powers over your platform in order to get the liability exception.
[1] Technically this is a "limited-purpose public figure", which basically means "you aren't a public figure, but you stuck your nose in the debate, so for this particular time we're going to act as if you were one".
[2] Not like it stopped him - the US court system has very few ways to stop a baseless suit before it is filed.
Your speech has power. That’s why we carve out free speech protections from the government so you always have some measure of power against it. That power also means it can be used to damage others.
Being made to pay for damages you caused via speech is not censorship in the same way that being made to pay for damages you caused via fire is not censorship.
If you want to argue that it doesn’t have the power to damage, then who cares if it is censored. If you want to argue that you should be allowed to damage others with impunity and no consequences you’ll find most of humanity turning against you.
Perhaps it's cynical rather than disingenuous. ~30% of people derive more satisfaction from seeing someone worse off than they do from mutual benefit - not even a zero-sum mindset, but a negative-sum one because such people are willing to incur a loss as long as it correlates with someone else experiencing a greater loss.
Put this depressing fact together with a highly networked communications infrastructure, and you can see there's a big economic incentive to talk shit about others. The US has an entire media sector built around the opinion columnists and radio/TV hosts whose whole brand is aggressive belittlement of others, or bullying as entertainment.
In the context of the user making a very inaccurate comment about the free speech rights of someone running one of the largest conspiracy theory websites, it is worth highlighting their own strong connections to an organization very similar in intent/spirit to InfoWars. I provided no direct link to any personal accounts, did not doxx OP, and will defer to dang on this one.
The irony is that the user would likely complain loudly about you posting this and ask moderators to remove the post. That's how far their defence of free speech goes.
It is incredibly hard in the US legal system to make a defamation claim stick. Relative to other nations (in particular the UK, which the US shaped some of its law in direct reaction to around 1776), there are several defenses to defamation.
The fact that in spite of all those assume-no-malice protections for a defendant this lawsuit still found him guilty says a lot about this case specifically, and very little about the risks of merely "saying the wrong thing" (at least under a US legal framework).
> The fact that in spite of all those assume-no-malice protections for a defendant this lawsuit still found him guilty says a lot about this case specifically, and very little about the risks of merely "saying the wrong thing" (at least under a US legal framework).
Weirdly, it actually doesn't. The court awarded the plaintiff's default judgement on the claims of defamation because Jones refused to hand over a bunch of evidence during discovery. Given the particulars of the case, he'd probably have lost anyway, and in some ways it's even worse that he felt it more important to hide his financials from the court and plaintiffs than to actually attempt to defend himself.
I guess this still does make your point even stronger though: the reason we're here, despite the malice protections, is that Jones didn't even try to defend himself.
Yes, in a world of hyperbole you may be correct. In this case, you're taking a very nuanced situation to an extreme and throwing out ALL of the important details in the process. I trust you are an intelligent person and you're able to see this case for what it is, not for what potential "GOTCHA" counter arguments you can filter through it.
> No this is not good news. Say the wrong words and get financially destroyed for ever is a feature of failed societies: dictatorships, and totalitarian counties.
Oh please, Jones is no way a victim. Your idea of a successful society is one that richly rewards wilful dishonesty - not the kind intended to amuse or entertain, like fiction or the tall tales shared by Art Bell, but by deliberately ruining other people's lives.
The "say words, get X punishment" complaint is one of the purest forms of bad-faith hypocrisy I've seen become popular, across my whole life. The simple reason it is hypocritical is that the complaint is predicated at once on the two mutually exclusive ideas that words are critically important (since "X" is frequently some kind of censorship, or at least a discouragement) and also that words are meaningless and have no real effects.
This isn't "saying the wrong words". This is a man who profited to the tune of (according to his financial audit) $818k PER DAY over the course of a decade by spreading lies about parents who had the misfortune of having their elementary-school-aged kids shot up by a highly disturbed individual.
Imagine your child being murdered, and then a guy comes along and starts making a profit on the idea that you are a crisis actor and your child never existed, and he doesn't stop even when the crazy people who listen to him start to stalk you.
Most people would probably say that this sort of behavior should not be only not be tolerated by a civil society, but that there should be penalties for it. You, on the other hand, have decided that being sued for libel is a totalitarian death wish.
Name a democratic country that does not have laws or torts against perjury and defamation.
"Free speech" has never been limitless. Fraud, libel, filing a false report, uttering threats, copyright infringement -- all grounds for a lawsuit if not a prison term in any respectable country.
> Say the wrong words and get financially destroyed
I would argue that a failed society is one that protects an individual at the cost of the group. You only see one individual held accountable for his words and actions, but you don't make any attempt to recognize the families and how their lives have been affected by Alex Jones' negligent and irresponsible words.
Where are we going with this line of thought Protecting minorities within a larger group of people is the ideal state according to thought leaders. In your world kicking out a black man of his home because property values are lowering for everyone else is acceptable. Sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the many
Sometimes? Often. The individual must be protected from the many, and this is why so many are working to get rid of protections for individuals of all sorts — the many like to get together to prey on individuals or on a few standing alone.
The difference between your theory ("say the wrong words") and practice (weaponizing the Sandy Hook massacre to industrially harness victim-blaming for maximum profit) is why having a fair trial by jury protects us from dictatorship and totalitarianism.
You may have a point about failed societies, that ship has sailed.
This is terrible news for free speech. But maybe great news for the unvaccinated who will be able to go after all the people that spread lies about them, and ostracize them from society for two years.
Unfortunately, Jones lost both his cases by default -- there were no trials. The jury trials were only on the amount of damages. So if the unvaccinated start suing everyone who defamed them and worse, this case sets no precedent. But it might indicate a ballpark figure for their damages. If 30% of Americans are unvaccinated, their Jones-damages could be 100 Million x $50 Million. That could cause a few bankruptcies.
He caused his fans to harass families of murdered children for years, several had to move, some multiple times. All the while Alex Jones was raking in millions in cash off it.
> Alex Jones is directly inciting people to go harass the plaintiffs
Where is this accusation made by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit? The only accusation I see is that Jones and his associates made defamatory false statements about the plaintiffs. As far as I can tell, that was the basis for the ruling, not any claims of incitement.
Defamation is inherently inciteful. If I publicly accuse you of a horrible crime, and I have a sufficiently broad audience, you are going to have to deal with assholes coming up to you and saying 'you're the evil person who committed a horrible crime!'. At best you get harrassed, at worse your safety is at risk from would-be vigilantes, revenge-seekers, and people who need a punching bag for sadistic or strategic reasons of their own.
Of course, you can argue that there's no direct causal relationship because Jones or whoever can say 'I'm not saying to do something, but....'. But so what? If an outcome is statistically predictable there doesn't have to be a direct nexxus, a proximate one is sufficient.
That might be your personal opinion, but it's not the law. If nutjob A makes a defamatory statement about you, but doesn't tell anyone to do anything, and then nutjob B harasses you after hearing what nutjob A said, nutjob B is the one who is legally responsible for the harassment. Nutjob A is responsible for the defamation, but not for what other nutjobs might decide to do.
Now if nutjob A explicitly said things along the lines of "you should go after this person", instead of just making defamatory false factual claims about them, that would be different. But I have not seen any claims by the plaintiffs that Jones said anything like that. They're just saying he made defamatory false statements.
> If an outcome is statistically predictable there doesn't have to be a direct nexxus, a proximate one is sufficient.
This legal theory is a recipe for disaster. There's a reason why the law requires direct evidence for things like this.
> If nutjob A makes a defamatory statement about you, but doesn't tell anyone to do anything, and then nutjob B harasses you after hearing what nutjob A said, nutjob B is the one who is legally responsible for the harassment. Nutjob A is responsible for the defamation, but not for what other nutjobs might decide to do.
Courts and jurors are completely fine with finding that the behavior of nutjob B (and C and D and E and F) that are predictable from the defamation are part of the damages associated with the defamation.
So, yes, nutjob A _does_ have legal liability for the damages caused by nutjobs B and C and D and E and F that are a predictable consequence of the defamation.
The law does not require "direct evidence" of the connection to every instance of harassment. It requires enough evidence that a jury can decide a "but for" causation is more likely than not. Jurors are perfectly capable of making deductions and inferences such as "person A with a massive platform lied repeatedly for years", and then "hundreds of nutjobs harassed plaintiffs based on the same lies", connecting those two facts, and deciding that it's more likely than not that the nutjobs wouldn't have harassed the person if not for person A's lies.
> Courts and jurors are completely fine with finding that the behavior of nutjob B (and C and D and E and F) that are predictable from the defamation are part of the damages associated with the defamation.
Do you have any actual cases where that was the ruling?
I mean, it's basically the very core of the typical harms that arise from defamation.
Almost always the economic harms that arise from defamation are the result of third parties responding to the defamatory content. If you couldn't incorporate the actions of third parties into the calculation of economic harm, then there would almost never be economic harm from defamation.
As for specific court cases, take a look at Gibson Bros., Inc v. Oberlin College. A jury awarded Gibson's Bakery $11M in compensatory damages (and another $33M in economic damages). Of the compensatory damages, Gibson had argued that, among other things Oberlin college should be responsible for the damages arising from:
"They blamed Oberlin for repeated vandalism and property damage and for Grandpa Gibson breaking his back while investigating the source of someone pounding on his apartment door in the middle of the night"
> it's basically the very core of the typical harms that arise from defamation
I understand that this is the opinion of you and others. That doesn't make it the law.
> take a look at Gibson Bros., Inc v. Oberlin College
In that case, there was evidence of communications by college officials saying things like "I hope we rain fire and brimstone down on that store". Also, the college has a responsibility for the behavior of its students that Alex Jones and his associates and employees do not have for the behavior of random nutjobs that have no association with them. So the facts in the cases are different and I don't think the Oberlin case shows a general justification for "damages from harassment" being part of a defamation claim.
> Two other examples, of course, would be the recent Alex Jones cases in TX and CT where the same reasoning also let to economic damage awards...
I didn't see that in any of the actual legal documents in those cases.
> I understand that this is the opinion of you and others. That doesn't make it the law.
It's not really a question of law. It's more a question of fact ("were these claimed economic harms caused by the statement"), which means its a question for the jury. Which means it's the opinion of the jury that matters.
As far as "the law" on this topic, typically the most relevant thing will be the jury instructions. These will vary from state to state, but let's take a look at Virginia's since those were the first I found online.
I'll highlight again my claim that we're evaluating:
"Courts and jurors are completely fine with finding that the behavior of nutjob B (and C and D and E and F) that are predictable from the defamation are part of the damages associated with the defamation."
> ...in determining the amount of damages to
which he is entitled, you may take into consideration all of the circumstances surrounding the statement, the occasion on which it was made and the extent of its publication, the nature and character of the insult, *the probable effect on those who heard the statement*, and its probable and natural effect upon the plaintiff's personal feelings and upon his standing in the community and in
business
I've indicated the key section which directly supports my claim. I'll turn it over to you. Can you find a state's pattern jury instructions that *don't* behave the way I suggest? I'm not familiar with all 50 states defamation laws, but I'll be very surprised if you find a single state that doesn't allow the jury to include the predictable actions of third parties based on the defamation as part of the harms of defamation.
> Let's look at the 37.100 for Actual Damages from the VA pattern jury instructions*
"The probable effect on those who heard the statement" is ambiguous. Does it mean the effect on their opinion of the plaintiff? Or does it mean the effect on their actions?
Legally, I believe it's the first. The defendant can be held responsible for the probable effects of their defamatory false statements as far as inducing negative opinions in others regarding the plaintiff. But the defendant cannot be held responsible for some other nutjob, who is not an associate or employee or in some other relationship with the defendant, choosing to harass the plaintiff based on nothing more than defamatory false statements. There would have to be something in the statements that explicitly incited others to commit wrongful acts, instead of just inducing them to hold negative opinions. And, as I have said, in the Alex Jones case I have not found anything that alleges or attributes incitement on the part of Jones.
This is an instance of a more general legal principle that individuals are free agents and are presumed to be in control of their actions, so no third party can be legally responsible for what an individual chooses to do (in the absence of some legally recognized relationship such as principal-agent). Explicit incitement can go against that presumption, but simple false statements that could reasonably induce a negative opinion cannot.
They're jury instructions. There isn't further legal analysis. These words mean precisely what a jury of your peers interpret them to mean. That's it.
You don't get to make a legal quibble over a juror's reasonable interpretation of the instructions. If there's ambiguity, it's up to the jury to resolve at that point (and often jury instructions deliberately have some ambiguity to them—because the job of the jury is to apply sometimes ambiguous phrases such as "reasonable care" to specific facts).
So you can't say "oh, most of society is just misinterpreting the jury instructions", because that just means you might very well lose the argument before a jury!
You say there's ambiguity. Fine. I left a challenge for you. Can you find a single state where the jury instructions are unambiguous and foreclose on my interpretation? One state where the actual harm jury instructions clearly don't allow damages from the predictable actions of third parties?
Frankly, I'm done with the discussion until you try. I've put in effort to cite cases and jury instructions to support my positions, while you've cited nothing but your own opinion.
> These words mean precisely what a jury of your peers interpret them to mean.
And how do we find out what that is? We find out by looking at what happened in actual cases.
In the Gibson case that you cited, I saw nothing that indicated that the jury awarded damages based on harassment by unrelated third parties. There is a mention of Grandpa Gibson "breaking his back", but there is nothing to indicate that the jury awarded any damages based on, for example, medical or other costs associated with that back injury. According to your position, damages for that should have been included. On mine, they shouldn't (the Gibsons would have to recover such damages from whoever was pounding on their apartment door in the middle of the night). So this instance supports my position, not yours.
Similarly, in the Alex Jones cases, I see no indication that the juries awarded any damages based on harassment by unrelated third parties. Which, again, is consistent with the position I have been arguing.
> there is nothing to indicate that the jury awarded any damages based on, for example, medical or other costs associated with that back injury
"I don't see something" is not evidence that it doesn't exist.
> So this instance supports my position, not yours.
Does it? You haven't cited anything beyond "I haven't seen it". If you want to claim it supports your position, show your work.
Show the breakdown of the $11M in damages, and show that it excludes property damages, and the medical damages.
"I see no indication that..."
Again, I'm not going to carry this conversation forward unless you actually start citing sources, and pointing to the breakdown of damages if you claim it supports your position.
For all you've demonstrated, "I've seen no indication" may only be evidence that you haven’t looked.
The law leaves room for the jury to form such moral determinations on their own, and in this case they have done so. I disagree that this is in any way disastrous.
Where have they done so in this case? As far as I can tell, the plaintiffs didn't even allege damages from harassment in this case. They alleged damages from emotional distress due to the defamation.
Its distressing because of the harassment it engenders and includes the fear of future harassment, as much as anything else. If you prefer a legal system where the jury is not allowed to weigh such factors and damage awards are determined in accordance with some statutory formula, that's your prerogative. Don't do any business in Connecticut, I guess.
This doesn't answer my question. "Harassment is distressing" might be your opinion, but I'm not asking for your opinion. I'm asking if you can point me at anything in the plaintiffs' claims or their lawyer's arguments or the court ruling that based any part of the damage award on harassment by people who had nothing to do with Jones but just heard what he said, instead of just on defamation by Jones and his associates and employees.
How about you look up the case and read the complaint for yourself, then you can express your opinion on how it's deficient. I don't know how the jurors parsed the evidence and haven't followed the trial so closely that I want to restate the plaintiffs' arguments.
If it's his own employee, then it does come within the plaintiffs' allegations (since they alleged conduct by associates and employees of Jones as well as Jones himself), but it also is different from an allegation of harassment by people not connected with Jones or his company, who harassed the plaintiffs solely on the basis of things they heard Jones say. AFAIK the plaintiffs made no allegations about the latter at all, nor was the latter considered at all by the court in awarding damages.
He probably could have made such an argument or a similar one on his defense but he received a default judgement because he continuously refused to show up to court dates for his case and perjured himself repeatedly.
If this was a soccer game he basically walked to the edge of the field and sat there the whole game and then complained that the refs were in a conspiracy against him because the opposing team was able to score unopposed.
He received a default judgment because he failed to provide discovery items including financial documents to show the company value, videos that included sandy hook, text and emails that included sandy hook, how much it made of sandy hook and failed to provide a competent corporate representative that could answer questions on a list of items that was provided in advance.
Is that not failing to defend himself? And you skipped over the perjury. And for one I missed, he continued his attacks on the parents on Infowars during his show
If failing to provide evidence to the prosecution is how you lose a trial. Than forever more all the prosecution has to to do prove your guilt is to ask for something you don't have. They were asking for things like his Youtube Analytics after Youtube deleted his channel. This was one of those things he was defaulted for. It's quite possible he did not have them backed up, and no evidence that he even viewed them. His monetary success was only relevant to his fine should he be found guilty. Yet this was used to find guilt.
> was under the impression that saying “Trump is a murderous liar” is fine, if I say “Go kill trump”etc then that's incitement
If Alex Jones said "go kill these families," he'd likely be facing criminal charges. Instead, he made up specific claims which he kept repeating even after being shown evidence a reasonable person would accept as refutation of said claims.
To your analogy: if you said "Trump is a murderous liar who buggered my pet rabbit last Tuesday in New York," then were shown evidence Trump was in London and up to no buggery, and yet you kept saying it, yes, Trump might have a claim against you.
He was not sued for "incitement", he was sued for defamation.
To prove defamation, you need to prove that someone lied about you, and that those lies caused material harms.
You saying "Trump is a murderous liar" is largely fine because:
- A reasonable reader, familiar with the context of the place you are writing, would understand that you aren't making a factual claim that Trump murdered a person but rather you are expression a rhetorical political opinion.
- Trump is a public figure, which means you must meet the "actual malice" standard of reckless disregard for the truth.
- Trump must have been materially harmed by your statements for it to be worth suing you.
If you, on the other hand, falsely and deliberately recklessly said: "Trump murdered person X", repeated that claim for years, and convinced hundreds thousands of people that it was true to the point where Trump had to move houses several times due to ongoing death threats, then you would probably be liable for defamation.
The _context_ matters. The _breadth of your reach_ matters. The _actual harms caused_ matter.
Doesn't "you" imply that "you" were actually named. If a politician says the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading the disease. Then it's proved that the vaccine did not stop transmission. Do they owe billions to these people.
> Doesn't "you" imply that "you" were actually named.
No, defamation doesn't require you to specifically be named. It's enough for them to be identified with enough specificity that they are harmed.
> If a politician says the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading the disease
There are two claims in the phrase "the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading disease".
The first claim, that they are terrible people, is not a statement of fact, but is rather an opinion. There is no factual, objective, way to determine whether someone is "a terrible person". So that part would not create the potential for liability.
The second claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" _could_ potentially be defamatory, but truth would be an absolute defense. The truth also doesn't have to be _perfect_ so long as it's "correct in the main". First, note that the claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" is still true even if the vaccinated are also spreading disease. So, your defamation claim would need to first convince the jury that the implication of the statement is "the unvaccinated are spreading disease *more than the vaccinated*". I think that implication is there, but it's a little more tenuous of a claim. Second, I don't think there would be any liability, since the vaccine has some efficacy. To defend against the defamation claim, it would be sufficient to show that the vaccine has any significant efficacy. You wouldn't need to demonstrate that the vaccine has perfect efficacy. The vaccine does have efficacy against COVID-19, so I think a defamation claim would fail here.
Finally, you'll need to go to the harms. It's going to be very difficult to demonstrate significant harm to any individual unvaccinated person, when the group includes 100M people. The harm is going to be _very_ diffused, and I think it would be difficult to demonstrate any economic harm.
So, on balance, I think a politician would still be very safe making the statement you suggested, even in light of the fact that a person doesn't need to be specifically named to press a defamation claim.
> did he just say they’re crisis actors and its hoax?
This is what he did, and it's defamation. If I say "go kill Trump" that might be incitement (although it might not be if it's not credible.) If I say "Trump is a murderous liar," that's really just a personal characterization that can't be disproven - you can find things in his past that can be interpreted as murder, and things that can be interpreted as lies, whether that makes him a "murderous liar" is just banter. If I say that Trump molested a child, and I clearly intend for the charge to be taken seriously, that's defamation unless I can show the kid.
You could argue that using drones to kill people is murdering, you can point to times when he lied. It also just strikes me as different when saying things about someone who is in public office and saying things about private citizens who aren't in the spotlight at all.
I'm curious, Democrats like Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Maxine Waters have incited people to go harass others, break the law, and commit violence, and their followers have followed through multiple times. Do you support each of them being ordered by a court to pay the conservatives they harassed nearly a billion dollars, or is it only justified if it's someone you disagree with politically?
This is a civil trial, not criminal, so families would have to identify harassers first. The FBI or the state can bring criminal charges against the harassers but same thing, the authorities need to track them down first.
Obviously, it's easier for the authorities to act first, then the families can sue.
The whole thing is senseless, the harassers are crazy people who believe that it was all "false flags" (for what? who knows), when these kids did die. Each harasser that is caught need to be shown the photos of these poor dead kids and forced to watch them, it will haunt them forever. As for Jones, he is a billionaire, this tragedy made is filthy rich, that's the only reason he exploited it. He probably never believed himself in these things.
Jones led a years-long defamatory harassment campaign against grieving parents for profit. He did not merely say something was a hoax, he organized and profited, for years, from his slander and harassment against many innocent people.
In this particular venue, damages were determined by the jury (which is not the case in all states).
Relevant to that process, Jones took the stand in his own defense, to show remorse and indicate why the jury should find for a lower penalty, and... Did the opposite of that. He lost his temper and managed to strongly indicate he had learned nothing and showed no remorse. Juries tend to take a particularly dim view of such behavior (often even dimmer than a judge, which is one of the reasons so many states don't involve the jury in the process of assigning penalty).
Interestingly enough, the judge also has the authority to assign penalty here (Jones' behavior on the stand and in court was egregious) and has not done so yet. Her say comes soon.
But these aren't puntive damages, they're compensatory damages, and plainly excessive ones at that. Alex Jones level of remorse has no bearing on the level of damage he caused, and so should have no bearing on the amount of compensatory damages. To the extent that they did, that's an injustice.
These damages are absolutely insane for emotional distress and defamation. The average lifetime earnings of a US citizen are $1.7 million. These damages essentially allege that each plaintiff suffered emotional distress so severe it was over forty times the average person's lifetime earnings. That's plainly absurd.
> Alex Jones level of remorse has no bearing on the level of damage he caused
That's an excellent legal argument, is the kind of thing that could probably win before a judge... And has no bearing on what a jury finds. In general, the reasoning of a jury is private to the jury. They can award maximum damages because they think Jones is ugly (all you have to do is get fourteen people to agree that's a fair thing to do to the man; hypothetically, the averaging effect over so many folks is a back-stop. That back-stop backfires if the defendant is particularly loathsome; recall how long it took to seat a jury for Martin Shkreli).
This is why damages are, in so many places, not put before a jury.
Probably. And when it happens, the overturn will be relative to where it is now. The jury's power here is still to send a clear message of what the public thinks, and that will factor into the judge's reasoning... For example, if a judge decides that it doesn't make sense for compensatory damages to be any higher than X, the jury has made clear that they expect 100% of X to be the damages level.
Is it really absurd? Losing a child to murder is already an awful outcome that most people never experience. Being accused of participating in conspiracy/cover up and told your child never existed makes that significantly worse. It would be horrible if some random crazy did that, but to have it done to you by a well-resourced media organization with nationwide reach and millions of devoted fans is the stuff of nightmares.
It's not hard to argue the ongoing security costs could easily reach that amount. i.e Security for trump and family cost 30 million in 2017 and these families would suffer similar political targeting. Though ofcourse we can argue that trump was purposefully inflating those costs to enrich himself. But even then we're only talking 120 mil per family for quite possibly the rest of their lives.
While I think there are many people would forgo that protection or pay less for protection it's one of the ineffable personal balances of security/cost/ease of life that I could easily see a jury saying "if they went the perfect security route then they could easily spend this much".
You can't ignore that cost just because they'd normally never earn enough to pay for that security... much like a company that causes an illness is on the hook for cost of treatment even if a person couldn't normally afford to treat themselves.
What does the lifetime earnings of the plaintiff have to do with anything? Jones made money by lying about these people. The value of the reputations he destroyed is not what you think it should be, not what you think would be average earnings for a different person, but rather what the market paid to the liar for his lies and the economic benefit he gained from them.
His lies had a measurable value of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, so the plaintiffs' reputations had that value, and damages should be calculated against that.
One of the lawyers made in the previous case what I consider an interesting argument: Alex Jones claimed under oath that his show reaches (off the top of my head) about a hundred million people. So the lawyer argued that Alex Jones should pay $1 for every person who heard him lie about Sandy Hook.
By this measure, if I intentionally harass someone on Twitter I'd have to pay the victim about $50 (on a good day). Since Alex Jones has a much larger following, he'd therefore have to pay more proportional to that.
I found that line of reasoning... well, reasonable. But then again, I'm not impartial here.
It's hard to fathom how much damage he did. What he said is the absolute pit of human depravity. I know a jury isn't really empowered to "send a message" but I hope they did it. Alex Jones is absolute stain on humanity and should be destroyed (financially and reputationally, not physically). I think paying back the families who lost children is the most important step, but the entire country deserves punitive damages for what he did. I wouldn't want them to get paid directly, I'd think they should spend something to deprogram all the people who believed his lies.
I don't think you'd find traditional media companies routinely getting convicted of defamation this egregious. Although, FOX and Newsmax are both facing $1B+ penalties over their reporting on Dominion Voting Systems. And they're both pretty much dead to rights with Dominion able to point very directly to lost revenue as a result of their deliberate lies.
Just reporting something incorrectly isn't punishable at all. Publishing something poorly sourced isn't punishable. Stating a disagreeable opinion isn't punishable. What Jones, Fox and Newsmax did was done with active malice.
here's an excerpt from the editor's note:
The first published version of this story stated incorrectly that Internet influencers Alyte Mazeika and ThatUmbrellaGuy had been contacted for comment before publication. In fact, only Mazeika was asked, via Instagram. After the story was published, The Post continued to seek comment from Mazeika via social media and queried ThatUmbrellaGuy for the first time.
So did the original author simply lie? Did they forget that they never contacted these people? What was the punishment? Clicking on her profile it appears she still publishes regularly.
I just am not a fan of that "loophole." What's to stop FOX news from saying "we just heard all of this bad stuff about the voting machines?" What if its just the opinions of the hosts that the voting machines are compromised?
Not at all saying this is what happened. Just saying its kinda frustrating that _if_ you're smart about it and change your actions, you can still have the same effect of misleading millions of people but be entirely "OK."
That level of lax fact checking pales in comparison to what Jones did. Jones didn't make a mistake. He acted with deliberate and relentless malice. The standards for actual civil punishment for slander, libel or defamation are very high. Just getting facts wrong is nowhere near those standards. Certainly not if you issue a prompt correction when it's brought to your attention. Even saying "I think Sandy Hook was staged" isn't a crime. It's as valid an opinion as thinking the earth is flat or the 2020 election was stolen. Jones absolutely tormented people in a vulnerable state for personal gain and did so relentlessly for years when he very well knew he was lying the whole time.
Media is constantly being sued for defamation. The difficult part is showing they had evidence they were lying. That was overwhelming in these cases, which is what makes them unique.
Morever, any serious media company in the world when faced with a suit like this would have lawyered up and diligently participated in their defense during the trial. Jones did the opposite: he and his counsel clownishly attempted to boycott the trial, despite repeated and escalating warnings from the judge, and ended up losing by default, which is an almost unprecedented outcome. Most companies don't respond to lawsuits by daring the state to demonstrate the rule of law.
Sure. I don't disagree with that at all. I'm just saying if OP finds that reasonable he would also find it reasonable that basically every media company would go out of business.
I'm not at all a fan of lying, not in the least and think news companies get off way too easy... but $1 for every lie * every person who heard it... that's just a little wishful, lol
No they wouldn't. For most journalists, it's not hard to stick to good faith reporting. If you have evidence, you can present that. If you don't, you can report on a controversy (like when someone is accused of a crime) but be clear you're describing it without the ability to resolve/shed light on it. And when you do make mistakes, you should have a practice of correcting them and documenting the fact that you did so, so that your audience is about equally likely to encounter the correction as they were the mistaken report.
If you do that and have a track record of consistency, then your legal liability is pretty minimal.
>If you don't, you can report on a controversy (like when someone is accused of a crime) but be clear you're describing it without the ability to resolve/shed light on it
Well, I guess there's degrees of lying.
I 100% understand what you're getting at though and I do believe _most_ companies and journalists do practice this... however I've noticed a trend where you'll have a headline or statement that is based on "anonymous sources" or "twitter user says X." Intentionally packing in as much of the claim as possible while minimizing the "source."
One of the most recent examples is from yesterday.
No reasonable person could infer that the entire headline is based off of a claim that has been denied by everyone involved. Musk can weather "negative" headlines like that but I'm more concerned about those that don't have the luxury of shrugging that off.
>And when you do make mistakes, you should have a practice of correcting them and documenting the fact that you did so, so that your audience is about equally likely to encounter the correction as they were the mistaken report.
I want to believe that... but there's certainly enough examples of people having their reputation completely trashed by the media with the truth only coming out years later. News companies have incentives to get views/clicks. I can't imagine "we messed up" is as attractive as "this person is a monster."
I 100% agree that they should make best effort to correct stories.
> If those were the reasonable standards, every media-company would be broke.
I think that's a very interesting aspect of this decision. Alex Jones is a very easy person for some people to hate, but will those same people cheer on Trump suing news outlets over the piss dossier and other fabrications, or Kyle Rittenhouse suing people who reported he shot three unarmed black people? And these were things said by actual purported news outlets, not just a guy whose entire schtick is clearly intended to be more entertainment than actual information.
This decision could usher in a new era of fact-based news reporting if it manages to set legal precedent for cases from both sides of the political aisle. But I'm not sure if I can trust either judges or the media to take the next steps required to make that happen.
It's not just "saying something is a hoax". It's deliberately lying, for years, for his own profit, in a way that caused significant amounts of damage to the people he was lying about. Should that be free from consequences?
No. No, it should not be.
And, since there was profit from the lying, shouldn't the damages be greater than the profit from the lies?
These are compensatory, not punitive damages. The only relevant factor is how the victims were impacted. Jones' level of wealth or the profit he gained from lying are both improper and injust to consider in the context of compensatory damages.
The Jones trials entered the public imagination because he's a character and his defense was clownishly incompetent in a way that takes no legal training to laugh at.
> are we holding all news to the same account regarding deliberate lying for profit?
>i hate double standards
Aren't we? Please provide examples of actual defamation (i.e., lies that were known to be lies, that caused damage to the subject of those lies) that haven't been the subject of legal proceedings?
Edit: Changed "libel" to "defamation" to be more inclusive as to give you more opportunity to provide examples.
Kind of an aside, but this theatric style of writing is irritating to read on HN. It also confuses the point here: Jones's payment isn't about what "should" be done based on personal morals, but what is dictated by law, and that is what GP is asking and the question you are ignoring.
And, legally, I'm pretty sure (but IANAL) that "deliberately lied", "repeatedly", "for profit", and "causing harm" were very relevant in deciding how much the fine should be.
(Except, as entiex pointed out, that this was only compensatory, not punitive. Still... the harm went on and on and on for the families, as the lies went on and on and on. Is that allowed to be figured into the amount of compensatory damage? I think so.)
My overall point: It wasn't just "saying something is a hoax". It was much more than that, and therefore the damage is much more, so the fine is much more, and justly so.
Are you sure about that? The jury recommended punitive damages, but as I understand it, in Connecticut the judge decides the punitive damage amounts in a later trial phase. I think today's number includes no punitive damages.
> This case presented the greatest financial risk to Mr. Jones, because he was found liable of violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, by using lies about the shooting to sell products on Infowars. There is no cap on punitive damages under that law.
> ...
> The next step will be for the judge to consider punitive damages, which would be in addition to Wednesday’s verdict.
> Defamation/slander damages, past and future: $60 million
That's not much of a breakdown, and if anything it seems to go against the idea that these dollar amounts aren't punitive. Are we supposed to assume that that particular plaintiff would have been $60 million richer if Jones hadn't had said what he said? Ridiculous.
The emotional distress damages are more subjective, of course, but I still don't see the amounts as any less punitive at this point.
Blatantly copying from Twitter [1], but it's what I believe, also:
> The largest fine paid by a banking executive responsible for the 2008 Financial Crisis was $67.5 million
A few tens of millions would have set straight almost everyone involved, the victims getting their money, Jones having to pay out of his pocket. But $1 billion means Jones will never be able to pay the sum, and, what's more, it will also silence him indefinitely. Which will make lots of his supporters think that was the intention all along, and in so doing making a mockery out of the act of justice.
> But $1 billion means Jones will never be able to pay the sum, and, what's more, it will also silence him indefinitely.
How does it do that?
You don't need billions or even millions to practice your free speech rights. Jones still has a website with a huge reader/viewership last I checked, which is far more reach than he'd have using the last backstop platform of free speech: literally speaking standing on a box in the town square.
Many people like him who have been demonetized on mainstream platforms because of content policy violations continue to operate with the financing of wealthy private donors who share their beliefs and agendas.
Furthermore, there are plenty of media companies that would probably hire him as a paid commentator or to host an entertainment show where he continues to talk about the subjects over which he isn't being sued for defamation. They would probably pay him well enough to pay these damages for years to come and still live a comfortable life.
He can also keep selling his dietary supplements to his audience who seem to believe in their efficacy.
He just can't slander the Sandy Hook families anymore without fear of financial repercussions.
Jones is already back on his show deriding the victims, saying he won't pay, and soliciting money. Given his conspiratorial bent and the type of people who support him, I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't hurt him as much as you'd think, because it reinforces their world view and will make them double down even further. Even if he ends up paying out substantial amounts, which would take years, I think he'll be just fine. The only thing that would really take him out would be if he went to jail for fraud or something.
This is only a good point if you think that the fines that the banking executives paid in 2008 were sufficient. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone express that opinion. The fine here is fully justified. The lack of fines in 2008 is the problem, not this.
That's literally how tort damages work. The inverse of your logic would imply that defamation wouldn't be actionable at all; reputation damage, after all, concerns entirely what unrelated third parties do with your misstatements.
Yes because thinking a BILLION dollar fine is absurd for saying dumb shit online, clearly means there should be no torts at all.
What it really means is for this fine to make sense, we need to start fining other people and companies TRILLIONS. I feel like I'm in an Austin Powers movie, or worse, on Reddit.
It's not a BILLION. It's a BILLION divided by fifteen plaintiffs, which brings the per-plaintiff number to a high-but-precedented number.
The total number is nosebleed-high because Jones managed to be culpable for one of the most egregious defamation cases in 50 years against more than a dozen people simultaneously.
Also, because he boycotted the trial and lost it by default.
You say it's precedented, can you cite the precedence? The guy is/was a conspiracy blogger, that's it. You would think he destroyed the housing market or droned thousands of innocent children with that sort of fine. Which is what makes it so absurd.
>Can I cite the precedent of an individual plaintiff winning more than $50MM in a civil judgement?
No, can you cite a precedent for someone being ordered to pay almost a billion dollars for saying a mean thing on a blog. You said it's precedented, I was asking for the precedent.
OP said: "It's not a BILLION. It's a BILLION divided by fifteen plaintiffs, which brings the per-plaintiff number to a high-but-precedented number."
Th adjective "precedented" modifies "number". In this sentence, "number" refers to the quantity "a BILLION divided by fifteen plaintiffs".
Clearly, it's the per-plaintiff number that OP refers to as "precedented", not the total sum.
Figuring out that "precedented" refers to 1B/15 in the above sentence requires roughly a fifth grade reading level. The fact that InfoWars has an audience is become less surprising by the comment.
Yes, you've defined what makes the judgement absurd. And because it's multiplicative and due solely to "mean words said on blog", then that leaves sane people to see how ridiculous the whole thing is.
Imagine for a minute if Trump decided to sue everyone who called him a Russian agent on TV or in writing. The award would be in the trillions.
I'm enjoying this educational thread from the side / all sides, and trying to stay a reader more than participant as I'm not a lawyer, but I don't feel this can be honestly characterized as "mean things said in internet". This was repeated, wilful, cognizant and extremely damaging willification of inocent people, as well as causing and inciting real action and damage, to a massive audience. If I repeatedly and authoritatively tell millions of people to kill themselves, that's not "mean thing said on blog". If I repeatedly and authoritatively tell millions of people that murdered children were actors and incite my audience to action, that's not "mean things said on a blog". Discussion is much more interesting and productive if everybody engages in basic intellectual honesty in making their argument.
I don't think this is a place for ad hominem attacks. I also don't feel like defending Alex Jones, so at this point we've probably taken this as far as we can.
Unless someone else comes through with a different example of what is effectively a billion dollar fine given to a blogger. I'll keep an eye out but I won't hold my breath.
> No, can you cite a precedent for someone being ordered to pay almost a billion dollars for saying a mean thing on a blog.
You're obsessing with the fact that the total of the individual damage awards is so high. But under the law, if you defame a lot of people, they each get their own individual damage awards; they don't have to share some abstract or artificial dollar amount between them.
So you want examples of high-dollar online defamation awards? LMGTFY: A Nevada guy won a $38 million jury verdict [0]. Three New Hampshire businessmen won a jury verdict of $274 million for defamatory billboards accusing them of being crooks [1]. A South Carolina mayor won a $50 million jury verdict against someone who sent defamatory emails [2]. I haven't looked to see whether these all stood up on appeal; feel free to do your own research.
If the judgement holds, all his liquidatable assets will be seized and his wages will be garnished perpetually until the total amount is paid or he is put in the ground. Not super complicated, I don't think?
> make lots of his supporters think that was the intention all along
His listeners believe that the literal devil controls the government, Hollywood, and the minds of liberal minded people. His listeners believe that Klaus Schwab secretly controls the United States and that his goal is to feminize men and cut off children's sex organs. His listeners believe that Sandy Hook never happened and the parents are crisis actors. His listeners will believe all kinds of insane things but that has nothing to do whether justice should be served or not.
He may not pay that amount, but he will spend the rest of his life bankrupt or spending most of his energy avoiding judgement, which is a not unreasonable fate for people who make a living lying, cheating, and stealing.
Defense of Alex Jones here, generally in the form of "it was just speech, it was just one falsehood, goodbye free speech, if I say just one wrong thing..." etc. speaks of a particular trait: Context-free pedantry.
These people imagine themselves practicing their context-free pedantry in the workplace and saying something like "Go to Massachusetts for your abortion" or something analogous regarding race, disability, sexual identity, etc. and getting crushed for their speech.
It's not the speech. In Alex Jones's case, the speech led directly to violence against the families of the dead kids. For the people who imagine themselves to be future victims of speech restrictions, it's not their speech, either. It's their lack of understanding that speech has consequences, like an inherent inability to work alongside others who cannot then trust them. What woman in Texas, for example, can trust a man who believes she has no right to control her own body when he could snitch on her?
I've never heard of anyone who went on trial because of the violence against the families. All I hear is people keep making those allegations. Nothing more than that.
- jurors have now spent weeks hearing more direct evidence than any of us
- even Alex Jones admitted multiple times that he is a liar, and spreads these lies for money
- the jurors determined that 1) there was harm and 2) the COMPENSATORY damages [0] for only part of the victims is $965 million
- the police are neither motivated, capable, nor often successful at gathering enough evidence to prosecute anonymous telephone or public threats made by cowards who try to make threats anonymously.
YET, with all those facts, you think it is appropriate to FURTHER question the integrity of the victims.
You make very clear that you have no idea what you are talking about, and are likely one of the idiots who laps up the lies from the likes of the defendant.
Rethink your life, and at least stop posting idiocy dressed up as "oh, just asking questions". You are only displaying your inability to think or even to get a clue, not persuading anyone.
Yikes.
[0] compensatory damages are damages to compensate for the harm itself, as opposed to punitive damages, which have not yet been determined in this trial.
Unless his primary residence is in Florida which the homestead act prevents the courts taking. He could then shift all his funds to Crypto and use Crypto ATMs that don't require KYC to withdraw a few thousand (per wallet) at a time.
OJ is a prime example of how a truly wealthy individual can prevent the bulk of the wealth being taken from a court order.
Yes indeed. They would have been very pleased with someone being charged 1 billion dollars for saying that a single event didn't happen. Clearly they would have agreed that Jones is liable for the actions of his viewers. It's all right there in the founding documents.
Defamation law at the time of the framers was even harsher than it is today. Truth wasn't a defense, and there was no "actual malice" standard. You were as likely to be arrested and imprisoned for these kinds of statements as you were to be sued for damages. The founders would have been fine with this outcome.
Most of Jones' opinions seem to revolve around the idea that cabals of conspirators are trying to trick people into accepting exploitation or tyranny. I don't keep up with all his different ideas, though.
You claimed my opinion was adjacent to his. I would not 'rather try controversies with violence than in court' but nor am I completely opposed to people mutually agreeing to settle them directly (with formalities) rather than submitting them to a third party.
It seems like you dislike this idea, and are just associating with Jones who you also dislike. I don't see how you get from his conspiracy worldview to my opinion that an archaic social institution might be worth another look. I don't see duelling as incompatible with having a functional legal system.
That's fine, but it's not responsive to the question I asked you.
What does this opinion of mine have to do with Alex Jones? If you're suggesting that all unusual ideas are somehow adjacent to each other, I don't think much of your categorical skills.
No, that's a particular unusual idea that I think Alex Jones would find very congenial, was the point I'm making. There are unusual ideas that he would find loathsome; that isn't one of them. I'm not saying anything more than that: it's a thread about Alex Jones, and you expressed a very Alex Jonesian unusual view. Seemed notable, that's all!
Did Alex jones only say that an event didn’t happen? Or is that perhaps skipping over the numerous other defamatory claims he made? Regardless this was a self own business jones refusing to defend himself and not continue to perjure himself repeatedly. He likely could have made all the same claims and walked away with a settlement or judgment in the low seven figures if he merely stopped lieing when caught and told to stop.
Oh no! The Founders would be displeased! I'm so tired of this kind of argument, as if we should forever substitute our own judgement with games of "what would The Founders want?" They were men, some were even great men, but men nonetheless. Don't worship them like gods. If there's something particularly great about the founders of the USA, it was that, one, they understood human imperfection, including their own, and two, they knew human societies change over time and so must their laws. They therefore built checks and balances into our system of government, and they put in mechanisms for change into the Constitution. So let's argue about the merits of laws or societal standards, but let's stop using the putative preferences of the founders like they mean anything. It's no better than when charlatans say "God wants this, God wants that" in order to legitimize their own opinions and actions.
The real issue here is that the founders would simply not agree with the parent comment. You don't have to reach the issue of whether the argument is persuasive; it's simply not accurate.
It's worth digging into this stuff, because it's kind of fascinating. It's a reason to go look up what the largest fortunes were at the time of the founders, or what the major defamation cases where at the turn of the 19th century, or how defamation law differs now from the time of the framers (hint: it got a lot more favorable to defendants).
If you use dumb-seeming arguments as an excuse to speed-research weird historical facts, these threads get a lot more fun, and also you tend to end up with more compelling arguments.
First amendment has limitations. Saying fire in a movie theater, for example. Multiple courts in a number of separate jurisdictions have ruled that the first amendment does not protect Jones in these cases
Just so we’re on the same page, “fire in a crowded theater” was coined as part of the Supreme Court’s upholding of a conviction for protesting the draft during WW1. The decision is no longer really relevant, having been replaced in a later case with a revised test that requires that the speech in question is intended to, and likely to cause, imminent lawless action. Which is for the best, because the Schenck decision hails from an era of the Supreme Court that was decidedly less tolerant of individual speech.
None of that is relevant here, because defamation is an established exception to the 1st amendment, totally separate from incitement of lawless action.
Oh I agree, it doesn't apply to this particular case but it is the textbook definition of a reasonable limit on free speech. The poster I was replying to seemed to be under the impression that the first amendment protected all forms of speech. As you said, the courts have carved out many exceptions to the first amendment.
Except it’s not the textbook definition. Shouting fire in a crowded theater is protected by the 1st amendment, and the case where the phrase was coined has been replaced by better 1st amendment tests for whether speech can be punished by the government.
The first amendment binds only the government, not private torts. It has never applied to libel, slander, fraud, or a host of other things either. Bringing it up in this context, especially as a one-line throwaway, is an act of extreme bad faith. No sane definition of "free speech" precludes accountability for one's words or their tangible effects.
Sorry, can't read minds. What I can read is the many other sub-threads where the "first amendment" point had already been addressed. Maybe if some new argument had been presented it would be easier to consider good faith, but not even an old one was. Just a casual dismissal, which is almost as bad as someone making meta comments more often than substantive ones.
This is more than the amount that people that lied about WDM's in the middle East were ever fined with. Consider they killed millions. Please know that I am not siding with Jones but this is ludicrous.
This is a fair judgement against Jones. A fair judgement against the people who lied about WMD's and killed millions via the war in Iraq would be life in prison, for a start.
Just because the criminals at the top get away with war crimes doesn't mean the criminals lower on the totem pole shouldn't be punished. It's a false equivalence to claim otherwise.
That is definitively not the definition of a false equivalence as I did not claim he should go scott free. However I doubt that there is anything fair regarding a 900 millon dollar punishment on a person that has a net worth that is orders of magnitude smaller.
A lifetime of garnished wages seems like a small price to pay for a millionaire who makes a career out of peddling hatred that ruins other peoples' lives. And they didn't just make up the number out of nowhere; it's based on estimated damages that his actions caused. I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak to precedent or similar judgements in other cases. In any case, he will appeal, so we'll see what the final number actually comes out to.
And anyone who subsequently voted for them or gave them money. I think they all should pay couple hundred million to victims and then spend rest of their lives in prison.
If you follow the trial at all, you'll see that this was not just "he said a bad thing one time and people are mad at him." He has a strongly demonstrated pattern of lies, perjury, obstruction of the legal process, and encouraging harassment against the Sandy Hook families. Most of the people saying "everyone should be afraid of this" are arguing in bad faith.
but absolutely none of that, save the encouragement of harassment, has any bearing on what the victims suffered from the behavior the lawsuit is fundamentally about. These damages are, supposedly, compensatory, and so the only relevant factor is supposed to be what the victims actually suffered.
Forgive me for wondering whether an account created 27 minutes ago is arguing in good faith on a topic that frequently gets brigaded by FUD trolling. An actual lawyer will have to weigh in on whether this fits the damages awarded in similar cases.
I think the point here is that it doesn't really matter whether the lawyers call it "compensatory" or not. Many legal terms don't really mean what it says on the tin. But we're talking here from a common-sense perspective: is the intent behind this fine, however it is described, to compensate for actual damages suffered, or to punish the conduct? And for it to be the former, it has to be in line with actual damages.
A defendant has a right to trial by jury. The consequence of exercising that right is trial by a jury.
In some venues, "unfair" (quotes here because reasonable people can dispute how "fair" is to be assessed in a circumstance such as this) damages rulings are back-stopped by statutory maxima. I don't know Connecticut law, but that appears not to be the case here.
Bad headline. The jury ordered Jones to pay this; the headline as written suggests he made a commitment to do so, which is untrue (he plans to appeal). 'Alex Jones must pay' or 'Alex Jones ordered to pay' would be more meaningful.
This is the third comment in this thread along these lines- Isn't this just splitting hairs? Is there any significant percentage of defendants in such cases that have judgements like this against them that don't actually appeal and just write a check on the spot?
I am asking honestly here- I am not sure if this is just typical engineer type "well actually..." type stuff going on, or if some attempt to downplay and discredit the judgement.
No, it's just the semantic ambiguity. I think more people should rewrite HN headlines for clarity when they're confusing (in this case, the BBC subsequently changed the headline but it doesn't auto-update on HN).
It is much simpler: one is expected to just copy the original unless there are very valid reasons to edit it...
Edit: the submitter explained - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33183697 - that the original title at the time of submission is the given one; the target news agency then edited the page. Oh well - some possibility for which we must take a mental note.
To the free speech purists in this thread, I have a hypothetical I'm curious about:
What if it happened to you? Let's imagine that a media source with millions of viewers - like a local news channel, for example, or a radio show, went live with a story that had specific and false allegations that you did something odious. Like they said you were a cannibal or a pedophile or something like that. And as a result, you were faced with a campaign of harassment and threats by fans of this source. If people googled your name, "Cannibal" was the top hit.
And they made millions of dollars from these allegations.
What if you performed simple public records requests and realized that this whole event stinks to high heaven and that it was immediately politicized by politicians and billionaire media elites to suppress the rights of American citizens?
There always has to be room to question events that dominate the news cycle.
>What if you performed simple public records requests and realized that this whole event stinks to high heaven and that it was immediately politicized by politicians and billionaire media elites to suppress the rights of American citizens?
Are you claiming to have done so? If that's the case, what were the results of your "public records requests"?
While nothing can bring back their children, siblings, or classmates, one hopes (but doesn't expect) that this will help consign a particularly vile and repugnant conspiracy theory to the dustbin of polite discourse.
Doubt. The people who believe this kind of stuff will just say it's the deep state trying to cover up their conspiracy or some equally asinine garbage. They have a persecution fetish, and any sort of punishment will just cause them to double down.
I'm not sure those people have the internal energy necessary to sustain the same magnitude and frequency of a abuse. Mostly the type of people who need an external source of energy. If Jones is taken out of the equation the whole thing may just dry up aside from the most remote, dark, damp corners of society.
Such public accounting does seem to have value in reducing the number of people (present and future) not yet committed to his cult, but who otherwise might. And while there'll be more Alex Jones personalities, for a little while at least they'll likely moderate their behavior more than they otherwise might.
This will certainly not help and has only breathed new life into the conspiracy. The (un)fortunate thing about most people that are absolutely nuts is that they have nothing to lose.
At this point, I've come to think that nothing would help these people. Nut jobs will see what they want to see. So we might as well make pied pipers like Jones face the consequences of their actions, like what we saw with today's ruling.
People gawking at the magnitude of the fine are perhaps underestimating the scale of profit being generated from the enterprise in question. To be clear, I'm not sure one way or the other, but I'd keep an open mind to the possibility that it's actually possible to collect a large fraction of this penalty.
The advice I received was as follows: for tax planning and personal budgeting purposes, start from the assumption that the entire settlement/award will be taxed as income. When you receive the check, set aside city+state+fed taxes at your highest tax bracket. If the award is big enough to justify it, talk with an expert since portions may not be taxable either federally or in some states. If the amount is too small to justify paying an accountant (mine was), probably better to simply treat it as income on your taxes.
> You understand that they're reporting the news and not predicting the future right?
No they’ve done the opposite of that here - saying he will pay is predicting the future (badly). Saying he’s been told to pay would have been reporting the news.
(The headline has been changed if you weren’t aware, so they must agree it was wrong.)
Or just that the new headline is better. Honestly "to pay" would, colloquially, mean "judged against at this dollar amount" given existing context of a pending judgement.
It's unlikely any of them will be sued civilly, as Jones was, because they for the most part weren't running successful businesses that profited by deliberately defaming the parents of shooting victims.
I'm not a fan of the guy, I think he's a two bit boner pill salesman, but I find it interesting, this is much higher than most SEC, FTC and FCC fines of big multinationals. Even bigger ones, like Purdue pharma, paid over 5 billion, but killed and addicted hundreds of thousands to a few million people, I'd argue that's more than 5x worse than this. Seems the government likes to be soft on their buddies and excessively hard on their critics and this is no exception to that.
This wasn't an action brought by the government. He wasn't sued by the SEC, the FTC, or the FCC. He was sued by the parents that he defamed repeatedly over years.
That makes it even worse. Defraud or harm the entire country and you pay less than defaming a handful of people. He deserves to pay them for causing them trouble for his own gain, but if this isn't a political example I don't know what is.
This is because of your ignorance of the courtroom process with a jury...
When those large companies go in front of a jury they are respectful, they don't act like assholes to the jurors, they defend their positions well, they avoid making the jurors hate them.
Jones did none of the above. He did, seemingly, everything possible to bias the jury against him. This is the pinnacle of arrogance and stupidity.
OK, sure, he's a fuckhead. He's a dumbass, he's a clown, he's not a smart man. He is an asshole.
But a billion dollars. A billion dollar judgment. You don't think they're rubbing his face in it a little? Teaching us all a lesson about what happens?
Rule number one is "Do not be a fuckhead in court". Rule number two is "Don't be a fuckhead about children"
It is the juries duty to teach you a lesson when you pull crap like this within the confines the law allows. If you're going into a courtroom with nearly unlimited liability you really need to comprehend that your behavior has ramifications. In addition this punishment is not just for his past acts but the fact the accused shows no remorse about their behavior and WILL continue to behave in the same manner in the future.
In a civil case it is not a jury's duty to teach anyone a lesson, it is their duty to assess and award restitution for noncriminal wrongdoing, nothing more.
For the actual damages section, I agree, a juries responsible is to determine the, well, actual economic harm that's befallen a person.
However, juries are also tasked with awarding punitive damages, and for this the juries responsibility is literally to determine the appropriate amount to teach someone a lesson. That's literally what punitive damages are intended for.
And yet I'm reasonably confident he'll exercise some legal maneuver to avoid paying even 1% of it, and will continue to live out the rest of his life in comfort.
Considering that America is such an advanced country mainly because of science and engineering, why is the american population so gullible as to believe the rantings of a madman. Even with a cursory glance one can easily say that Alex Jones is lying. This is so sad.
A quick Google search confirms the ~$6B number, and as a lower bound. When the facts are this easy to find and you repeat wildly false information, you're not simply mistaken, you are intentionally lying.
Why do you feel the need to lie about this? Why are you so desperate to deny an obvious truth? Good men don't lie.
"Attorney General John M. Formella today announced a national settlement with Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, for their role in the opioid crisis, that will increase the amount of funds paid by the Sacklers from $4.325 billion under the original bankruptcy plan to at least $5.5 billion." https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2022/20220303-settlement-purdue-...
If Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist that most rational people don't take seriously, which is how the media portrays him, how could what he have said possibly had such an effect on the public to warrant almost a billion dollars in compensation?
This monetary verdict doesn't make sense in any way.
Considering how they used a clip from the trial talking about Jones' crypto "donations" for an ad to get viewers to send more crypto, I'm sure the verdict will be incorporated into future ad breaks as well.
> This case presented the greatest financial risk to Mr. Jones, because he was found liable of violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, by using lies about the shooting to sell products on Infowars. There is no cap on punitive damages under that law.
The decisions of the courts are, by a wide margin, much more influenced by one's relationship with the regime than by one's relationship with morality.
Civil jury cases are concerned with both. If you commit an illegal act, but with a seemingly moral reasoning behind it, you may only suffer a light punishment. Now, if you are found guilty and your actions and behavior is found detestable by the jury the penalty will be far more harsh within the statutes.
put it this way: I have never in my life heard of this man, and I doubt most people have either. Alex Jones has somewhere in the region of 100m viewers
Correct. That's the point. If free speech is based on how much you make or how many people listen to you then it's not free speech it's a system for extortion.
the person I'm talking to seems to think that an actor with a smaller audience and smaller capacity to cause damages should be punished equally to someone with a bigger audience and bigger capacity to cause damages. with great power comes great responsibility, and the law reflects this
whether you think courts generally award damages appropriately or not is beside the point
Jones runs a 9-figure media and supplements business that misappropriated and sold the memories of 20 children and the reputations of their parents to boost his numbers, and then refused to participate in the trial that established his culpability. He might be the least sympathetic corporate defendant in US history. Even the tobacco CEOs could reason that the science was overblown, and that the companies were protecting tens of thousands of jobs.
The biggest numbers I've seen were 8 figures (Rolling Stones published something suggesting 160 million over 3 years, while he was still on YouTube at his peak, which is 53 million a year), and that was for total revenue which to my understanding is debated as being too high. Jones himself is probably worth less than 10 million especially considering his share of InfoWars is now worthless
> This will only send the signal to millions of people, that the establishment wants to shut Alex down for speaking the truth.
FTA:
"Jones ... argued for years that the massacre was a "staged" government plot to take guns from Americans and that "no one died."...He now acknowledges the attack was "100% real", a concession he made in August at a separate defamation trial in Texas."
So most people I know who do a dramatic 180 hit a breaking point.
For all that the inaccurate "boiling a frog" metaphor describes how things work fairly well, a lot of people hit a wall at some point -- for instance, when "those people are bad" becomes "your best friend Joe is bad" -- and rebound. Once they hit that breaking point, the scales have fallen, and they begin re-examining everything.
This happens both with people raised in a particular worldview, as they gain experiences outside their original upbringing, and to people who fall into a cult, as the cult gradually ratchets up the craziness.
Of course, not everyone ever finds such a breaking point, and trying to push someone to find a lever to crack open their worldview antagonistically usually just makes someone double down, but a lot of people do find their way out.
Apple and other large businesses get fined nowhere near what they have in assets.... no matter how bad their actions are. One billion is just crazy in this case...
Because Apple is not inflammatory in the court. You cannot go into a court and behave poorly, especially in the a case covering murdered children and expect a jury not to punish you to the full extent of their capabilities.
The ALAB podcast has a fun theory on the subject that while ostensibly your success in court is a matter of law and procedure, but the underlying test you've got to pass is "who's the asshole here?". Because the judge is going to decide which party is the asshole at some point, and part of the job of lawyers is to make sure it's not them and their clients.
On the other hand, Gawker network was completely obliterated for copyright infringement over the Hulk Hogan thing. That seems more disproportionate than this.
I disagree. Many of these families need security and barriers to prevent Alex Jones' fans from attacking them. A lot of folks were impacted by his outrageous claims.
> To put it into perspective, the top 100 biggest company fines in the world start at around 1 billion (give or take 200mil).
Fines for companies doing wrong are far too small.
> Alex Jones is NOT the same as some of the biggest companies in the world.
InfoWars store alone generated 165 million in 3 years time. They pull in a lot of cash. And this penalty should prevent him from ever running a media business again, or it has failed.
> the establishment wants to shut Alex down for speaking the truth.
(a) Stuff like this is supremely unhelpful and corrosive to the thread.
(b) It's obviously not the case that Jones is getting a sympathetic hearing from this thread; instead, you're noticing mostly the randos posting pro-Jones stuff that lives briefly before being flagged to the bottom of the site.
I think the poster has misidentified most people defending Jones in this thread as fans when they are more likely free speech absolutists who believe any government sanctioned consequence for speech is immoral.
They’d likely defend anyone who received a punishment for this type of behavior, Alex Jones just happens to be the man of the hour
I am yet to see a "free speech absolutist" defend anyone on the left (where's the outrage about Republican school districts banning books?). It just seems to be a convenient excuse for being friendly with fascists.
You’ve got a fair point although I will play devils advocate at you can find them occasionally in deep corners of the internet like /r/libertarianUncensored, and even there they aren’t the majority
Individuals being allowed to say / write what they want versus school boards prohibiting certain texts from being taught or distributed as part of their curriculum... maybe they just understand what "free speech" means?
I haven't heard of that - could you describe the books being removed from schools? Are they still teaching books like 1984, Brave New World and Animal Farm?
Book bans are on the rise across the US[1], in blue and red states. In blue states it tends to be books like to “kill a mockingbird”, “huckleberry Finn”, or other books with racially charged language. In red states they say they are removing “CRT”, and “pornographic” or “sexual content”, but their definition of sexual and porn includes any mention of homosexualities existence and their definition of CRT includes any mention of minorities having been oppressed at any point in time.
In this thread there are many non-new accounts taking positions such as:
- This infringes on the first amendment
- He shouldn't be punished solely for his speech
- What about this or that person who did X
- The punishment is too much
- Anyway, he'll never pay so it doesn't really matter
All these strike me as being sympathetic to Jones. Why even post such things if not to elicit sympathy or muddy waters? Meanwhile you and others are up and down the thread playing whack-a-mole with these people.
So calling a spade a spade, I'm surprised how many on this site are sympathetic to Jones. If you find that corrosive and unhelpful so be it.
P.S. I'm only replying because your a respected member of this community who has called me out.
These are all valid points that you may strongly disagree with, but at least recognize that they don't require being sympathetic to Jones. E.g. the first two are just a very extreme position on the general freedom-of-speech scale, which some people hold for purely ideological reasons. Similarly, the third and the fourth are also a matter of justice and fairness in the abstract - that the punishment ought to be the same for the same crime. And so on.
Indeed, I would say that most commenters on this story that take one or more of those positions explicitly state that they're doing so as a matter of principle. Which, given the prevailing attitudes hereabouts on topics such as freedom of speech, is quite believable - so why are you assuming some other sinister motivation?
My perception is that the comments and the voting on this thread overwhelmingly disfavors Jones. But, anyways, just as a general rule, characterizing the tone of an entire thread or of HN in general is just something we're not supposed to be doing here. That's all!
The poster is wholly correct in observing that Alex Jones has a disproportionate number of defenders here. Usually a busy thread might collect 2 or 3 flag-dead comments, this one has 23.
The point is that they're all flagged dead, not that this story didn't attract a bunch of new randos to post flagged comments. Anybody can make an account here to post nonsense with practically no effort at all; it's an open-access site.
Sure, but flagging comments (and not just downvoting) because one disagrees? I keep on the ability to see such posts precisely because more and more frequently the flagged / dead posts are the most interesting and informative ones. This mass flagging approach isn't exactly countering the argument that silencing opposition and censorship is the aim of stuff like this ruling.
Bringing up unpunished propaganda during the Bush era is irrelevant when most here would agree that was equally vile and punishable. Two wrongs don't make a right.
The predominant perspective here is that free speech should be protected, but if you are spreading lies to make a profit, society ought to take back that profit. That seems like a pretty reasonable take to me, but I'd entertain counterarguments if you have any. As for whether the punishment here fits the crime, maybe you're underestimating the scale of profit he's made off his lies?
yes, I brought up another event and compared and contrasted the two, with the intent of demonstrating how the two things are not equivalent, yet the demonstrably more impactful media falsehood campaign remains wholly unpunished, contrasted with this situation, which is being punished rather dramatically. fairity characterized these two events as directly equivalent ("most here would agree that was equally vile and punishable. Two wrongs don't make a right.").
how's that "odd"?
-- edit, because I'm still Posting Too Fast, somehow: --
with the load-bearing word "equally" removed, your response to my post begins:
> Bringing up unpunished propaganda during the Bush era is irrelevant when most here would agree that was vile and punishable. Two wrongs don't make a right.
what conversation are you trying to have? "bad things are bad?" comparing and contrasting formally similar situations (media lies) with differing magnitudes (independent media organization calling single-digit number of individuals lying paid actors vs. an organized propaganda campaign that manufactured civilian consent for a foreign-soil invasion leading to a six-digit death toll) and the outcomes thereof (nearly a billion in fines vs. no punishment whatsoever) is not worth discussing?
the point of my post was to demonstrate how unpunished coordinated mainstream media lies are, by using an example of something that happened in the lifetime of nearly everyone who reads HN and basically everyone agrees was a concerted effort in willfully propagandistically disseminating misinformation, which resulted in wide-scale death and destruction, completely without any punishment of any kind whatsoever, to this day. then you compare and contrast that with Alex Jones, whom you have been told repeatedly by mainstream media outlets is a terrible, terrible person, for defaming about a handful of individuals to his audience (which is sizable, but not on the scale of "everyone in the US paying attention to the news, pre-social media, in the 2000s, in the wake of 9/11").
how is anyone supposed to come away from this thinking justice has been served in any way?
You're hanging on to poor word choice, without making an honest effort to engage with the actual idea. I'd suggest removing the word "equally", and making an honest attempt at having a conversation.
I don't care. The amount of irreversible damage and suffering that man has caused with his company and his total fake news goes far beyond the Sandy Hook victims.
I only wish more generational bankruptcy for him with everything he has caused.
In this case there is demonstrable harm here. The Sandyhook parents have had their lives threatened and confronted by strangers both on the street and in their home due to Jone's words - the problem is there were a lot of unreasonable people who very much believed Jones and while you claim you would, you wouldn't just shrug this off. His accusations made their lives unsafe by sullying their reputation with irrational people.
I don't think holding a person accountable for another person's irrational behaviour is reasonable though. If you tell me "it's going to rain" and I take that as a call to attack people with umbrellas, is that your fault?
But that's not at all what happened. Jones lied in a deliberate attempt to provoke harassment of these poor people. If owned a radio show and I go on and said you were a child rapist and should be stopped by any means necessary would you believe me faultless if you got attacked?
> a deliberate attempt to provoke harassment of these poor people
That seems superbly unlikely. If that were true, what would he stand to gain from that? What did he have against these people?
I can't imagine he was just sitting there chuckling maniacally "yes yes I'm going to hurt these people who just lost their children". That's an imagined cartoon
Money? His audience eats that shit up. He may not have had anything personal against the victims, but he needs grist for the mill of the type of content he creates.
You're right, he may not have done it deliberately for the harassment, but he clearly had no qualms about it and made no move to stop it when he knew it was happening. He deliberately lied, and deliberately spread false, vicious claims about the parents.
He makes a living of spreading fabulous and wild lies designed to spread fear and anger. In this case, and in the context of all those other anger fueling claims, he lied and said that the shooting was a false flag, that no one died, and that the parents were crises actors who faked the death of their loved ones because the state was going to use it as an excuse for gun control, and he continued to claim it, even after the parents were harassed, even after they initially sued him, and even went so far as to make accusations about the parents and judge on TV during the trial.
What do you believe his goal was? And do you believe those claims don't meet the requirement for defamation? Again I ask how you'd feel in my proposed scenario, if I accused you of being a child rapist on TV, even if I didn't say you needed to be stopped, but that you were raping children for satan. Would you think that's just fine because no one rational would believe it?
Have you listened to Alex Jones speak? I get that we should try to see the humanity in people and that 99.999% of people are complex and nuanced but some people really are sociopaths. Some people really are cartoons.
Seems like the kind of thing a jury of your peers could decide. Kind of like what happened in this case.
It also bears mentioning that the gulf between "it's going to rain" and "the parents of murdered children are actually 'deep-state' actors aiding a conspiracy to take away your rights" is vast.
I don't think that's a great standard. For example if I consistently call a group of people subhuman and vermin that should not exist I may not have a call to action but the ideology I'm promoting is pretty clear. It's not unreasonable to hold me accountable when a member of my audience decides to attack an individual from the group I'm dehumanizing. Nor is it unreasonable for a member of that group to sue me.
And again, the grey areas here seem like the kind of thing that a jury is able to decide. Alex wasn't found guilty by executive order from the president.
I think it's entirely unreasonable. Having a horrible opinion is a million miles away from telling people to do horrible things. Prosecuting people for opinions is the literal opposite of what a liberal democracy should be doing.
I don't have a lot of respect for the people who listen to Alex Jones or Infowars or believe the content that's published there, but the site had (has?) millions of dollars in revenue and Jones's podcast had (can't find a reliable source, so educated guess:) millions of listeners. So it's quite disingenuous of you to say "no reasonable person is going to believe it" when millions of people didn't find it so unreasonable that they abandoned Jones as a commentator; maybe they themselves, are not reasonable, but that doesn't make the reputational damage any less of a problem; arguably it makes it a lot more of a problem since now these people have to deal with violent threats, being SWATted, and so forth due to the reputational damage among unreasonable people.
So the extraordinary amount of harassment the families received as a result of the crap he was spewing is completely meaningless? Sure no reasonable person is going to believe it but there are a lot of gullible idiots that eat up everything he says.
Really easy to say you could shrug it off when your family wasn't just murdered.
> If someone said something about me that was patently laughably untrue, something that no sane person would believe, I'd just shrug it off.
If it were one ordinary person making those accusations to a small group of their friends and acquaintances who also knew you and could see for themselves that those accusations were false, that'd be one thing.
When the person making those accusations is a celebrity, broadcasting those accusations to an audience of millions who know nothing else about you, that's quite another matter.
Jones has a rabid following who engaged in a campaign of stalking and harassment - including death threats and harassment by mail to their homes - against the plaintiffs. It went quite a bit beyond one guy saying some mean things.
I think you’d probably find that harder to shrug off.
Does the "reasonable person believes it" test apply when numerous people did believe it and engaged in a campaign of harassment and threats against the families? Yes, those people were not reasonable, but on the other hand since Jones runs a snake-oil sales outfit, it's also notable that these are exactly the people he intends to attract. Unstable extremists are his target audience.
He professionally cultivates an army of nitwits for profit, and then weaponizes them just to keep engaged in his product.
Alex Jones did a lot more than that. His defaming the families of dead kids resulted in his followers and supporters harassing those people. The harassers need to be held civilly and criminally liable, too. But Jones persisted over years in encouraging this harassment.
Jones stated that the Sandy Hook victims were crisis actors. he knew that to be false. it was an egregious case of defamation. knowingly spreading lies that damage someone's reputation is called slander, and it's not protected by the first amendment. neither is shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, or committing perjury, or falsifying your income taxes.
> knowingly spreading lies that damage someone's reputation is called slander, and it's not protected by the first amendment
Only in spoken word is it slander. Written it'd be libel, whereas defamation covers both. The lies have to be about regarding factual matters, not just odious opinions.
> neither is shouting "fire" in a crowded theater,
That's a bad example from an overturned case that created an overly broad standard, which is why you shouldn't use that as an example of something not protected:
So in other words, only people with a reputation for integrity should have to abide by the law, and as long as someone is a known pathological liar, they should be allowed to defame and send armies of trolls to harass anyone they feel like, whenever and as often as they like?
It is very clear that he doesn’t believe his own nonsense (did you follow the trial?). He’s not “crazy” in the sense that he does not comprehend reality, but rather in the sense that he is a psychopath who doesn’t have empathy for other humans and doesn’t have any respect for society and its basic norms and rules, including civil/criminal law.
The dude figured out a way to personally profit off the murder of a bunch of 6-year-olds by calling them all actors and then mercilessly targeting their families for harassment. It was beyond malicious: one of the most heinously sadistic patterns of behavior in American history. Your defense of it is grotesque.
With any luck, criminal charges will eventually catch up with him and he’ll spend many years in prison.
> It is very clear that he doesn’t believe his own nonsense (did you follow the trial?). He’s not “crazy” in the sense that he does not comprehend reality, but rather in the sense that he is a psychopath who doesn’t have empathy for other humans and doesn’t have any respect for society and its basic norms and rules, including civil/criminal law.
What specifics in the trial made it clear that he comprehends reality but acted "psychopathic" on purpose?
> That seems tenuous. I don't think anyone can prove what Alex Jones believed.
“Prove” in this context means “convince a jury that it is more likely true than not”; legal proof is not logical/mathematical proof, and, among legal standards of proof, the main civil standard (“preponderance of the evidence”) is lower than the standard required for criminal conviction (“beyond a reasonable doubt”).
Beliefs and other mental states are routinely proven in court under both the criminal and civil standards. The arguments that this is impossible rely on concepts of “proof” that are not applicable to the legal environment.
Juries are not mind readers. At best you can get to roughly what a rational person would have thought given said data, Alex Jones is not rational. It is literally unknowable.
This is actually a legit distinction and a jury could base their decision on this. However, the matter is entirely up to the jury and in this case they decided they did know what he thought and there's not much that can be done about it.
It could well be reduced on appeal and it's unlikely they can pay that much, however.
In the context of needed a specific outcome in finite time, a legal process can never be certain of anything. We depend on process like juries to come to a good enough conclusion.
The phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” describes the standard of proof for criminal conviction as a safeguard b/c of the special potential consequences (like execution, imprisonment, disenfranchisement, and lasting legal disabilities) associated with such conviction.
It has no bearing on a civil defamation suit, where the general burden is merely “preponderance of the evidence” (i.e., given what evidence each side has presented, what the jury finds more likely to be true.)
A) after the amount of mind boggling conspiracies by the CIA NSA etc that were proven to be true, are we really going to make conspiracy theories illegal? (In this case I don’t think it’s true, but conspiracies do exist)
B) how can you be held accountable for the actions of a mob? If I go crazy over your hacker news comment, should you be liable for inciting me?
You're making up a narrative for why suppressing free speech is acceptable in this instance, not discharging the notion that free speech was, in fact, suppressed.
The fact that a conspiracy talk radio guy can get hit with a billion dollar fine for some off-hand nutso claim (that he subsequently recanted!) is a very unpromising barometer for the health of free speech in our country.
> suppressing free speech is acceptable in this instance
Libel, slander, and defamation are not free speech. You do not have the right to repeatedly, knowingly, lie about someone else, especially when said lies ruin peoples' lives.
> billion dollar fine for some off-hand nutso claim
It wasn't a claim, he asserted it as fact, and it wasn't just once, he did this up until he got sued, and even made up conspiracies about the trials as they were happening.
> (that he subsequently recanted!)
If Jones truly did believe he was correct about Sandy Hook being fake, the moment he found out he was wrong, he should have delivered a formal apology and begged his audience to stop harassing the families of the victims. He should have publicly rebuked people like Wolfgang Halbig and any callers who talked about the "Sandy Hook hoax" and chastised the harassers.
But he never did that. Instead it's "I already said I was sorry, I might have been wrong but I'm right like 95+% of the time, why are people so angry at me? It's all part of a plot by the globalists to shut us down, buy my iodine."
> a very unpromising barometer for the health of free speech in our country
So "free speech" is when someone with a significant media presence is able to knowingly spread lies about you that lead to over a decade of stalking and harassment with no recourse?
If you're an American, you might want to consult a lawyer on that. Our civil liberties have been heavily curtailed over the years, but this verdict isn't threatening anyone's rights.
I would take a different tack on this: the speech was legally unhindered, that is, free.
The consequences of the speech are, however, borne by the speaker.
I'm not sure this covers all cases of consequential burdening, but it does seem to cover many of them. A future prohibition on speech, gag order, banning from online or broadcast services, etc., might be a harder case to make, though these could still be seen as sanctions on behaviour rather than content.
I'm not defending Jones at all here, his penalties are exceedingly well deserved and have been far too delayed.
> I would take a different tack on this: the speech was legally unhindered, that is, free. The consequences of the speech are, however, borne by the speaker.
If you do redefine freedom of speech thus, then what place in the world doesn't have it? Even in North Korea you can speak freely for a short while before you have to bear the consequences.
Prior restraint and criminal punishment would seem to be two fairly obvious standards. Neither apply in this case.
Freedom of speech is never an absolute, it had a long history of far lower significance in the United States prior to the 1950s, and has a long an complex history.
I'm not a legal scholar, I'm still researching the background and history myself. Two resources of possible interest and use to yourself and others:
Jacob Mchangama's Clear and Present Danger podcast, 40 episodes plus several special installments on the history of free expression. The creator tends rather more libertarian than I, though he's not an absolutist. That said, there's reasonably little bias I'd noted in the overall presentation, which is nuanced.
On texts ... there's a whole heck of a lot. I've not read the Very Short Introduction title yet, but have added it to my own reading mountain/asteroid:
Alex was free to say it and the people he defamed were free to sue him for saying it. Alex was free to hire competent legal counsel for the trial(s), and he hired a bunch of wacky, like-minded nincompoops instead.
There were so many points in this saga where Alex could have made decisions that would have made the outcome less severe and he doubled down almost every time instead. Even as the last trial was wrapping up, he was going on air and defaming the judge in the case while calling one of the plaintiffs "slow" and a victim of manipulation[1].
There is such a thing as consequences for your actions.
> There is such a thing as consequences for your actions.
A system which produces effects extrinsically equivalent to direct proscriptions on free speech is not better than a system which explicitly proscribes some speech, and is arguably worse, because it tricks credulous people into thinking it's not as bad.
Do you believe there is any kind of speech that is appropriate to have consequences for, or is there literally no line that could be crossed in your world view?
The state did not. The fine was decided by a jury.
I have a very strong suspicion that if I started exercising my 'freedoms' in a harassing manner against you personally then suddenly your views would be very different.
His speech isn't being suppressed. The government didn't arrest him. He's being sued for damages he caused to the families of the victims he lied about. That's as American as it gets.
>His speech isn't being suppressed. The government didn't arrest him. He's being sued for damages he caused to the families of the victims he lied about. That's as American as it gets.
I'd add that he is still free to continue lying forever. No one is stopping him from doing so.
>That ... may remain to be seen. Though it does seem to presently be the case.
What legal mechanism might someone use to stop Alex Jones from saying whatever the hell he wants?
I mean, sure, a bullet to the brain or a successful car bomb would shut him up, but that's murder.
IIUC (IANAL), Alex Jones can, while in the United States (with certain very limited exceptions), say whatever he feels like saying.
If he defames someone (in the case we're discussing here, the families of children killed in Newtown, CT in 2012), they are also free (as they did) to sue him for such defamation.
What, exactly, do you see changing with respect to the current status quo? What legal basis would you base such changes on?
In preparing this reply, I noted this comment[0] of yours which reads, in part:
I'm not sure this covers all cases of consequential burdening, but
it does seem to cover many of them. A future prohibition on speech,
gag order, banning from online or broadcast services, etc., might
be a harder case to make, though these could still be seen as
sanctions on behaviour rather than content.
I am unclear as to how any of that could happen under US civil law. There certainly are examples of such orders in criminal cases, but very different rules/laws/regimes apply between the two.
Unless Jones is criminally charged, I don't see how any of that could happen in a civil legal proceeding in the US.
Are you taking the idea that "speech has consequences" to its logical extreme and hypothesizing that private actors may curtail Jones' access to media?
I'd say that doesn't stop him from pontificating about anything on a bar stool (unless the bar owners don't like it and throw him out) or on his own private property.
Or are you hypothesizing that laws will change and his defamation activity will be criminalized?
If I misunderstand your point (always a possibility), my apologies. I'd just like to understand the mechanism(s) you're alluding to that could result in someone "stopping him from doing so[1]".
N.B.: I'll say it again: IANAL. Also, I find Jones' behavior reprehensible and hope he ends up destitute and living in a cardboard box under a highway overpass.
One example might be legal injunctions, which could prohibit specific actions directly. These may be temporary or permanent, and are generally applied through civil law.
In cases of professional or corporate misconduct, individuals may be stripped of professional certification (e.g., law, medical, or engineering licences), or barred from participating in specific roles within an organisation. An example, also from a civil (rather than criminal) case is this temporary bar against participating in hedge-fund activities:
A third possibility might be to have a mandate that a representative of the plaintiff's be granted a board seat, editorial oversight, or some similar role in any future media role held by Alex Jones. I'm not aware of any specific similar instance, though lawsuits seeking, e.g., board representation, have been filed. See:
In cases of cybercrime there are many instances of punishments (typically criminal law in this case) of defendants being barred from Internet access. That seems to have somewhat fallen from favour though I believe it's still practiced. A 2003 discussion:
Late edit: Another example of extant prior restraint would be prepublication review, a process which applies to members of the intelligence and justice communities. I just heard a mention of it during a Fresh Air interview of Geoffrey Berman. It's described (for the NSA/CSS) here:
Jones made money from lying, but remains free of government interference. Nobody’s killing him or even putting him in jail. That’s the very definition of free speech.
But free speech doesn’t mean speech without consequences. He’s being sued by the victims of what he said. It’s not the government doing this, it’s the people he hurt, and that’s the definition of “justice”.
Defamation is a thing you can be sued for. The plaintiffs successfully sued Alex Jones for defamation. Him making money didn't have much to do with that.
In this phase about damages, the economics can be considered as a factor. It can also imply his motivations. The testimony given in this hearing showed direct connections between defaming Sandy Hook victims and money made by Alex Jones. He knew it was a money making story from the first day.
A true believer might spend their time and money on useful evidence instead of crappy photoshops and flashy nonsense. Alex Jones wasn't doing that. He was pushing the flashy nonsense, calling it evidence, and watching the money roll in.
He never really tried to prove his theories because that isn't a required part of the grift.
Essentially, he did an illegal thing (defamation) and made money by doing that illegal thing. Economic fines and damages are pretty common to dissuade people from doing illegal things to make money.
What Jones said wasn’t criminal. He’s allowed to say what he wants. But what he said did cause harm to people. So those people are using the same legal system that allows Jones to say whatever he likes, to make him fix the damage he caused by saying it.
The fact that he made money from it simply helps the judge - who is not part of the government executive - understand the motivation for what he did. The reason someone did something might be a mitigating factor in some cases, but this time it’s probably aggravating.
He made hundreds of millions of dollars spreading his lies. He shouldn't profit from that, and should be forced to give all the revenue to the families he effected with his lies.
You shouldn't be able to profit off of others misery like that, get caught out, and then go whoopsy and pay a small percentage of all the money you made off of it. That just encourages you and others to do it again.
But maybe he does not think they're lies. He thinks he is spreading the truth. Doesn't that make a difference, from lying on purpose for profit?
The same for the people giving him money. They don't care what he says, they never believed Sandy Hook was real for starters. They give him money because they want to see it "uncovered" and investigated from the only "journalist" that takes it
To prove prima facie defamation, a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.
You're right - it is OK as long as he's not profiting nor has a bullhorn the size of his. Otherwise, Wolfgang Halbig would be in the same kind of shit. He isn't.
If there ever was such a country, would people want to live there? And if they wouldn’t, doesn’t that just mean it would change?
I can’t see how some form of free speech absolutism would even function.
As for the size of the damages: in the US, weirdly, rich people pay more damages because I assume it’s also a way of making them stop committing the crime and not simply compensation for damage done.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but fundamentally, defamation involves a "false statement of fact". Weasel wording that would be understood by a "reasonable person" to imply facts can be defamatory even if the verbiage says "opinion", so it may require more careful language to stay on the safe side, but I can't think of any opinion that couldn't fundamentally be expressed at all.
Everyone is cool with fundamental erosions of our liberties as long as some fat jackass get what he deserves. They will never realize people like Trump and Jones are used specifically FOR that purpose.
*People downvoting have never heard of Wolfgang Halbig nor do they really care. That doesn't jive with their need to virtue signal.
Infowars has $53MM of revenue, so this is 20 years of revenue for knowing, persistant and harmful actions and then misconduct during trial. For comparision, 20 years of income for the median american is less than a million dollars. I think million dollar damages are common even just for negligence, let alone this severity.
Revenue is pretty much useless to determine how much money they have. If the revenue was $53,000,000 it is possible they spent $52,999,999.99 of the money on expenses to get that $53 million.
Despite my strong belief that he be strongly punished for his lies, I agree with you. It's so over the top that it discredits the whole process for me.
I think you should look at the theatrics Alex engaged in during the trial as well as his repeated failure to provide documents during discovery. He was arguably incompetently represented[1] (Infowars is probably going to sue their lawyer[2]) while treating the trial(s) as both a joke or a conspiracy against him. With that kind of behaviour, I'm not sure what kind of outcome he expected - him and his legal team failed to mount a serious defence of his actions.
Not saying that you are. But if Alex tried to make a mockery of the litigation he was facing why is the outcome disproportionate in your opinion? Didn't he undermine the process with his own actions here?
The argument is that his supporters harassed sandy hook victims, to my knowledge nobody was hurt and certainly nobody died from the harassment. If this isn't enough, what would be enough? And what would be appropriate compensation if he had encouraged violence against them/etc?
Stupid question, why not 1 trillion? Is it dischargeable in bankruptcy? I assume he won’t even get close to 1B. Figure it gets cut to 500M in appeals, and he doesn’t make 100M in his lifetime. What happens?
I believe The largest fine paid by a banking executive responsible for the 2008 Financial Crisis was $67.5 million
Broadcasting equipment. Think "towers/rented space on towers and dishes and antennas and radio engineers and technicians and insurance policies", not "microphones and a recording studio".
Neither he nor his companies have spectrum allocation or licenses to broadcast.
The more I think about it, the less concerned I am that there's one less controlled oppo nutcase out there. His Sandy Hook stuff was so stupid and unhelpful that it just had to be an act similar to the old Phelps "GOD HATES [insert any group here]" people of yesteryear.
The problem of course, is that lies (in the technical sense) are pretty common and often much more damaging that this fluff up. There's a lot of billions that could change hands if the lawsuits all went up at once. But really, they won't all go up at once--it will be the political undesirables only.
Does he even have the money to pay nearly a billion dollars?
Or is the point to bankrupt him with what seems like lawfare?
America is not a place where people like being told to be quiet. Alex Jones went mainstream on the Joe Rogan show. Millions and millions of Rogan fans see Alex Jones are legitimized by this ruling. Joe Rogan has the biggest podcast in the world.
Just some things to think about.
Unintended consequences.
Those consequences being what, more people defaming the parents of dead children and losing their fortunes as a result? I don't think Rogan is dumb enough to make that particular mistake.
What are you implying then? That if someone gets popular enough we should all just roll over and let them do as they please? I’m failing to see a different interpretation when you end with
> Just some things to think about. Unintended consequences.
> Can anyone justify why the amount should be that high? Does he have 1 billion dollars?
1) InfoWars wasn’t some small blogger or random guy on the street. It’s a business with 10s to 100s of millions in revenue depending on which documents Alex Jones had for the day
2) Alex Jones had the opportunity to defend himself and instead either did not show up to his court dates or chose the opportunity to continue attacking the plaintiffs and doubling down on perjurious statements when given orders not to
If anything the “wrong moral signal” being sent here is that even when your behavior is not functionally different from trying to rack up the highest damage amount possible, it’s still easily payable by our top echelons of society.
Yes, it's in fact pretty easy to justify why the amount should be that high. My guess is that the distinction between 200MM and 900MM is not especially material to Jones at this point; either zeroes him out.
And before anyone says "but why wasn't Jones given a trial to determine his guilt? The first amendment is under attack!", Infowars has repeatedly failed to prepare its employees for depositions, refused to respond to discovery requests, and has perjured itself numerous times. The default judgements received in both this and the Texas cases were well deserved, and anyone with a less explosive personality and media presence would have been given far fewer chances to comply.