It is the next step in the war against InfoWars, the Alex Jones organization that was sued over his comments about the Sandy Hook school shooting and the families involved. And it’s gone to the Supreme Court.
Jones, who was declared liable for more than a billion dollars in damages in default judgments from two different judges, is challenging those rulings.
Jones has submitted an appeal to the high court that centers on a judgment in Connecticut.
He charges the default judgment was improper because it presented an incomplete picture of his statements about Sandy Hook, it made too much of “trivial” discovery issues, and it undermined Supreme Court precedent on the First Amendment rights of media defendants, like him, according to a blog that focuses on the high court and its issues.
“Viewed in full context, Jones expressly affirmed that deaths occurred, while using the phrases ‘staged’ or ‘hoax’ to characterize media and governmental scripting. It is therefore contextually impossible to construe his remarks as denying deaths, as the Complaint did by selective editing. Precisely to guard against such distortions, this Court has required independent judicial review of the entire record in First Amendment cases,” said the petition.
He is seeking emergency relief because he charges that allowing the collection of the full $1.4 billion judgment while his appeal is being reviewed would inflict “irreparable injury.”
He warned that Sandy Hook families would take control of his InfoWars and turn it over to another company, the Onion.
“Without a stay now, when this case is reviewed and later reversed, InfoWars will have been acquired by its ideological nemesis and destroyed — which Jones believes is the Plaintiffs’ intention. Hence, Jones will clearly experience irreparable injury if a stay is not granted,” his application said.
The report explained Jones is a longtime talk-show host who had built a platform for comment and discussion.
He repeatedly has addressed “conspiratorial claims about major world events, such as that the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 was staged or that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 were an inside job,” the report said.
In this case, after the 2012 shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead, Jones repeatedly criticized coverage and suggested parts of the events were staged to push for new gun limits.
Family members of victims sued, both in Connecticut and Texas.
Both judges ruled against Jones by default.
After the judgment, the companies filed bankruptcy petitions and that process has not yet yielded a final result.
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