In his legal filings, Jones vastly downplayed his blatant lies regarding the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request from far right podcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was seeking an appeal of a $1.4 billion judgment against him after he lost a defamation lawsuit brought by family members of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting of 2012.
Jones and his legal team submitted a writ of certiorari to the high court last week, arguing that his past defamatory statements were mere “reporting” on the school shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six adults. The event, Jones wrote in his filing, was “the subject of reporting and debate” and was discussed by “scores of journalists worldwide,” including himself.
Jones also claimed that, were the Supreme Court to decide against hearing his case, it would mean that “all journalists will realize that they could be found liable for huge defamation awards, especially in ideologically divergent geographic regions…and therefore [will] refrain from publishing for fear of being hauled into court” to face a “‘trial by sanction’ in which the First Amendment is superfluous.” He further described the sanctions he faced as being a “financial death penalty by fiat,” stating that the words he was being punished over were “lifted out of context.
