Conspiracy theorist and Infowars host Alex Jones has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up his appeal of a roughly $1.4 billion Connecticut judgment that found him liable for falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting a hoax.
Jones filed the petition Friday and it was released by the court on Tuesday. The appeal challenges a rare default ruling by Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis, who in late 2021 found Jones and his company liable for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress without a trial on the merits and left damages to a jury.
A six-person jury in Waterbury in October 2022 awarded plaintiffs approximately $964 million, and Bellis later added about $473 million in punitive damages, bringing the total to roughly $1.4 billion. The plaintiffs included an FBI agent who responded to the shooting and relatives of eight children and adults killed when a gunman attacked the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school in December 2012.
In the petition, Jones' lawyers — Ben Broocks, Shelby Jordan and Alan Daughtry — argued that state courts lack authority to determine liability based solely on sanctions such as a default ruling and that constitutional law and Supreme Court precedent require public-figure plaintiffs to meet the heightened proof standards for defamation claims against journalists. The petition contends Judge Bellis imposed the default for "trivial" reasons and that Jones substantially complied with court orders, an assertion the families' attorneys dispute.
Jones' attorneys also asserted that statements denying events are not the same as statements attacking the character or reputation of private individuals, and they characterized some of Jones' comments as constitutionally protected opinion. The petition further argues that the judgment is excessive punishment under the Eighth Amendment and warned that allowing it to stand could "chill the reporting of news" and produce self-censorship.
Lawyers for the Sandy Hook families have pushed back on those claims. "There is no legitimate basis for the U.S. Supreme Court to accept this last gasp from Alex Jones and we will oppose it in due course," Christopher Mattei, an attorney for the families, said in a statement.
A mid-level Connecticut appellate court upheld all but $150 million of the $1.4 billion judgment in December, and the state Supreme Court declined to hear Jones' appeal in April. In a separate Texas defamation lawsuit brought by the parents of another Sandy Hook victim, a judge and jury in August 2022 issued a $49 million judgment after finding Jones liable without a trial as a sanction for discovery failures; that decision is also being appealed.
Jones filed for bankruptcy in late 2022. Bankruptcy court proceedings included an attempted sale of Infowars' assets, with a November auction that named the satirical outlet The Onion the winning bidder; a bankruptcy judge later voided the sale, citing problems with the auction process. The effort to sell Infowars' assets has moved to Texas state court in Austin, and Jones is appealing a court order appointing a receiver to liquidate assets. Some of Jones' personal property is also being sold as part of the bankruptcy process.
The Supreme Court accepts a small fraction of petitions each term. If the justices decide to consider Jones' case, they would weigh whether federal constitutional protections constrain a state court's use of default sanctions to establish liability in defamation actions and whether the judgment implicates free-speech and excessive-punishment principles. The Sandy Hook litigation has produced multiple rulings across jurisdictions and remains the subject of ongoing appeals and enforcement actions.