A Texas appeals court has reduced a $50 million judgment against Infowars founder Alex Jones to $1.5 million in a lawsuit brought by the parents of a Sandy Hook Elementary School victim. The ruling on Friday by the Texas Third Court of Appeals does not impact a separate $1.4 billion judgment against Jones in Connecticut.
The court found that Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis did not present sufficient evidence that harassment stemming from Jones' false claims about the 2012 shooting rose to a level that would permit damages exceeding Texas's statutory cap of $750,000 per plaintiff.
Jones falsely claimed that the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six educators, was a hoax orchestrated by the government to seize firearms. Heslin and Lewis's son, Jesse Lewis, was among those killed.
During the trial, Jones, who had portrayed the lawsuit as an infringement on his First Amendment rights, acknowledged that the shooting was "100% real" and admitted his falsehoods. However, Heslin and Lewis told jurors that an apology was insufficient and sought to hold Jones financially accountable for the prolonged suffering he inflicted on them and other Sandy Hook families.
Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, have filed for bankruptcy, and those proceedings are ongoing. In April, Jones relinquished the Infowars brand and transitioned his shows to new websites and his personal X account. Separately, the satirical website The Onion has initiated efforts to take over Jones's Infowars platforms, aiming to transform them into parody sites.