The US supreme court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by the Infowars host, Trump ally and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was fighting a Connecticut court sanction in a defamation lawsuit brought by relatives of some victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting.
Jones was penalized in 2019 by a trial court judge for an angry outburst against an attorney for the relatives and for violating numerous orders to turn over documents to lawyers. Judge Barbara Bellis barred Jones from filing a motion to dismiss the case and said she would order Jones to pay some of the families’ legal fees.
Jones argued he should not have been sanctioned for exercising his free speech rights. The Connecticut supreme court upheld Bellis’s ruling last year.
The families and an FBI agent who responded to the 2012 shooting, in which 20 first-graders and six educators were killed, are suing Jones and his web show over claims the massacre was a hoax. The families said they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’s followers.
Jones, whose show is based in Austin, Texas, has since said he believes the shooting occurred. The supreme court turned down his appeal request without comment.
Jones’s attorney, Norman Pattis, called the court’s decision “a disappointment”.
“Judge Bellis, and the Connecticut supreme court, asserted frightening and standardless power over the extrajudicial statements of litigants,” Pattis said. “Mr Jones never threatened anyone; had he done so, he would have been charged with a crime. We are inching our way case-by-case toward a toothless, politically correct first amendment.”
Messages seeking comment were sent to lawyers for the families of eight victims of the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and the FBI agent.
Jones, on Infowars in 2019, accused an attorney for the families, Christopher Mattei, of planting child sexual abuse images that were found in metadata files Jones turned over to the Sandy Hook families’ lawyers. Pattis has said the files were in emails sent to Jones that were never opened.
“You’re trying to set me up with child porn,” Jones said. “One million dollars, you little gang members. One million dollars to put your head on a pike.”
Jones showed a photo of Mattei, a former federal prosecutor, and said: “I’m done. Total war. You want it? You got it.”
In remarks riddled with obscene language, Jones added: “One million dollars when they are convicted. The bounty is out …. you little dirt bag. One million … It’s out.”
The Connecticut supreme court said sanctions against Jones did not run afoul of the first amendment because they were imposed due to speech that was an “imminent and likely threat to the administration of justice”. Chief Justice Richard Robinson wrote: “Language evoking threats of physical harm is not tolerable.”
Sandy Hook families sued Jones and others for defamation in other states. A Texas judge in 2019 ordered Jones to pay $100,000 in legal fees and refused to dismiss the suit. A jury in Wisconsin awarded $450,000 to one parent in his lawsuit against conspiracy theorists, not including Jones, who claimed the massacre never happened.