United States: conspirator Alex Jones will have to pay nearly a billion dollars

Published on: 10/13/2022 – 03:59 Alex Jones, figure of the American extreme right and owner of the conspiracy site Infowars, was ordered on Wednesday to pay 965 million dollars in compensation for defamation and moral damage to the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012, which he had denied. Alex Jones, a figure of far-right conspiracy in the United States, was sentenced Wednesday, October 12 to pay almost a billion dollars in compensation to the families of victims of a massacre in a school which he had denied the reality, for the moral suffering caused by his false remarks. The owner of the Infowars site had claimed that the relatives of the students and members of staff killed in 2012 at the Sandy Hook school in Connecticut were actors and that the killing was staged. driven by opponents of firearms. A tenacious conspiracy theory that has swarmed the internet. A jury in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from the facility, decided that Alex Jones should pay the families of eight victims, as well as an FBI agent present on the day of the drama, 965 million dollars in compensation for defamation and moral prejudice. A “historic” verdict A “historic” verdict, reacted a family lawyer, Chris Mattei, promising to have it “applied”. wife Mary was killed in Sandy Hook, said the decision showed that “the internet is not the Wild West and actions have consequences”. “People like Alex Jones are going to have to rethink what they say, and how they say it,” he added to the press. of the conspirator firmly believing that the massacre had never taken place and that grieving relatives played a role. They said they no longer felt safe, at home or in public. social networks to be an actress and that she had even received rape threats. She said Wednesday “proud” of the message sent by the verdict: “the truth matters”. “And those who profit from the trauma of others will pay for what they have done. There will still be Alex Joneses in the world. But today they learned that they should be held to account,” he said. – she added. Weeping Relatives In 2012, a young man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 20 children and six adults in Sandy Hook. The killing had sparked fear in the United States and revived the debate on the measures to be taken to regulate the sale of firearms. Present in the courtroom, relatives of the victims wept when the verdict was announced . Alex Jones, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, followed the hearing on Infowars and commented on it live. He said he intended to appeal and that he didn’t even have “two million in cash”, calling on his supporters to support him by buying products on his site. “They want to scare us away from freedom and scare us so that we don’t question Uvalde and what really happened there or in Parkland,” he said, referring to other school killings. “Guess what: we are not afraid, we are not going anywhere and we are not going to stop”, he launched. The jurors notably awarded 120 million dollars to one of the victims, Robbie Parker, who lost his six-year-old daughter, Emilie, in the massacre. William Aldenberg, an FBI agent also targeted by conspiracy theories, is to receive $90 million. Alex Jones had already been sentenced in Texas to pay nearly $50 million to a couple whose six-year-old son was broke at Sandy Hook. The conspirator had finally publicly admitted the reality of the killing. But he refused to cooperate with the courts, so magistrates in both states convicted him in absentia. They had left it to jurors to set the sentence. With AFP