A Texas appeals court slashed a nearly $50 million judgment against Alex Jones on Friday, reducing it to approximately $6 million under state law limits on lawsuit damages.
The ruling came from the Texas Third Court of Appeals, which cited a statutory cap on exemplary damages. According to The Wrap, which obtained the ruling, the court wrote: "We modify the judgment by reducing the exemplary damages award consistent with the statutory cap, resulting in exemplary damages awards of $750,000 to Scarlett Lewis and of $750,000 to Neil Heslin."
Heslin and Lewis are the parents of Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old who died in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Jones, the founder of Infowars, had claimed for years that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax. He was found liable for defaming Heslin and Lewis and causing them emotional distress.
The Texas ruling does not affect a separate $1.25 billion judgment against Jones out of Connecticut, where another group of Sandy Hook families sued him. The combined financial verdicts, along with penalties against his company Free Speech Systems, have driven Jones into bankruptcy and forced him out of Infowars. The site has since been taken over and relaunched as a satire publication under The Onion.
The appeals court ruling did leave in place more than $4.1 million in compensatory damages that had already been awarded to Heslin and Lewis.
Jones responded to the decision Friday by calling it "a gigantic victory for the First Amendment" and said he intends to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court to try to eliminate the remaining damages. "I got lawyers who are good constitutional lawyers and they are not backing down," he said.
The families' attorney, Mark Bankston, dismissed the ruling entirely. "The families care not at all about this irrelevant ruling which affects only two of the 19 claims they all share," he said in a statement to AP News. "Jones still faces over a billion dollars of liability, so this changes absolutely nothing. All it does is highlight the absurdity of Texas law."
Jones has continued broadcasting since leaving Infowars, posting videos to X and streaming on other websites. His planned appeal to the Texas Supreme Court is the next legal step in the Texas case.
