Being a Non American, I have heard a lot about this recently. I know Alex Jones is paying billions of $$ to victims but what happened?
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On 14 Dec 2012, a young man shot up Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. 26 people died, of which 20 were elemental school kids between ages 6-7.
The shooting re-sparked discussions in the US about gun control.
Alex Jones is a “journalist”. More accurately, he’s a TV/radio personality who operates in the far-right/alt-right sphere. He started his main website, Infowars, in around 2000 – the site has been universally criticised for peddling mostly conspiracy theories and inflammatory hate but is quite popular among its target audience of far-right conspiracy theorists.
Ever since Sandy Hook took place, Alex Jones has been claiming the event did not happen. He openly states that he believes the event was a hoax perpetrated to force a conversation on gun control (Jones is vehemently in favour of no/low gun control). The idea that Sandy Hook was a hoax began to spread through his viewership, who began harassing the parents of the children who died, claiming their kids never existed.
This was, obviously, pretty horribly upsetting for the parents. Many of them got death threats for “perpetrating the lie”.
Over 2018, various parents of children who died in Sandy Hook began to bring defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones.
I won’t go into the specifics of the court dates, but tl;dr the parents won. Alex Jones has been ordered to pay millions in damages to various parents across various cases.
Alex Jones almost certainly does not have enough money to pay all of the damages he’s been ordered to pay. Since around 2022, he’s begun restructuring his various companies and filing bankruptcies in an attempt to avoid paying as much money as possible.
The Sandy Hook parents intervened, basically saying that he should not be allowed to get out of paying this money. This is still going through the courts.
And Alex Jones is still, to this day, claiming that Sandy Hook was a hoax and that this legal action is just a new kind of coverup.
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