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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It’s a big topic. There was a mass shooting event at Sandy Hook Elementary school. This was a shockingly horrible event and many people did not want to believe that it really happened.
Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist with a popular show. The very day Sandy Hook happened, he said it was a false flag. Broadly he was saying that that the children that died weren’t real and that parents were paid actors that were pretending to have lost children.
Jones repeated those claims on his show for years, and platformed other crackpots (e.g. Wolfgang Halbig and Jim Fetzer) on his show who were also highly involved in the conspiracy theory. Other crackpots harrassed families more directly, but Jones had a substantial audience and repeatedly called for people to ”investigate” and find out the “truth”. Which his audience did in droves, by harassing the “actors”. At least one Infowars member was also sent to Connecticut and confronted the family.
Due to the extreme harrassment they received, many family members of the teachers and children killed at Sandy Hook had to move multiple times. The harassment has taken a terrible toll on those families who had already lost loved ones in a senseless massaacre.
Jones made a complete mockery of the court in the (multiple) suits against him. He was defaulted for not complying with discovery (failing to produce requested documents or other evidence). He also repeatedly talked about the cases on his show, shit-talking the judges and I believe in one case offering a million dollar bounty on one of the opposing lawyers.
I know that a billion dollars in damages seems crazy, but the damage he did to those families absolutely horrendous, no amount of money would compensate for it. Jones’ actions in court didn’t exactly help him there either, and the finances of his business are pretty opaque (again due to lack of cooperation during discovery) so it was hard to pin down exactly how much he profitted from his defamation of the families.
If you want a fuller picture of what the families experienced, I recommend Elizabeth Williamson’s book Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.
Jones is currently abusing the bankruptcy system to delay payment to the families he owes damages to. He has done some financial trickery such that his company owes money to his dad’s supplement company, moving money around to claim bankruptcy.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Erica Lafferty, had to rely on GoFundMe to pay for chemotherapy treatement for brain cancer. All while Jones owed her in excess of $100million in damages.
I don’t know that Jones has $1billion lying around, but I do know that while Erica was trying to scrape together enough money to pay medical bills, he was buying time through bankruptcy and taking lavish vacations to Hawaii.
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Actual ELI5:
* Buncha kids get killed in a school shooting.
* Alex Jones claims it didn’t happen, because…politics. Says it was made up to take our guns and freedom away.
* Parents say “plz stop with this lying, we’re grieving”
* Alex responds by doxxing them and doubling down to get his extremist right-wingers riled up. The attention continues to make him millions.
* Parents sue, Alex treats it like a joke.
* Judge is like “dude, this in insane” and fines Alex billions, even though Alex claimed he had no money.
If that reads like bat-crazy insanity….that’s because it is. No sane person would look at all those dead kids and be like “nah, fakenews”. And to be honest, I don’t personally think Alex is that dumb/insane either…dude knew becoming a denier would rack him up millions in the contro alone. There’s even evidence suggesting he knew that.
* Sorry for being flippant about the kids lives, I’m trying to eli5. The whole thing, even the controversy, is very sad and messed up.
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