Jury Gets The Alex Jones Damages Case

Jury deliberations began late Thursday in the damages trial of the Infowars fabulist Alex Jones, who defamed the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and unleashed years of abuse and threats against them from people who believed Mr. Jones’s lies on his online and radio broadcast that the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting was a hoax.

The NY times reports Chris Mattei, a lawyer on the families’ legal team, Thursday walked the jurors through a litany of the abuse inflicted by Mr. Jones and his followers, who believed the families were complicit in the plot.

“You saw — he’s going on 10 years of defaming these families, and it’s not stopping,” Mattei told the jury during his closing remarks. “This is their one chance, and your one chance — your one chance — to render a verdict on just how much devastation Alex Jones has caused.”

Jones in Court last month

Mattei did not ask the jury to consider a specific dollar amount. Rather, he asked them to assign a dollar amount to each lie Mr. Jones had told about the shooting, then multiply it by the more than 500 million times those lies drew readers from social media to Infowars’ website. There are 15 plaintiffs in the case, including parents, siblings and spouses of the victims, as well as a former F.B.I. agent who was singled out by the conspiracy theorists and labeled an actor.

In its deliberations, the six-person jury will consider weeks of searing testimony from the families about the attacks and threats from conspiracy theorists who believed Mr. Jones’s lies, beginning with his broadcast three hours after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 first graders and six educators.