Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
And before anyone says "but why wasn't Jones given a trial to determine his guilt? The first amendment is under attack!", Infowars has repeatedly failed to prepare its employees for depositions, refused to respond to discovery requests, and has perjured itself numerous times. The default judgements received in both this and the Texas cases were well deserved, and anyone with a less explosive personality and media presence would have been given far fewer chances to comply.
The people using this turn of phrase are effectively saying “good, he deserves it for being a bad person”.
But a $965 million dollar judgment for libel or slander would have to be justified by comparable damages. That isn't the case here.
Nobody involved had a reputation that was worth $100 million dollars.
Remember, it's almost a billion dollars because twenty children were murdered at Sandy Hook, and Jones' company managed to target all of the parents. If only one parent had sued, we wouldn't be batting an eyelash at the resulting damages. But Jones built an immensely powerful media machine, and then aimed it very carefully at his own testicles. Play stupid games, &c &c.
Damages for wrongful death usually don't even go this high.
Apples vs Oranges.
Anyway if it isn't punitive shouldn't there be some kind of account for how the number was arrived at? I don't see it in the article.
These damages may be above average and the highest ever in a defamation trial, but Alex Jones really took being a defamatory piece of shit to a new level.
This is not really a convincing response to my comment on the per-family damages:
>> Nobody involved had a reputation that was worth $100 million dollars.
You can't lose value you never had.
> How disruptive would it be to my life if that happened to me? Over how many years?
However disruptive it was, the damages could not reach $100 million unless you either (a) spent $100 million dealing with the disruption, or (b) forwent $100 million of earnings in order to deal with the disruption. (Or any combination.) Again, that hasn't happened. You can't deal $100 million of economic damage to someone who doesn't possess assets worth $100 million. That is a major reason for the concept of punitive damages.
>> damages could not reach $100 million unless you either (a) spent $100 million dealing with the disruption
You would additionally have some criminal liability, but that doesn't affect damages.
Very probably the matter is not with reputation. What seems to be more plausible instead is:
-- the victims having had an angry mob risen against them (and of course in the context of having suffered a diremost loss);
-- the responsible having financially exploited the situation.
This has nothing to do with the lawsuit. It's not a defamation claim; it's not a damages claim. You'd have to make a claim for unjust enrichment.
I'm not saying I'm sure these numbers will hold up (punitive damages under CUTPA are uncapped, though!), but I think the story about how the jury could have reached these numbers is a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be.
In particular:
(1) It's not just defamation.
(2) You do not in fact need to make a "claim for unjust enrichment" to recover profits earned through an intentional tort.
I would need a lot more than your assertion to be convinced of this. Here's Ward Farnsworth introducing his book, Restitution: Civil Liability for Unjust Enrichment:
> Restitution is the mirror image of tort law. You sue in tort to recover for losses that you have suffered. You bring a restitution claim to recover gains that another party has obtained. In some cases it makes no difference which claim you bring, because your losses and the other side's gains are the same. Or you might prefer a tort claim because your losses are bigger than the defendant's gains, as usually is true when you suffer damage in an accident. But sometimes going after the defendant's gains will allow a much bigger recovery, or is the plaintiff's only way to recover at all.
> Restitution is the great overlooked topic in American private law. In this country most students can't learn about it even if they want to; few schools teach the subject. Students only hear about restitution as the name of an occasional remedy in contract cases. But restitution is the name of a claim, not just a remedy. So lawyers often overlook restitution and sometimes try to use tort and contract to solve problems that restitution law would handle better. Missing or misunderstanding the right to go after a defendant's gains can be a very expensive oversight.
( https://reason.com/volokh/2014/10/27/restitution-law-interes... )
Here we see a brief mention of Jesse Ventura's novel (in 2014) legal strategy of including a claim for unjust enrichment in his defamation suit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
(From the piece: "The jury awarded plaintiff $500,000 for defamation, and $1,345,477.25 on the unjust enrichment theory.")
Why would he do that, if it were just part of how all torts are handled? What would be unusual about it? (And why would Ward Farnsworth introduce the subject by pointing out that "tort claims and restitution claims are opposite things"?)
I don't see anything indicating this in the linked article.
Whatever bankruptcy judge he ends up before might not be amused by such antics.
Sure, but debts from frauds and willful and malicious harms, includong associated punitive damages, are not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
Please don't do these things on HN, regardless of how strong the provocation is. It just makes everything worse.
Sure, we have a scenario in three parts:
1. Your daughter goes to school.
2. She bleeds to death in a corridor.
3. You get attacked by strangers claiming you are a phony.
Don't you think the damage occurs in step 2? What did Alex Jones have to do with that?
Can you imagine meeting an alien who reveals to you a better way of life, founding a religion according to his teachings, attracting followers, and then for years you get attacked by strangers claiming you made it all up? What would they owe you?
Damage occurred in both steps 2 & 3, but as you point out, Alex Jones had nothing to do with step 2, so this case is about step 3.
Because that's what Alex Jones targeted to abuse these people. He didn't kill their children, but he did take people whose children were killed, and lie about that fact in order to attack these people for money.
That's a great system you got there.
How can you be guilty in Civil Court and not guilty in Criminal Court? Easy. Two different criteria for guilt. In Criminal Court it must be shown beyond reasonable doubt that you committed the crime. In Civil Court it must be shown that it's more likely than not that you committed the crime. In the case of OJ what this means is it's more likely than not that he murdered his wife but it's not beyond reasonable doubt that he did so. OJ was acquitted of murder in Criminal Court and forced to pay his wife's family for damages in Civil Court since it's more likely than not that he murdered his wife.
Whether you think this is a great system or not is subjective but that's how the system works.
Between the blood on everything he owned, the car chase, the domestic abuse calls etc.
He was acquitted by the jury due to racial tensions. Certainly not something to apply to any other case, it was a special exception of injustice.
The standard for acquitting is reasonable doubt. You're presumed innocent until proven guilty, so in theory you aren't necessarily required to prove your innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt. While it may work differently in practice at times, that idea IS actually a great one.
So yes, it may still be possible that someone who is acquitted is in fact guilty, but the prosecution isn't allowed a second chance.
Exactly. That's my point. Don't assume everyone who was acquitted is guilty because of the few exceptions of injustice such as OJ.
No one was. Even you said
>So since OJ got off you assume everyone acquitted may still be guilty?
which is not the same thing.
No one is pronounced innocent in the US justice system, so by definition yes, anyone who is found not guilty "may still be guilty".
Defamation cases are civil, so ending up in jail isn’t one of the possible outcomes.
Finally, defamation cases in the US are almost never resolved by determining whether or not a statement was factually accurate, so in general it is a mistake to infer anything from the result of a case alone (you always need to know the details of the decision).
True, but...
> Alex Jones isn’t being punished by the govt.
The courts are part of the government, and Constitutional limits on government power apply to civil liability; the First Amendment, quite notably, restricts the conditions in which defamation liability can be applied.
Right, but that is not how the law is applied. In a civil lawsuit, court or the government is not the plaintiff or the defendant, and therefore first amendment protections do not apply. There are first amendment protections when public officials are involved in the defamation suit. But beyond that, it is well established that first amendment does not protect this kind of speech.
It absolutely is, which is why thr First Amendment limits the conditions in which civil defamation damages can be awarded, see, e.g., Times v. Sullivan.
EDIT: In fact, Times v. Sullivan rejects this specific argument, saying: “Although this is a civil lawsuit between private parties, the Alabama courts have applied a state rule of law which petitioners claim to impose invalid restrictions on their constitutional freedoms of speech and press. It matters not that that law has been applied in a civil action [...]. The test is not the form in which state power has been applied but, whatever the form, whether such power has in fact been exercised.”
> There are first amendment protections when public officials are involved in the defamation suit. But beyond that, it is well established that first amendment does not protect this kind of speech.
This is completely wrong. Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case applying the 1A to defamation, and subsequent cases elaborating the Constitutional limits of defamation liability established both basic 1A rules for all defamation cases, and additional rules for public figures (not just public officials, but also others who seek public attention), and matters of public concern. Among the rules applicable to all cases, not just public figures and public concern are:
(1) Opinion is Constitutionally protected and cannot be defamation (as it could be in some jurisdictions before),
(2) Falsity is required element of defamation and must be proved by the plaintiff, it cannot be presumed with the truth as a defense (as, again, it was in some jurisdictions)
(3) Fault (at least simple negligence) is a Constitutionally-required required element; defamation cannot be strict liability (as, again, it was in some jurisdictions prior to the Constitutional rule being articulated by the Court),
What do you think will ultimately happen with the case?
You are correct that it is about the target, its just odd that you read something contrary to that into my comment.
Since Jones is seen to have intentionally caused these plaintiffs emotional distress, the plaintiffs are being awarded compensatory damages nearing $1 billion, however punitive damages will be considered next because of a Connecticut law that bars using false statements to sell products. (A hearing set for Nov. 7 will determine the amount of those damages.)
According to the law, all the plaintiffs had to prove was that Jones (1) knowingly made false statements that would cause the claimants emotional distress and (2) such distress and injury could be proved or substantiated. In this case, the government served primarily as a mediator between the private citizens on both sides.
People are Big Mad about the fact that Jones wasn't allowed to proclaim his ignorance on the stand. But I'm guessing that if you surveyed those people, fewer than 50% would be aware that he was tried and found liable already, and that the "trial" we're discussing is simply the damages phase of the trial he lost.
The Dystopian Part:
The Judge finds you guilty of murder by default, without hearing any evidence of your guilt, and denies you your jury trial, based on the justification that you did not turn over a couple of the knives.
Guilt and Punishment:
The judge proceeds to hold what amounts to a memorial service, as family member after family member is called up to the stand by the prosecution and they cry in front of the jury over their lost loved one. Your lawyer can't effectively question a crying family member as that makes them seem like a cruel psychopath.
Should you take the stand in your defence, the judge threatens you and your lawyer with contempt, and by implication jail, if you go up there and say you're innocent. There's a list of things you're not allowed to talk about because they would imply your innocence. And you were already found guilty! Therefore, saying you're innocent would be perjury.
You're only allowed to answer with "yes", "no" or "I don't know" when the prosecution calls you up to the stand. After they berate you for half a day, and your defence lawyer objects to the judge losing control, the judge ends the day by yelling at your lawyer that she won't stand for any nonsense from now on. That she hasn't found a lawyer in contempt in all her career, but she's ready to do it now. The next day is when you're supposed to testify in your defence.
You decline to take the stand.
Final Instructions:
The judge tells the jury it isn't allowed to question or speculate on what basis you where found guilty, just that there are only here to determine your punishment.
This is what I'm upset with. This was a political show trial, engineered for a specific verdict.
As to the points you've made:
* Default judgment: If you repeatedly do not show up for a trial, then at a certain point the trial needs to still continue. You should not be able to indefinitely put off a case just by refusing to turn up. If this were a criminal case, Jones would be forced to be there, as it's a civil case this is the alternative (as I understand it).
* Not having evidence: would work a lot better as a defence if (a) you genuinely contested it, and (b) you didn't send all the evidence that you supposedly couldn't find to the opposition lawyer halfway through the case by accident
* The civil case was split into two parts: one to determine fault, and the other to determine damages. As previously mentioned, Jones refused to take part in the trial that would have determined whether he was guilty or not, and therefore a default judgement was given. If he wanted to claim he was innocent, he should have done it then. Again, this is, as I understand it, standard practice for a civil trial.
* During a discussion of how much damages you should pay, given you were found guilty, you cannot argue to the jury that you are innocent. This has already been decided - typically with your involvement, assuming you don't just refuse to turn up - so this is just not in question any more.
This gets even more murky because the financial evidence, such as his earning, is relevant to damages, and not really to guilt. And really, in the end the prosecution was able to estimate his earnings by expert testimony during the damages portion. So was it actually critical. Yet Alex was found guilty based on failing to provide it. And if it was critical, at most it established damages, not guilt.
Also, can you imagine how much the prosecution is prejudiced in a criminal trail where the defendant fails to hand over the murder weapon. Yet a jury trail is still allowed proceed.
* Default Judgment:
I'm not aware of Alex missing any days where he needed to be there pretrial. He sat through 10 days of depositions. Any specific articles you can link where he missed a pre-trial date he had to be there for?
* Not having evidence. a) What does genuinely contested really mean? b) That did not happen. The prosecution found an email with an attached screenshot containing a keyword. This was the gotcha moment in his previous trial. Just very dubious. Since attached screenshots are not easily searchable for keywords, and could have been easily missed without any malice by his lawyer.
* Jones was never allowed to take part in a "take part in the trial that would have determined whether he was guilty or not". Every interview on the subject, Jones decries not being allowed do process. He wanted to be able to state facts of his case to a jury, his lawyers wanted to make constitutional arguments to the jury, and so on.
Seriously.
Cannot.
In a criminal case, this is equivalent to standing in your doorway and physically blocking the police from executing a lawful warrant. Except, in that case, the police have recourse -- they can push you aside and execute a search. That isn't possible in civil cases; the only power a court has to compel cooperation with discovery is threatening a default judgement. This is why responding to discovery is important, and it's why the punishment for failing to do so is "you lose". Otherwise, all plaintiffs in all civil cases would simply ignore discovery and the courts would be mostly useless.
Jones failed to EVEN RESPOND to multiple discovery requests by the plaintiffs. Quoting from the order [1]:
"One month after remand, plaintiff wrote to the Defendants inquiring about overdue responses. Plaintiffs offered defendant an additional 14 days... More than three weeks later, with no response provided, Plaintiffs brought the motion". The order goes on to explain that refusing to even respond to discovery requests is a pattern of behavior and not a one-off mistake.
Again, he didn't refuse to turn over discovered documents. He didn't even say "I don't have that". He just straight up ghosted opposing counsel's request. Didn't respond!!!
You. Cannot. Ignore. Discovery.
You can respond and say "I don't have that". Of course, if you and your counsel knowingly and brazenly lie about not having a document, then civil damages are probably the least of your concerns because you will end up in prison and your lawyer will be disbarred. But, assuming "I don't have that" is true (or at least cannot be proved false beyond a reasonable doubt), then "I don't have that" is an acceptable response.
What you CANNOT do is simply ignore the request and expect a trial to proceed normally prior completion of discovery.
Ignoring discovery requests is a wildly insane thing for a lawyer to do. Failing to even respond to a discovery request after a reminder and extension from the opposing counsel -- and doing so multiple times over several trials -- is literally unfathomable to me.
There are only three reasons to do this. The first is that the discovered documents would be even more damaging than a default judgement in plaintiff's favor. The second is WILD incompetence. The third is mental instability. Those are the only three reasons, because... You. Cannot. Ignore. Discovery.
This isn't an overdue homework assignment or some procedural snafu. Discovery is a core part of a trial, and messing around with it is a huge deal. Ignoring discovery is, in most cases, way worse than a guilty verdict. You lose, you piss off the judge, and any jury will most likely assume you have something to hide that is even worse than a guilty verdict.
I might ignore a discovery request if I felt that the documents in question would likely result in criminal prosecution or additional, much more serious, civil cases. That's the only rational reason that I can think of to ignore discovery. Because, seriously seriously seriously, You. Cannot. Ignore. Discovery.
It's possible that this was just wild incompetence. It's possible that Jones is arrogant enough to think he is above the court. I do not know. But the behavior of him and his lawyers in these cases is beyond baffling. If they aren't hiding something criminal, and aren't hiding the most damning possible evidence, then they are either incompetent or insane.
[1] https://infowarslawsuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Septe...
Also note that in a civil trial you do not have a right against self-incrimination. You can refuse to testify but your opponent can use your lack of testimony against you.
In the Texas trial, I believe Andino Reynal (the counsel at trial) was the 13th attorney they had retained. Yes, 13. At this point, I'm convinced Alex Jones is right up there with Faketoshi as the worst client you could ever have.
The man was fined more than any other person in the history of humanity for saying words. A billion dollars! pharmaceutical companies that knowingly and willfully killed people have not been fined to such an extent.
And yet Alex was denied the ability to say words in his defence during his trial. "words" like "I'm innocent".
Citizens respect the outcomes of trials not because they follow a some set procedure, but because they think justice happened.
In major political case, in which a a populist talk show host, questioned the official narrative around an event. The state would not allow him to have his say, to raise constitutional issues. While the prosecution spent days talking about things he wasn't allowed to, and opened the trial by telling the jury this is their opportunity to take away Alex's megaphone, to silence him forever.
Alex might need to leave America, like Snowden, and continue his talk show abroad. Will the freest country in the world confiscate his passport to prevent that from happening.
This is a battle for public opinion. You might think you won this, but you haven't really.
I could just quote thwayunion's comments on not being allowed to re-litigate issues that were already decided on in an attempt to derail the damages phase of the trial, but Jones already attempted to argue that what he was doing was protected speech. (In fact, I wasn't even going to respond until I remembered his TCPA motions where he tried just that.)
In De La Rosa v. Alex Jones et al, (D-1-GN-18-001842, 345th District Court of Travis County, Texas), Infowars filed an anti-SLAPP motion, which is implemented in Texas under the Texas Citizens Participation Act (TCPA). From [0]:
> "The [TCPA] protects citizens who petition or speak on matters of public concern from retaliatory lawsuits that seek to intimidate or silence them." In re Lipsky, 460 S.W.3d 579, 584 (Tex. 2015) (orig. proceeding). The protection comes in the form of a motion to dismiss a suit that would stifle the defendants' exercise of those rights.
In the anti-SLAPP motion, Jones' attorneys argued the case on its merits - that is, at this point in the trial, they weren't attempting to delay and obstruct by any means necessary, they were actually cooperating with the court.
And yet, despite actually working with the court, their motion was denied, meaning the lawsuit was not dismissed for infringing upon Jones' first amendment rights. And this is extremely notable since the TCPA is one of the most aggressive anti-SLAPP statues in the country - that is, if you lose an anti-SLAPP motion in Texas, your speech is so insanely out of line that basically no court would consider it to be defensible under the first amendment. Again, from [0]:
> CONCLUSION
> Having determined that the parents established a prima facie case for defamation per se that was not subject to the defense raised by Appellants, we affirm the district court's order denying Appellants' motion to dismiss.
His other anti-SLAPP motions also failed.
In summary, Jones already tried the first amendment defense, and lost. Therefore, even if he cooperated and wasn't defaulted on, he would still be barred from presenting a free speech defense during the damages hearing, because the court had already decided that his speech was not protected by the first amendment.
I'm following this discussion as it's educational, but fwiw, dear God no. I trust trials, inasmuch as I do, because I believe they follow a known, afore-indicated and public procedure, which is the only remotely meaningfilul thing that can try to provide equality of treatment and a sane outcome.
Turning over all your email/phone data, your financial records, email and phone data from all your employees, and still being asked for more and more. I doubt the NY times, or CNN would ever be forced to turn over all their employee emails in a libel case.
Eventually he wasn't going to able to turn over something. For example he may have not had google analytics to his youtube channel that youtube took down.
You yourself might assume that Alex was going to get a fair trial if he cooperated more with discover. But is that even a reasonable assumption. His own lawyers may have know that this was a political case he was going to lose no matter what, if the discovery process was already unusually intrusive.
This is not true. Evidence was shown in the trials that InfoWars looked at and responded to traffic analytics.
In a criminal case, the prosecution does not typically rely on a defendant's cooperation with a discovery process. Instead, the state obtains a warrant to search the defendant's property and gather the evidence required to build their case. If this were a criminal trial, the police would have shown up at Alex's house and place of work. If Alex refused to let the police search his property, they would have used whatever physical force was necessary to remove Alex and execute a lawful search of his property. Then a trial would have happened using any lawfully discovered evidence. Jones cannot ignore a warrant; guns and battering rams and overwhelming force will compel him to comply.
This sequence of events is not possible in civil cases, because civil courts do not typically use force to compel discovery. Instead, they have only the threat of a default judgement to compel discovery. The state has less power to compel discovery, so in cases of obstruction the recourse to the aggrieved party is different.
The common denominator is that proper trial cannot happen if one party can arbitrarily withhold key evidence from the other party. You CANNOT simply refuse to let the police execute a lawful warrant and expect to proceed with a normal trial. The state will execute the warrant. Similarly, you CANNOT simply refuse to share evidence with the plaintiff and expect to proceed with a normal trial. The state will not bring a battering ram to your home, but it will find you guilty by default.
This wasn't a show trial, and Alex wasn't "refused" a trial. He had a right to a trial to determine innocence or guilt. He chose to give up that right by repeatedly and willfully refusing the comply with discovery requests.
I would get a decent lawyer who knows the rules of evidence.
As for the amount - the highest fine paid by Wall Street firms for the 2008 crisis was less than $100M. One of those numbers is unjust for sure.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/alex-jones-railed-against-sandy-19364...
Actual headline is: Alex Jones told to pay $965m damages to Sandy Hook victims' families
@dang pls fix.
In an ideal world the title field would auto-populate from the page title, which would (at least mostly) work fine on BBC News because they're pretty disciplined about keeping page titles and rendered titles on the page in sync. But we don't live in an ideal world: not all sites do that, and there's no hard requirement for them to do so. Plenty will, for example, SEO the heck out of the page title such that it doesn't match the title rendered in the page. You wouldn't want to use the page title as the HN title in these cases.
So we're left with the current situation where an article's title can be updated, but the title on HN isn't. Can't really blame either HN or article submitters for that.
Those companies aren't even fined or put behind a prescription-wall.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...
Pharmaceutical companies, in general, know how to listen to their lawyers and shut the hell up.
It's insane that they didn't.
If you look at the fine, you will see that many families were affected. There is nothing unreasonable about that amount of money awarded from that perspective.
There are also two important distinctions:
1. The American court system is inherently adversarial and judges/juries have a lot of discretion. The strategy employed by the defense does matter and a bad strategy can be expensive. If the lawyers in the opioid cases had employed the strategies used by Jones and his lawyers -- instead of working hard to get a settlement -- their damages would likely have been an order of magnitude larger than $26B & the executives behaving like Jones would be in jail. Jones, in many ways, has only himself to blame for the size of these damages. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
2. The $26B and counting will actually be paid. I would guess that Jones will only ever end up paying a small faction of the <$1B.
Note that gp said "people who released opioids upon the American public". How much of those $26 billion fines are towards individuals that profited from those opioids rather than some fictional entity that can just be re-created as needed.
The Sackler family was listed alongside Purdue pharma. More importantly, personal liability in opioid cases goes FAR beyond civil damages. Dozens of physicians have received fines comparable in net worth to that fine Jones received. Much more important, those physicians have also received prison sentences. Opioid litigation is still ongoing, so the $26B is a floor not a ceiling, and the settlement didn't preclude further prosecution or litigation against a large number of potential defendants.
Jail time and additional financial penalties remain on the table and a real possibility, including for individual drug company execs and major shareholders. In fact, at least one drug co exec has already been charged criminally, found guilty, and received a prison sentence.
If any drug company exec or investor acted as brazenly as Jones has, they will certainly receive a huge financial penalty and a stiff prison sentence. Unfortunately, most of those people are much smarter than Jones so prosecution won't be nearly as open-and-shut.
More importantly, though, is that the Texas damages were split into ~$4.5M as compensatory damages (this is the part where you make amends for the harm you've caused), and the remaining ~$45M as punitive damages (the part where you). Texas has a cap on how much you can _actually_ be forced to pay in punitive damages, and it is specifically forbidden to instruct juries on the existence of this cap, so as to avoid tempting the jury to tack their actual punitive damages onto the compensatory damages number.
The amount in this case will almost certainly going to have a similar-ish split, and Connecticut is likely to have similar-ish laws in place. I'm not sure how this all works, but there's also the interesting detail that, if this was just one judgment, the punitive damages cap might apply to the aggregate amount rather than per plaintiff (So: if there is a $1M cap, does that mean he pays no more than $1M, so each family gets $125k, or each family can't get more than $1M, and he pays $8M).
NAL, but according to the New York Times, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
> This case presented the greatest financial risk to Mr. Jones, because he was found liable of violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, by using lies about the shooting to sell products on Infowars. There is no cap on punitive damages under that law.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/12/us/alex-jones-verdic...
(I have no particular reason to believe this verdict will stand unchanged, but whatever happens to knock the damages down, it will be something very different than what happens in Texas, where state and federal law caps punitive damages in relation to the underlying compensatory damages).
The other obvious difference between this case and Texas is that there are many more plaintiffs here.
> «We disagree with the basis of the default, we disagree with the court’s evidentiary rulings. In more than 200 trials in the course of my career I have never seen a trial like this», Pattis added. «Today is a very, very dark day for freedom of speech»
given that another bullet states
> claimed the shooting was a "false flag" operation planned by the government using "crisis actors" to undermine gun rights
which gives very little space for interpretation.
I can claim that McDonald's hamburgers are made of cat meat to lower prices and it's the exact same thing. It's only because it's political (and Jones is a perennial example to be paraded about as the standard for "evil far-right conservative extremist" thought) that it gets contorted into what it has.
This will predictably bite people in the cheeks later when this case is used as pretense for going after someone those chastising Jones agree with.
(The numbers in the Oberlin case also flatly refute your argument as well; there, a conservative-friendly plaintiff won a number comparable to what the Sandy Hook parents won here. The big distinction is that there were many more Sandy Hook parents than there were defamed Oberlin candy store owners.)
A parent (individual) isn't a corporation with profits to be damaged. I don't doubt a claim of emotional distress, but it's a stretch to say every single parent's character was defamed. As far as I saw from trial clips, one nutjob lady claimed Info Wars radicalized her into going after parents.
Defamation in that case doesn't make much sense based on the stuff I saw presented.
Which seems to indicate that his end game is to hope for the broader political winds to shift so radically rightward that this judgement against him is somehow unenforceable, perhaps because the very enforcement apparatus has been destroyed by that shift.
Also, let’s not walk this eggshell here of “did he make any specific claim”, this is the same bullshit that defends trump from calling covid hoax and whatnot.
Those are individuals who should be tried independently of Jones. By that standard, anybody who goes and commits a crime because of song lyrics should find the artist tried as an accomplice.
It's not "walking on eggshells," it's a matter of legal accuracy. You may not like it, but it's important for maintaining a fair courts system (without which, we forfeit a civil society and revert to tribalism).
later edit; I wrote the following I think as the reply below was being written
If you watched the Texas Jones trial, you saw the jury be instructed in some detail on what forms of damage they could and could not attribute to Jones. But you can also just look this up; there's no shortage of documents on the Internet that lay out the procedure for attributing damages to a proven case of defamation.
Long story short: if you damage somebody's reputation with false statements and, following causally from that damage, they suffer losses because lunatics start harassing them on the street, you are in fact liable for those losses.
If an artist published songs with lyrics that met the criteria for defamation, and then people heard the song and committed crimes, the artist would be liable for defamation and the listeners who committed crimes would be guilty of those crimes (notably, defamation is civil, not criminal).
If you’re curious what constitutes defamation, it’s not a complex list: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation .
Now, my kind viewers on Hacker News, I have to attest that these are just my opinions, and as such, I cannot strongly recommend that this viewership immediately find out rglover's personal information and regularly and constantly forward that information to the New York City Metropolitan Police Department's phone numbers for anti-terrorism or crime prevention (available here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/investigative/investi...).
Thank god, where we live in a type of society where, as rglover describes, I am free to make any statements I please, in any manner I please, and claim protection under the right to free speech, and things like defamation and libel law simply do not exist.
Yes, you are.
> things like defamation and libel law simply do not exist.
I never said they didn't exist.
I did not know about his album /Politics/, for which a most amazing sleeve is conceived:
in the image he is hypersmiling, his teeth visually tricked into an impossible shining blinding white (see https://genius.com/album_cover_arts/28060 )
There is opinion, there is lying; there is good faith and there is bad faith. And there is an image of "politics" with hypertouched re-imaging of reality.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/facc1f5a-91e1-42b9-9d72-d36ee88...
Without evidence? Wouldn't this just be slander?
from: https://twitter.com/SubodhChandra/status/1580285453348921344
But I'll be generous and give that lawsuit a 0.01% chance.
But less tongue in cheek, I think Hamuko's comment has the right idea.
In sum, it's good to know that we're trying to hold him to account, but it seems unlikely that this stops him in any material way from just continuing on the way he has been.
Our system is not setup for situations that involve faith as bad as Jones', on the part of people who have not themselves committed an obvious violent crime.
So this isn't quite like the Texas situation, where Jones attorneys successfully convinced the jury to award relatively small compensatory damages and large punitive damages --- those Texas punitive damages will get knocked way back, because there are local and federal caps on the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages.
Still, I think the odds he actually is forced to pay almost any of this are vanishingly small.
Still a lot of "if's" here!
And doesn't the responsibility to pay up remain for money made after the bankruptcy event? Or does declaring bankruptcy ensure a clean slate such that income from new ventures is safe from being confiscated?
A bankruptcy discharge does usually ensure a clean slate for new ventures. However, some types of debt are "nondischargeable" and can survive a bankruptcy. That includes "intentional torts" like these instances of defamation. So, it's likely that these plaintiffs/creditors will be able to go after his new ventures.
Still however, I wish the laws were more selective about which funds are ripe for being taken from. E.g., Alex Jones should have to pay up for money that was made from the source of the problem (the podcasts in this case), if he had, say, funds attained from a side-business of roofing, those should be untouched. And if he continues with his roofing business, maybe we shouldn't be taking all of those funds. Otherwise, I fear we are really just erecting disincentives for them to be good and upstanding contributors to society. As losing defendants of these battles are likely to be a perilous group, the issue probably deserves more careful handling. What are your thoughts?
Not if you have lived in Florida for the past 40 months[0], which is why many professional athletes change their residency to Florida and start the clock on the day they sign their professional contract. It appears Alex missed a trick here.
[0]https://www.floridabankruptcynow.com/floridas-homestead-exem...
You could take everything I own and prevent me from ever earning another dollar and it wouldn't be $64 million dollars.
I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million. The US government values a human life at $10 million, is this 6x worse than what the killer did?
You're massively underestimating both the impact of Jones's behavior and the value of a lifetime of earnings for many two earner families.
Assume both parents were the equivalent of senior SWEs at google and now cannot work. The assumption that they can no longer work is not an unreasonable assumption; their children were slaughtered and then they were threatened by angry mobs for years (and still are). I wouldn't be able to hold down a job.
$64M * 2% = $1,300,000 per year safe withdrawal. (The 4% rule is good if you are retired, but 2% is more realistic if you're eg in your early 30s.)
$1,300,000 / 2 = $640,000 income per earner.
Subtract $20,000 per person to compensate for typical healthcare and retirement benefits [1]. Actually that's a lower bound because of tax implications. We're now at $620,000 per earner.
I'm actually surprised that there aren't at least a few families for whom the number is higher; eg two surgeons, a surgeon and a lawfirm partner, a principal engineer and a VP, etc. would all have lost far more than $640K/yr/earner. These aren't typical pairings, but they're also not particularly rare, and the Sandy Hook community's family median income is nearly 2x the national average so it's the type of place you might expect to find these sorts of people over-represented.
So anyways, we are already within the Senior FAANG salary range and haven't even considered the various serious damages caused by Jones's behavior, beyond his victims' inability to hold down fairly normal upper middle class jobs. Many of them had to move multiple times, probably now have serious and life-long mental health issues from the harassment piles on top of trauma, etc. Once you include those damages, you probably end up with that $64M principal translating to something that is not far from the median family income for Sandy Hook.
I think people in this thread are massively underestimating the value of a lifetime of labor. This number is perfectly compensatory for eg a married couple that are both MDs, biglaw lawyers, FAANG engineers, finance professionals, or any number of other well-paying white collar jobs.
Being threatened the way that these families have -- after losing my child -- would absolutely wreck my mental health. There's no way that I or my wife would be able to live a normal life after the type of harassment incited by Jones. Certainly not hold down a job while looking over our shoulders and processing the trauma of losing a child and being hunted down by wackos in the aftermath.
The safe withdrawal rate on $64,000,000 when you're decades away from retirement age is probably closer to 2% than 4%, which puts us at $1,280,000 per year. That's $640,000 per earner. As a Senior at a FAANG -- which probably isn't my terminal level -- my income + benefits are north of this number.
Now allocate 1/3-1/2 of that $1.2M/yr to personal security and the cost of not having employer-sponsored healthcare and retirement benefits and you're already down to the equivalent of perhaps $250,000 - $400,000 per earner. That's fairly believable. And my only operating assumption is that this sort of trauma makes maintaining a white collar career path difficult/impossible.
And there are lots of other recurring expenses even aside from personal security associated with being hounded by a mob of armed wackos. I'd bet we would get down to $100,000 - $150,000 per earner per year of safe withdrawal income after extraneous expenses.
If I had to guess, the judge isn't going that much further than simply compensating these families for the cost of losing a lifetime of two normal incomes and compensation for other things that are necessary due to Jones's behavior.
I was under the impression the courts were "unwinding" (perhaps not the correct technical term) some of his bankruptcy efforts for precisely this - being illusory efforts to avoid consequences, rather than functional lack of solvency.
It depends on if your goal in a trial about the horrible damages done to the parents of murdered children was only to compensate in some way those suffering parents for that defamation. If your goal was to attack Alex Jones because you don't like him (you're an anti-fan) and you don't like people who like him, then this will be disappointing. Really anything other than summary execution would be disappointing.
(This thought feels familiar).
That's not much of a breakdown, and if anything it seems to go against the idea that these dollar amounts aren't punitive. Are we supposed to assume that that particular plaintiff would have been $60 million richer if Jones hadn't had said what he said? Ridiculous.
The emotional distress damages are more subjective, of course, but I still don't see the amounts as any less punitive at this point.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/12/us/alex-jones-verdic...
> This case presented the greatest financial risk to Mr. Jones, because he was found liable of violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, by using lies about the shooting to sell products on Infowars. There is no cap on punitive damages under that law.
> ...
> The next step will be for the judge to consider punitive damages, which would be in addition to Wednesday’s verdict.
The article How the jury divided $965 million in damages among the plaintiffs in the case. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/us/politics/alex-jones-da...
This has a breakdown of the compensatory damages and you get things like:
> Defamation/slander damages, past and future: $60 million
> Emotional distress damages, past and future: $60 million
> Total damages: $120 million
for one defendant. As there were 14 defendants, this can sum up quite quickly.
No. No, it should not be.
And, since there was profit from the lying, shouldn't the damages be greater than the profit from the lies?
Yes. Yes, it should be.
And, legally, I'm pretty sure (but IANAL) that "deliberately lied", "repeatedly", "for profit", and "causing harm" were very relevant in deciding how much the fine should be.
(Except, as entiex pointed out, that this was only compensatory, not punitive. Still... the harm went on and on and on for the families, as the lies went on and on and on. Is that allowed to be figured into the amount of compensatory damage? I think so.)
My overall point: It wasn't just "saying something is a hoax". It was much more than that, and therefore the damage is much more, so the fine is much more, and justly so.
i hate double standards
Yes, we should everyone accountable for slander & libel. Even journalists.
>i hate double standards
Aren't we? Please provide examples of actual defamation (i.e., lies that were known to be lies, that caused damage to the subject of those lies) that haven't been the subject of legal proceedings?
Edit: Changed "libel" to "defamation" to be more inclusive as to give you more opportunity to provide examples.
The Jones trials entered the public imagination because he's a character and his defense was clownishly incompetent in a way that takes no legal training to laugh at.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-05/alex-jone...
Liars on CNN get fired. Plaigiarists at the New York Times get fired.
Let's contrast this to ... say ... Fox "News".
Oh, wait, Fox testified in court that they weren't news.
Sorry, my fault.
Yes.
You can sue news media companies under the same laws Alex Jones was sued. People do it all the time.
By this measure, if I intentionally harass someone on Twitter I'd have to pay the victim about $50 (on a good day). Since Alex Jones has a much larger following, he'd therefore have to pay more proportional to that.
I found that line of reasoning... well, reasonable. But then again, I'm not impartial here.
I'd argue traditional media reaches many more people and the impact of intentional lies is that much greater.
Media is constantly being sued for defamation. The difficult part is showing they had evidence they were lying. That was overwhelming in these cases, which is what makes them unique.
I'm not at all a fan of lying, not in the least and think news companies get off way too easy... but $1 for every lie * every person who heard it... that's just a little wishful, lol
That doesn't make it any less reasonable of a standard.
Just reporting something incorrectly isn't punishable at all. Publishing something poorly sourced isn't punishable. Stating a disagreeable opinion isn't punishable. What Jones, Fox and Newsmax did was done with active malice.
I'm probably just a bit bias, as I remember a bit of a fiasco with content creators relatively recently with the Johnny Depp trial.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/02/johnny-...
here's an excerpt from the editor's note: The first published version of this story stated incorrectly that Internet influencers Alyte Mazeika and ThatUmbrellaGuy had been contacted for comment before publication. In fact, only Mazeika was asked, via Instagram. After the story was published, The Post continued to seek comment from Mazeika via social media and queried ThatUmbrellaGuy for the first time.
So did the original author simply lie? Did they forget that they never contacted these people? What was the punishment? Clicking on her profile it appears she still publishes regularly.
I just am not a fan of that "loophole." What's to stop FOX news from saying "we just heard all of this bad stuff about the voting machines?" What if its just the opinions of the hosts that the voting machines are compromised?
Not at all saying this is what happened. Just saying its kinda frustrating that _if_ you're smart about it and change your actions, you can still have the same effect of misleading millions of people but be entirely "OK."
I think that's a very interesting aspect of this decision. Alex Jones is a very easy person for some people to hate, but will those same people cheer on Trump suing news outlets over the piss dossier and other fabrications, or Kyle Rittenhouse suing people who reported he shot three unarmed black people? And these were things said by actual purported news outlets, not just a guy whose entire schtick is clearly intended to be more entertainment than actual information.
This decision could usher in a new era of fact-based news reporting if it manages to set legal precedent for cases from both sides of the political aisle. But I'm not sure if I can trust either judges or the media to take the next steps required to make that happen.
If you do that and have a track record of consistency, then your legal liability is pretty minimal.
Well, I guess there's degrees of lying.
I 100% understand what you're getting at though and I do believe _most_ companies and journalists do practice this... however I've noticed a trend where you'll have a headline or statement that is based on "anonymous sources" or "twitter user says X." Intentionally packing in as much of the claim as possible while minimizing the "source."
One of the most recent examples is from yesterday.
This is the headline VICE News put out yesterday: Elon Musk Spoke to Putin Before Tweeting Ukraine Peace Plan: Report https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake44z/elon-musk-vladimir-pu...
No reasonable person could infer that the entire headline is based off of a claim that has been denied by everyone involved. Musk can weather "negative" headlines like that but I'm more concerned about those that don't have the luxury of shrugging that off.
>And when you do make mistakes, you should have a practice of correcting them and documenting the fact that you did so, so that your audience is about equally likely to encounter the correction as they were the mistaken report.
I want to believe that... but there's certainly enough examples of people having their reputation completely trashed by the media with the truth only coming out years later. News companies have incentives to get views/clicks. I can't imagine "we messed up" is as attractive as "this person is a monster."
I 100% agree that they should make best effort to correct stories.
Alex Jones is directly inciting people to go harass the plaintiffs so he bears liability for his actions.
Im genuinely asking because i don’t understand how this works.
I was under the impression that saying “Trump is a murderous liar” is fine, if I say “Go kill trump”etc then thats incitement.
Does that make sense?
If Alex Jones said "go kill these families," he'd likely be facing criminal charges. Instead, he made up specific claims which he kept repeating even after being shown evidence a reasonable person would accept as refutation of said claims.
To your analogy: if you said "Trump is a murderous liar who buggered my pet rabbit last Tuesday in New York," then were shown evidence Trump was in London and up to no buggery, and yet you kept saying it, yes, Trump might have a claim against you.
You could argue that using drones to kill people is murdering, you can point to times when he lied. It also just strikes me as different when saying things about someone who is in public office and saying things about private citizens who aren't in the spotlight at all.
If this was a soccer game he basically walked to the edge of the field and sat there the whole game and then complained that the refs were in a conspiracy against him because the opposing team was able to score unopposed.
This is what he did, and it's defamation. If I say "go kill Trump" that might be incitement (although it might not be if it's not credible.) If I say "Trump is a murderous liar," that's really just a personal characterization that can't be disproven - you can find things in his past that can be interpreted as murder, and things that can be interpreted as lies, whether that makes him a "murderous liar" is just banter. If I say that Trump molested a child, and I clearly intend for the charge to be taken seriously, that's defamation unless I can show the kid.
He was not sued for "incitement", he was sued for defamation.
To prove defamation, you need to prove that someone lied about you, and that those lies caused material harms.
You saying "Trump is a murderous liar" is largely fine because:
- A reasonable reader, familiar with the context of the place you are writing, would understand that you aren't making a factual claim that Trump murdered a person but rather you are expression a rhetorical political opinion.
- Trump is a public figure, which means you must meet the "actual malice" standard of reckless disregard for the truth.
- Trump must have been materially harmed by your statements for it to be worth suing you.
If you, on the other hand, falsely and deliberately recklessly said: "Trump murdered person X", repeated that claim for years, and convinced hundreds thousands of people that it was true to the point where Trump had to move houses several times due to ongoing death threats, then you would probably be liable for defamation.
The _context_ matters. The _breadth of your reach_ matters. The _actual harms caused_ matter.
No, defamation doesn't require you to specifically be named. It's enough for them to be identified with enough specificity that they are harmed.
> If a politician says the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading the disease
There are two claims in the phrase "the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading disease".
The first claim, that they are terrible people, is not a statement of fact, but is rather an opinion. There is no factual, objective, way to determine whether someone is "a terrible person". So that part would not create the potential for liability.
The second claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" _could_ potentially be defamatory, but truth would be an absolute defense. The truth also doesn't have to be _perfect_ so long as it's "correct in the main". First, note that the claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" is still true even if the vaccinated are also spreading disease. So, your defamation claim would need to first convince the jury that the implication of the statement is "the unvaccinated are spreading disease *more than the vaccinated*". I think that implication is there, but it's a little more tenuous of a claim. Second, I don't think there would be any liability, since the vaccine has some efficacy. To defend against the defamation claim, it would be sufficient to show that the vaccine has any significant efficacy. You wouldn't need to demonstrate that the vaccine has perfect efficacy. The vaccine does have efficacy against COVID-19, so I think a defamation claim would fail here.
Finally, you'll need to go to the harms. It's going to be very difficult to demonstrate significant harm to any individual unvaccinated person, when the group includes 100M people. The harm is going to be _very_ diffused, and I think it would be difficult to demonstrate any economic harm.
So, on balance, I think a politician would still be very safe making the statement you suggested, even in light of the fact that a person doesn't need to be specifically named to press a defamation claim.
Where is this accusation made by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit? The only accusation I see is that Jones and his associates made defamatory false statements about the plaintiffs. As far as I can tell, that was the basis for the ruling, not any claims of incitement.
Of course, you can argue that there's no direct causal relationship because Jones or whoever can say 'I'm not saying to do something, but....'. But so what? If an outcome is statistically predictable there doesn't have to be a direct nexxus, a proximate one is sufficient.
That might be your personal opinion, but it's not the law. If nutjob A makes a defamatory statement about you, but doesn't tell anyone to do anything, and then nutjob B harasses you after hearing what nutjob A said, nutjob B is the one who is legally responsible for the harassment. Nutjob A is responsible for the defamation, but not for what other nutjobs might decide to do.
Now if nutjob A explicitly said things along the lines of "you should go after this person", instead of just making defamatory false factual claims about them, that would be different. But I have not seen any claims by the plaintiffs that Jones said anything like that. They're just saying he made defamatory false statements.
> If an outcome is statistically predictable there doesn't have to be a direct nexxus, a proximate one is sufficient.
This legal theory is a recipe for disaster. There's a reason why the law requires direct evidence for things like this.
I have, and I didn't see anything about claiming damages based on harassment.
> then you can express your opinion on how it's deficient
I haven't said anything was deficient.
Courts and jurors are completely fine with finding that the behavior of nutjob B (and C and D and E and F) that are predictable from the defamation are part of the damages associated with the defamation.
So, yes, nutjob A _does_ have legal liability for the damages caused by nutjobs B and C and D and E and F that are a predictable consequence of the defamation.
The law does not require "direct evidence" of the connection to every instance of harassment. It requires enough evidence that a jury can decide a "but for" causation is more likely than not. Jurors are perfectly capable of making deductions and inferences such as "person A with a massive platform lied repeatedly for years", and then "hundreds of nutjobs harassed plaintiffs based on the same lies", connecting those two facts, and deciding that it's more likely than not that the nutjobs wouldn't have harassed the person if not for person A's lies.
Do you have any actual cases where that was the ruling?
Almost always the economic harms that arise from defamation are the result of third parties responding to the defamatory content. If you couldn't incorporate the actions of third parties into the calculation of economic harm, then there would almost never be economic harm from defamation.
As for specific court cases, take a look at Gibson Bros., Inc v. Oberlin College. A jury awarded Gibson's Bakery $11M in compensatory damages (and another $33M in economic damages). Of the compensatory damages, Gibson had argued that, among other things Oberlin college should be responsible for the damages arising from:
"They blamed Oberlin for repeated vandalism and property damage and for Grandpa Gibson breaking his back while investigating the source of someone pounding on his apartment door in the middle of the night"
https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/9/2022/2022-O...
Two other examples, of course, would be the recent Alex Jones cases in TX and CT where the same reasoning also let to economic damage awards...
I understand that this is the opinion of you and others. That doesn't make it the law.
> take a look at Gibson Bros., Inc v. Oberlin College
In that case, there was evidence of communications by college officials saying things like "I hope we rain fire and brimstone down on that store". Also, the college has a responsibility for the behavior of its students that Alex Jones and his associates and employees do not have for the behavior of random nutjobs that have no association with them. So the facts in the cases are different and I don't think the Oberlin case shows a general justification for "damages from harassment" being part of a defamation claim.
> Two other examples, of course, would be the recent Alex Jones cases in TX and CT where the same reasoning also let to economic damage awards...
I didn't see that in any of the actual legal documents in those cases.
It's not really a question of law. It's more a question of fact ("were these claimed economic harms caused by the statement"), which means its a question for the jury. Which means it's the opinion of the jury that matters.
As far as "the law" on this topic, typically the most relevant thing will be the jury instructions. These will vary from state to state, but let's take a look at Virginia's since those were the first I found online.
I'll highlight again my claim that we're evaluating:
"Courts and jurors are completely fine with finding that the behavior of nutjob B (and C and D and E and F) that are predictable from the defamation are part of the damages associated with the defamation."
Let's look at the 37.100 for Actual Damages from the VA pattern jury instructions: https://www.vacourts.gov/courts/circuit/resources/model_jury...
> ...in determining the amount of damages to which he is entitled, you may take into consideration all of the circumstances surrounding the statement, the occasion on which it was made and the extent of its publication, the nature and character of the insult, *the probable effect on those who heard the statement*, and its probable and natural effect upon the plaintiff's personal feelings and upon his standing in the community and in business
I've indicated the key section which directly supports my claim. I'll turn it over to you. Can you find a state's pattern jury instructions that *don't* behave the way I suggest? I'm not familiar with all 50 states defamation laws, but I'll be very surprised if you find a single state that doesn't allow the jury to include the predictable actions of third parties based on the defamation as part of the harms of defamation.
"The probable effect on those who heard the statement" is ambiguous. Does it mean the effect on their opinion of the plaintiff? Or does it mean the effect on their actions?
Legally, I believe it's the first. The defendant can be held responsible for the probable effects of their defamatory false statements as far as inducing negative opinions in others regarding the plaintiff. But the defendant cannot be held responsible for some other nutjob, who is not an associate or employee or in some other relationship with the defendant, choosing to harass the plaintiff based on nothing more than defamatory false statements. There would have to be something in the statements that explicitly incited others to commit wrongful acts, instead of just inducing them to hold negative opinions. And, as I have said, in the Alex Jones case I have not found anything that alleges or attributes incitement on the part of Jones.
This is an instance of a more general legal principle that individuals are free agents and are presumed to be in control of their actions, so no third party can be legally responsible for what an individual chooses to do (in the absence of some legally recognized relationship such as principal-agent). Explicit incitement can go against that presumption, but simple false statements that could reasonably induce a negative opinion cannot.
They're jury instructions. There isn't further legal analysis. These words mean precisely what a jury of your peers interpret them to mean. That's it.
You don't get to make a legal quibble over a juror's reasonable interpretation of the instructions. If there's ambiguity, it's up to the jury to resolve at that point (and often jury instructions deliberately have some ambiguity to them—because the job of the jury is to apply sometimes ambiguous phrases such as "reasonable care" to specific facts).
So you can't say "oh, most of society is just misinterpreting the jury instructions", because that just means you might very well lose the argument before a jury!
You say there's ambiguity. Fine. I left a challenge for you. Can you find a single state where the jury instructions are unambiguous and foreclose on my interpretation? One state where the actual harm jury instructions clearly don't allow damages from the predictable actions of third parties?
Frankly, I'm done with the discussion until you try. I've put in effort to cite cases and jury instructions to support my positions, while you've cited nothing but your own opinion.
And how do we find out what that is? We find out by looking at what happened in actual cases.
In the Gibson case that you cited, I saw nothing that indicated that the jury awarded damages based on harassment by unrelated third parties. There is a mention of Grandpa Gibson "breaking his back", but there is nothing to indicate that the jury awarded any damages based on, for example, medical or other costs associated with that back injury. According to your position, damages for that should have been included. On mine, they shouldn't (the Gibsons would have to recover such damages from whoever was pounding on their apartment door in the middle of the night). So this instance supports my position, not yours.
Similarly, in the Alex Jones cases, I see no indication that the juries awarded any damages based on harassment by unrelated third parties. Which, again, is consistent with the position I have been arguing.
"I don't see something" is not evidence that it doesn't exist.
> So this instance supports my position, not yours.
Does it? You haven't cited anything beyond "I haven't seen it". If you want to claim it supports your position, show your work.
Show the breakdown of the $11M in damages, and show that it excludes property damages, and the medical damages.
"I see no indication that..."
Again, I'm not going to carry this conversation forward unless you actually start citing sources, and pointing to the breakdown of damages if you claim it supports your position.
For all you've demonstrated, "I've seen no indication" may only be evidence that you haven’t looked.
Their actions come closer to criminal. Alex Jones isn't being criminally investigated; this is all civil.
Obviously, it's easier for the authorities to act first, then the families can sue.
The whole thing is senseless, the harassers are crazy people who believe that it was all "false flags" (for what? who knows), when these kids did die. Each harasser that is caught need to be shown the photos of these poor dead kids and forced to watch them, it will haunt them forever. As for Jones, he is a billionaire, this tragedy made is filthy rich, that's the only reason he exploited it. He probably never believed himself in these things.
Relevant to that process, Jones took the stand in his own defense, to show remorse and indicate why the jury should find for a lower penalty, and... Did the opposite of that. He lost his temper and managed to strongly indicate he had learned nothing and showed no remorse. Juries tend to take a particularly dim view of such behavior (often even dimmer than a judge, which is one of the reasons so many states don't involve the jury in the process of assigning penalty).
Interestingly enough, the judge also has the authority to assign penalty here (Jones' behavior on the stand and in court was egregious) and has not done so yet. Her say comes soon.
These damages are absolutely insane for emotional distress and defamation. The average lifetime earnings of a US citizen are $1.7 million. These damages essentially allege that each plaintiff suffered emotional distress so severe it was over forty times the average person's lifetime earnings. That's plainly absurd.
That's an excellent legal argument, is the kind of thing that could probably win before a judge... And has no bearing on what a jury finds. In general, the reasoning of a jury is private to the jury. They can award maximum damages because they think Jones is ugly (all you have to do is get fourteen people to agree that's a fair thing to do to the man; hypothetically, the averaging effect over so many folks is a back-stop. That back-stop backfires if the defendant is particularly loathsome; recall how long it took to seat a jury for Martin Shkreli).
This is why damages are, in so many places, not put before a jury.
While I think there are many people would forgo that protection or pay less for protection it's one of the ineffable personal balances of security/cost/ease of life that I could easily see a jury saying "if they went the perfect security route then they could easily spend this much".
You can't ignore that cost just because they'd normally never earn enough to pay for that security... much like a company that causes an illness is on the hook for cost of treatment even if a person couldn't normally afford to treat themselves.
His lies had a measurable value of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, so the plaintiffs' reputations had that value, and damages should be calculated against that.
> The largest fine paid by a banking executive responsible for the 2008 Financial Crisis was $67.5 million
A few tens of millions would have set straight almost everyone involved, the victims getting their money, Jones having to pay out of his pocket. But $1 billion means Jones will never be able to pay the sum, and, what's more, it will also silence him indefinitely. Which will make lots of his supporters think that was the intention all along, and in so doing making a mockery out of the act of justice.
[1] https://twitter.com/WSBChairman/status/1580289631714947072
How does it do that?
You don't need billions or even millions to practice your free speech rights. Jones still has a website with a huge reader/viewership last I checked, which is far more reach than he'd have using the last backstop platform of free speech: literally speaking standing on a box in the town square.
Many people like him who have been demonetized on mainstream platforms because of content policy violations continue to operate with the financing of wealthy private donors who share their beliefs and agendas.
Furthermore, there are plenty of media companies that would probably hire him as a paid commentator or to host an entertainment show where he continues to talk about the subjects over which he isn't being sued for defamation. They would probably pay him well enough to pay these damages for years to come and still live a comfortable life.
He can also keep selling his dietary supplements to his audience who seem to believe in their efficacy.
He just can't slander the Sandy Hook families anymore without fear of financial repercussions.
A billion dollar fine is justified because idiots read his blog and decided a baseless conspiracy theory seemed plausible?
That's laughable. I didn't think I'd ever find myself on the same side of something as Alex Jones and yet here I am. These people lost their minds.
What it really means is for this fine to make sense, we need to start fining other people and companies TRILLIONS. I feel like I'm in an Austin Powers movie, or worse, on Reddit.
He isn’t going to jail (which seems like it should be in play to me).
He’s just not able to keep any of his ill gotten gains. It’s really hard to feel sympathetic here.
It's like "babies first day in court" in this thread with all the ridiculous crap being said.
The total number is nosebleed-high because Jones managed to be culpable for one of the most egregious defamation cases in 50 years against more than a dozen people simultaneously.
Also, because he boycotted the trial and lost it by default.
No, can you cite a precedent for someone being ordered to pay almost a billion dollars for saying a mean thing on a blog. You said it's precedented, I was asking for the precedent.
OP said: "It's not a BILLION. It's a BILLION divided by fifteen plaintiffs, which brings the per-plaintiff number to a high-but-precedented number."
Th adjective "precedented" modifies "number". In this sentence, "number" refers to the quantity "a BILLION divided by fifteen plaintiffs".
Clearly, it's the per-plaintiff number that OP refers to as "precedented", not the total sum.
Figuring out that "precedented" refers to 1B/15 in the above sentence requires roughly a fifth grade reading level. The fact that InfoWars has an audience is become less surprising by the comment.
Imagine for a minute if Trump decided to sue everyone who called him a Russian agent on TV or in writing. The award would be in the trillions.
You're obsessing with the fact that the total of the individual damage awards is so high. But under the law, if you defame a lot of people, they each get their own individual damage awards; they don't have to share some abstract or artificial dollar amount between them.
So you want examples of high-dollar online defamation awards? LMGTFY: A Nevada guy won a $38 million jury verdict [0]. Three New Hampshire businessmen won a jury verdict of $274 million for defamatory billboards accusing them of being crooks [1]. A South Carolina mayor won a $50 million jury verdict against someone who sent defamatory emails [2]. I haven't looked to see whether these all stood up on appeal; feel free to do your own research.
[0] https://www.robertdmitchell.com/internet-defamation
[1] https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2017-09-29/jury-awards-record-b...
[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/south-carolina/artic...
His listeners believe that the literal devil controls the government, Hollywood, and the minds of liberal minded people. His listeners believe that Klaus Schwab secretly controls the United States and that his goal is to feminize men and cut off children's sex organs. His listeners believe that Sandy Hook never happened and the parents are crisis actors. His listeners will believe all kinds of insane things but that has nothing to do whether justice should be served or not.
OJ is a prime example of how a truly wealthy individual can prevent the bulk of the wealth being taken from a court order.
Under Florida law. Federal law, e.g. Chapter 11 bankruptcy, overrides it.
These people imagine themselves practicing their context-free pedantry in the workplace and saying something like "Go to Massachusetts for your abortion" or something analogous regarding race, disability, sexual identity, etc. and getting crushed for their speech.
It's not the speech. In Alex Jones's case, the speech led directly to violence against the families of the dead kids. For the people who imagine themselves to be future victims of speech restrictions, it's not their speech, either. It's their lack of understanding that speech has consequences, like an inherent inability to work alongside others who cannot then trust them. What woman in Texas, for example, can trust a man who believes she has no right to control her own body when he could snitch on her?
- these people had their children murdered.
- jurors have now spent weeks hearing more direct evidence than any of us
- even Alex Jones admitted multiple times that he is a liar, and spreads these lies for money
- the jurors determined that 1) there was harm and 2) the COMPENSATORY damages [0] for only part of the victims is $965 million
- the police are neither motivated, capable, nor often successful at gathering enough evidence to prosecute anonymous telephone or public threats made by cowards who try to make threats anonymously.
YET, with all those facts, you think it is appropriate to FURTHER question the integrity of the victims.
You make very clear that you have no idea what you are talking about, and are likely one of the idiots who laps up the lies from the likes of the defendant.
Rethink your life, and at least stop posting idiocy dressed up as "oh, just asking questions". You are only displaying your inability to think or even to get a clue, not persuading anyone.
Yikes.
[0] compensatory damages are damages to compensate for the harm itself, as opposed to punitive damages, which have not yet been determined in this trial.
A defendant has a right to trial by jury. The consequence of exercising that right is trial by a jury.
In some venues, "unfair" (quotes here because reasonable people can dispute how "fair" is to be assessed in a circumstance such as this) damages rulings are back-stopped by statutory maxima. I don't know Connecticut law, but that appears not to be the case here.
Just because the criminals at the top get away with war crimes doesn't mean the criminals lower on the totem pole shouldn't be punished. It's a false equivalence to claim otherwise.
[1] https://www.insider.com/alex-jones-free-speech-systems-infow...
But TBH I don't really want to live in a world when Alex Jones exists at all.
The issue is not with exceptions (every village is entitled to having a fool), but with the trend of large amounts of people giving them credit.
Especially in a wave of mounting relativism trying to "soften the distance between lunacy and truth".
Agreed. Screw that neanderthal dummy Joe Rogan for giving credibility to Alex Jones.
Edit: the submitter explained - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33183697 - that the original title at the time of submission is the given one; the target news agency then edited the page. Oh well - some possibility for which we must take a mental note.
I am asking honestly here- I am not sure if this is just typical engineer type "well actually..." type stuff going on, or if some attempt to downplay and discredit the judgement.
What if it happened to you? Let's imagine that a media source with millions of viewers - like a local news channel, for example, or a radio show, went live with a story that had specific and false allegations that you did something odious. Like they said you were a cannibal or a pedophile or something like that. And as a result, you were faced with a campaign of harassment and threats by fans of this source. If people googled your name, "Cannibal" was the top hit.
And they made millions of dollars from these allegations.
What would your recourse be?
There always has to be room to question events that dominate the news cycle.
Are you claiming to have done so? If that's the case, what were the results of your "public records requests"?
What rights have been suppressed? Please do tell.
What records have you reviewed?
I think this is the system working as it should.
But if he does, making money from this trash (or at least from a US audience for it) may be harder.
disgusting individual, or very broken.
That's 1 billion dollars in damages.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/us/alex-jones-finances.ht...
It would not be hard for me to go out into the world and cause more damage that I can afford to repay.
I don't think Alex Jones has that much money.
Also, could I make a deduction for my damaged reputation based on this sort of calculation/figure?
There is absolutely no way this is going to happen. The BBC are delusional.
No they’ve done the opposite of that here - saying he will pay is predicting the future (badly). Saying he’s been told to pay would have been reporting the news.
(The headline has been changed if you weren’t aware, so they must agree it was wrong.)
The phrase is frequently in these situations.
Did they ever fine / jail those doing the harassment and death threats?
Unlikely that the judgment creditors will ever see a dime--and someone has to pay for collection efforts on an hourly basis.
Because that's how the US justice system™ works.
When those large companies go in front of a jury they are respectful, they don't act like assholes to the jurors, they defend their positions well, they avoid making the jurors hate them.
Jones did none of the above. He did, seemingly, everything possible to bias the jury against him. This is the pinnacle of arrogance and stupidity.
But a billion dollars. A billion dollar judgment. You don't think they're rubbing his face in it a little? Teaching us all a lesson about what happens?
It is the juries duty to teach you a lesson when you pull crap like this within the confines the law allows. If you're going into a courtroom with nearly unlimited liability you really need to comprehend that your behavior has ramifications. In addition this punishment is not just for his past acts but the fact the accused shows no remorse about their behavior and WILL continue to behave in the same manner in the future.
For the actual damages section, I agree, a juries responsible is to determine the, well, actual economic harm that's befallen a person.
However, juries are also tasked with awarding punitive damages, and for this the juries responsibility is literally to determine the appropriate amount to teach someone a lesson. That's literally what punitive damages are intended for.
Alex Jones just got ordered to pay nearly a billion for playing a character on an online TV show.
Let that sink in.
Love em or hate em, a billion dollars is absurd.
Alex Jones was fined more money (for this Sandy Hook case) than Purdue Pharma's role in the opioid crisis.
Why do you feel the need to lie about this? Why are you so desperate to deny an obvious truth? Good men don't lie.
"Attorney General John M. Formella today announced a national settlement with Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, for their role in the opioid crisis, that will increase the amount of funds paid by the Sacklers from $4.325 billion under the original bankruptcy plan to at least $5.5 billion." https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2022/20220303-settlement-purdue-...
Don't appreciate being called a liar, but that's the internet for ya.
This monetary verdict doesn't make sense in any way.
I'd predict that he's going to flaunt the enormity if this penalty, and his fans will lap it up.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/12/us/alex-jones-verdic...
Why didn't Wolfgang Halbig get hit with the same?
whether you think courts generally award damages appropriately or not is beside the point
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-jones-lawyers-acci...
[2] https://ca.movies.yahoo.com/alex-jones-turning-own-lawyers-0...
I believe The largest fine paid by a banking executive responsible for the 2008 Financial Crisis was $67.5 million
Infowars made $165 million in 3 years [1].
1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/alex-jon...
Even legacy media manages 20%-40% margins; an outfit like InfoWars can probably get way over 50%. What exactly are their expenses?
LOL what?
> Legacy media sells ads.
Legacy media also typically has broadcasting equipment, large headcount, spectrum allocation, and so on.
> Infowars sells products.
I'm sure those supplements have extensive R&D and product development expenses /s
I didn’t defend alex Jones and i won’t. He’s a bad guy. But I care about accuracy. The idea that he’s rich is unfounded and silly
Broadcasting equipment. Think "towers/rented space on towers and dishes and antennas and radio engineers and technicians and insurance policies", not "microphones and a recording studio".
Neither he nor his companies have spectrum allocation or licenses to broadcast.
The problem of course, is that lies (in the technical sense) are pretty common and often much more damaging that this fluff up. There's a lot of billions that could change hands if the lawsuits all went up at once. But really, they won't all go up at once--it will be the political undesirables only.
America is not a place where people like being told to be quiet. Alex Jones went mainstream on the Joe Rogan show. Millions and millions of Rogan fans see Alex Jones are legitimized by this ruling. Joe Rogan has the biggest podcast in the world.
Just some things to think about. Unintended consequences.
Whether you like it or not, Alex Jones is insanely popular and so is Joe Rogan. Their audiences votes and can certainly tip elections.
I bet you never thought Trump would win in 2016. I knew that race would be close because I understand the mood of average Americans better than you.
> Just some things to think about. Unintended consequences.
It makes the punishment look unusual and petty.
Can anyone justify why the amount should be that high? Does he have 1 billion dollars?
I would have fined him 200million something he might actually have.
Using the law to make an example out of someone requires moral authority and the population to agree. COVID has shown us, America is split on that.
1) InfoWars wasn’t some small blogger or random guy on the street. It’s a business with 10s to 100s of millions in revenue depending on which documents Alex Jones had for the day
2) Alex Jones had the opportunity to defend himself and instead either did not show up to his court dates or chose the opportunity to continue attacking the plaintiffs and doubling down on perjurious statements when given orders not to
If anything the “wrong moral signal” being sent here is that even when your behavior is not functionally different from trying to rack up the highest damage amount possible, it’s still easily payable by our top echelons of society.