Maybe I’m out of touch, but doesn’t a $1.4b dollar settlement for this seem rather… large?
[0]: https://youtu.be/x-QcbOphxYs
This is when from when Jones' lawyer sent a copy of his phone to the opposition...
IANAL but it does seems like "sending an entire copy of your clients phone and making no effort to redact it" could be a thing that, you know, is bad counsel.
> his lawyer was so bad-behaved here he ended up with a disciplinary suspension
Jones had multiple lawyers throughout the process. That was in fact a big part of the problem that ended up getting him defaulted. Free speech systems (his company) do a depo with one set of lawyers that didn't comply comply with the judges orders, they'd go in unprepared and give the "I'm so sorry I'm brand new on this case" and then he'd have a completely different set of lawyers in the next depo that would rinse and recycle the same rhetoric.
It was also 2 cases, one in Texas and the larger one in Connecticut. But he pulled the same shit in both and got defaulted in both.
> the plaintiffs win by default and he doesn't get to argue his case.
The plaintiffs do win by default but he did also get to argue his case still. The trial was focused on how much damage Jones did to the plaintiffs with Jones arguing he did nothing and the plaintiffs showing how crazy it was (Including Jones's fans shooting up his house, getting fired from jobs, having friends accuse them of lying about their kid's deaths).
> And then for some reason he didn't even enter an argument during the damages calculation phase, so the jury just went with whatever the plaintiffs said.
Not really true. He did put forth really bad arguments during the damages calculations. But in both Connecticut and Texas the amount of damage was left up to the Jury to decide. They could have put forward any number from 1 to 80M (I think the highest amount). And in Connecticut the amounts were broken down for each of the victims (including an officer that responded to the shooting). That's part of what's made it impossible for him to unwind because each of the victims got different amounts of damages. There was just like 20 of them which is why the damages went so high.
His lawyers in CT didn't call witnesses but they did cross examine the plaintiffs witnesses. In the TX case they did have AJ take the stand for his own defense, the "Perry Mason" moment was during the cross examination which I'm sure he didn't want to repeat in CT.
That said, his CT lawyer was REALLY bad, far worse than his TX lawyer who famously gave away a copy of his phone by mistake.
If Alex Jones wanted a smaller settlement, he could've chosen to destroy fewer lies, comply with legal orders, or simply not commit any number of his many other legal infractions.
He's desperately trying to weasel his way out of paying any of it back by doing things like moving assets around, leaving companies empty, and then declaring bankruptcy on them. His victims will probably spend the rest of their lives chasing after the compensation they're owed, but perhaps at least taking Jones' branding from him might be punishment for a man like him.
This unidimensional analysis is so funny to me. When your lens forces you to group together Alex Jones, Bill Gates, and George Soros as part of the same “rich and influential” clique, maybe it’s time to reconsider your dimension.
Alex Jones is nothing. At best he can be described as a small business owner.
If you're net worth is above $15 million or so in the US, your in the 99th percentile. There are many orders of magnitude between you and Bezos, but you're rich. And if you have a media empire that is watched by millions, you're influential.
Alongside the class action, Jones was iirc also facing several separate lawsuits, so what you're seeing here is multiple lost lawsuits (I think he lost 4?) adding up.
The bankruptcy also doesn't wipe the slate clean for Jones afaiu, because he specifically was found to be malicious in his behavior. Court debts aren't wiped in that situation. He's still on the hook for that.
Never underestimate Trump's ability in decreeing something and hoping for it to stick long enough to cause real damage before the courts eventually strike it down - it took almost a year until the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs, by the time the first large corporations get their refunds it will be over a year, and honestly I'd be surprised if the first consumers get refunds by the end of 2026.
Trump's ability to do that is solely caused by a lot of people across all branches and levels of government too afraid to say "no" to him and getting on the receiving end of "you're fired".
I don't think there's any reasonable person who could read the full medical description of the injuries sustained and think "yeah 2.7 mill was too much".
Just with inflation (6.4m) and number of victims (22?) you get a much larger number real quick.
I’m not entertained that the court is playing an unrealistic and hyberbolic game.
I know, I’m a weirdo that wants to see realism and pragmatism in the court systems even if the defendant is a real asshole.
All of the threads related to this topic have had a pile of folks going "the amount was too much!" but hardly any of them say what they think an appropriate punishment would look like...
In criminal cases, I've seen victims getting anywhere between 50% to 10% of what they've demanded, or even nothing even when the judgement has been in their favour.
TL:DR this is never going to be a problem you have, because you'll get a decent lawyer and not be a wildly massive prick about getting your own way.
This is also the result of multiple lost lawsuits as well as additional penalties from not complying with court directives during the cases.
I think it needs to be large enough to be a real deterrent. So it needs to be large enough that there is a real risk of turning substantial profit into substantial loss. "What if we get sued for $existentiallyLargeAmount?" needs to be part of the business math when deciding whether to tell lies for profit.
"More money than exists in the world" would clearly be too much. But I'm absolutely fine with a company and its chief officers being left penniless for such behavior. So I'm definitely fine with taking everything the company has, taking everything the chief officers have, and possibly adding a bit of debt on top of that.
It has to be bigger than what the business can accept as "just a cost of doing business" or it isn't actually a deterrent.
Correct. This is what happens when you go to court and play by the rules and stop doing things when you get an injunction against said behaviors.
When you tell the court to fuck off and you can do whatever you want, repeatedly, this is when you get the deserved massive punitive smack down for being an anti-social dick.
The problem you have is the complete and total lack of ability to put yourself in the shoes of any of the victims here that had got injunctions from the court many times only to have them be ignored and for have the abuse to then scale up even further. Millions in fines does not solve the behavior, he was making more than that in scamming people. A fine that is lower than profits is just a cost of doing business.
They did not. Jones was given years and dozens of opportunities to comply. He defaulted in 2 cases because he failed to comply in both cases. He was also defaulted after being warned he'd be defaulted. The cases literally started in 2018 and resolved in 2022. The reason they dragged out for so long is primarily due to Jones not complying with court orders. Constantly having to retake depositions where the same incomplete and non-compliant answers were given.
And he appealed (and lost) the appeal for the default.
Multiple judges saw his default and concluded "This was a reasonable way to handle an unreasonable litigant".
Yes he was. Jones didn't have 1 set of lawyers from start to finish on the cases. He went through about 20 different lawyers in both cases.
That doesn't happen if a client isn't personally directing the lawyers.
His strategy was very clearly to bring in new lawyers at each depo that didn't comply with the court order. When challenged, the lawyers would say "Oh, sorry, it's my first day on this case. We'll be sure to bring it next time".
He did the same thing with the corporate representatives. He had at least 3 different people show up as the corporate representative that were supposed to bring the finances. None of them complied.
Example: they sent a copy of his cell phone to the prosecuting attorney on accident and didn't request it back in time, so 2 years of his text messages were used against him.
And the reason his lawyers were so objectively bad was because they all had about 1 month working on the case before getting fired and replaced by a new lawyer.
Meanwhile, the plaintiffs had exactly 1 set of lawyers representing them (1 in TX and one in CT).
I'm not joking when I say that Jones went through about 20 different sets of lawyers throughout the cases. You can listen to his various depositions and there's not a repeat defense lawyer in any one of the depos. I highly doubt they were all just uniquely terrible, especially given how much money Jones has. A few were really terrible (Norm, Barnes). Reynolds was actually one of Jones's better lawyers, he just messed up. Unsurprising given how little time he was on the case.
IIRC, the reason for the phone copy getting shared was because of the case hand-off between reynolds and the previous lawyers. The TX lawyers were CCed when they shouldn't have been. And in the process of getting ready for trial, reynolds missed the email informing him of the mistake.
No, his lawyers were deliberately bad. There is a massive difference.
While no direct evidence, it's almost certain that Jones when to a good lawyer at first who told him that "He was most utterly and unanimously fucked" in which Jones did the you better call Saul and got himself lawyers that would try anything at all to muck up the system. While your first response may be "No bar lawyer would do something that could lose their license", after many years doing computer work in the Texas legal system and seeing myriads of interactions, my response is "Yes they fucking would".
Jones chose poor lawyers because good ones ran away screaming after he told them what he wanted to do.
This punishment reflects not just the conduct at question by the law suit, but also the conduct during the law suit.
It was shit like him saying "noooo I didn't enrich myself, I actually lost money and popularity on site because of it", then court going "okay, could we see your financial records and site visits?"
And him just not delivering. Or not showing up at all, multiple times. Also asking for someone to deliver the head of the opposition's lawyer on a pike for a reward(that's not even exaggerating his words).
The resulting amount is basically "fuck you", and mostly coz he didn't even showed to defend himself so it wasn't challenged by court
Instead, Jones repeatedly failed to comply with court orders and attempted to delay the trial. He lied under oath, broadcast lies about the plaintiffs, and mocked the plaintiffs on his show after losing a case. He additionally broadcast his intent to continue spreading disinformation about the Sandy Hook shooting.
The long-term pattern of treating the court with contempt and clear intent to continue his illegal behavior are an extreme level of noncompliance for a defendant in a lawsuit, and they added up to an extreme penalty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones#Sandy_Hook_Elementa...
Because what he did wasn't criminal, many people wanted a maximal civil settlement in substitution.
The man made a fortune destroying the reputations of some people, and he did so by (provably) intentionally lying about them, without their consent and with nothing paid to them. They deserve every peny of that - he stole their reputations and as with all theft, reparations are logical.
In addition he grew his following with those lies, and that following will continue to give him money. This is the interest and dividends of those lies.... it's the result of him investing the reputatoins he destroyed. Since you can't sell a following, but it's still a profit generating asset, it's fair to make Jones turn over those dividends. This ensures that he'll be turning over those dividends for a long time.
Finally there's a punative component - making sure he doesn't continue to maliciously destroy reputations for profit. It's a good idea to make sure such a pile of shit thinks twice about he tells more lies to the morons and trash that follow him.
The only lesson he's learned is to hire a better legal team in the future for civil (not criminal) suits.
Is there any real reason to believe that the problem was his legal teams? You know there were a lot of them, right? Aside from the singular example late in the case, it is plausible that most/all of his legal teams were quite competent.
It's a bit messier than that. For example if he's going to set up a new media empire things like banks will give a pretty big fuck you to loans and such if they think all your assets will be captured by the court and they'll be left holding the bag.
This doesn't stop him from putting together money in other ways, but massively increases the difficulty on his part as every time he does he'll find a suit showing up to collect it from him.
And as others have said, this has nothing to do with good/bad lawyers. The good lawyers came in at first and told him he was totally screwed, and because he's such a pompous ass he could not handle that.
However the notion that Jones has learned something is so utterly preposterous that not even his fans are stupid enough to believe it