Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.
I’m not really in the loop on this but can someone ELI5 why Alex Jones is the only one that’s being forced to pay money for the shit that comes out of his mouth? It seems like everyone else is doing whatever they want with no repercussions.
He made very specific defamatory statements accusing fellow citizens / parents of murdered children of participating in a government conspiracy and those people were able to prove they experienced harm as a consequence of his words.
The plaintiffs also had enough financial backing from (understandably horrified) strangers, and a high enough chance of winning for lawyers to want to represent them. Those factors allowed the plaintiffs to survive the legal system long enough to get a ruling, and the severity of the situation maintained their motivation to keep pushing for it instead of accepting settlement so they could somewhat move on with their lives.
Sometimes, the planets align to create the trifecta of enough energy, money, and evidence to force the justice system into enforcing justice. And I am grateful that can sometimes still happen, as rare as it feels.
I prefer to think thusly:
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
But I can certainly understand people’s pessimism, looking at the world around us…
That’s fair, I’m not a flat-bow conspiracy theorist, even if the curve looks real flat right now from down here.
I wonder if MLK ever read Hegel. I know he got a doctorate so it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Nothing’s been enforced though. Jones is proceeding with his life pretty much unchanged.
Because it’s still in process. This stuff goes slow but he will lose everything.
I’m not holding my breath. Rich people do not play under the same rules as normal people. Bankrupt me and I’m on the street. Bankrupt rich dudes and somehow they still have lawyers, nice clothes and roofs over their heads that they own.
Depends on which chapter of bankruptcy, which all entail wildly different things. There’s bankruptcy that effectively eliminates debt and others which force you and your debtors to come to the bargaining table to restructure your payment plan or they get nothing since you could just file for actual bankruptcy
The difference is if you can afford to pay for the lawyers necessary to create that restructuring or if there’s any trust at all that you can pay it off eventually without getting yourself deeper in debt
On top of everything else, his idiot lawyer accidentally emailed ALL of the discovery evidence that they had claimed didn’t exist TO THE PLAINTIFF’S ATTORNEY. As well as no showing and getting a summary judgement.
There is so much stupid in that trial, you really should go find a legal YouTuber who documented the various levels of stupid and just watch in amazement.
I’d recommend LegalEagle.
Alex Jones got himself into this position via a trifecta of pure stupid.
First of all, he made claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. This turned public opinion against him severely, because Sandy Hook was a lines-crossed kind of event. Although school shootings are common in America, these tended to happen in colleges and high schools. Sandy Hook was an elementary school, meaning the victims were much younger
Secondly, he called the victims of the aforementioned shooting ‘crisis actors’, people who are paid to portray victims during emergency drills. These lies by Jones directly led to harassment campaigns against families that were already grieving the loss of their very young children. This also got national attention, abs many people pitched into the responding lawsuits raised by the grieving families against Jones’s media company.
Thirdly, and perhaps a big reason why the punishment is so severe, Jones treated court hearings and depositions as optional, and skipped a huge amount of them. He didn’t even seriously attempt to defend himself in a court of law. This led to a lot of default judgements against him.
To the third point, if they had done the minimum, they were more or less fine. The burden lied with the plaintiffs. He handed them a default judgement dream.
Because most public figures leave themselves some wiggle room.
Like “just asking questions” or being careful to qualify their statements.
“Some people are saying that Sandy Hook was a fabrication, and I think they make a pretty convincing case. Are the parents hiding something?” vs “these parents of so called victims are lying, they’re actors hired by the government to take away our guns”
Plus I think Alex Jones included some calls to action that led to harassment of these grieving families - he didn’t leave himself any way to wiggle out of it. Especially since his exposed communications made it obvious he had no valid basis to assert he believed it , and he showed contempt for the legal process