The Texas Supreme Court rejected Infowars founder Alex Jones’s request to toss out four defamation lawsuits filed by parents whose children were killed during the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012.
The court rejected the request on Friday without comment.
The rejection is another defeat in court for Jones regarding the Sandy Hook shooting, which Jones said was staged by the government, accusing the parents who lost children in the shooting of being actors hired to “sell the coverup and exploit the event to attack gun rights,” according to the Austin American-Statesman.
Jones, a noted conspiracy theorist who built his Austin-based show into a syndicated program airing on radio stations across the country, peddled falsehoods in the wake of the massacre that killed 20 children and six staff members at the school in Newtown, Connecticut.
Jones lost his appeal to the Texas Court of Appeals in March 2020 and was forced to pay $20,000 in attorney fees to the defendants. In December 2019, he was ordered to pay $100,000 to one Sandy Hook parent for “disobeying court orders,” and in September of that year, Jones was ordered to “pay all costs” by the appeals court in the same case.
Jones’s attorneys argued that the Infowars host was engaging in protected speech when he promoted the conspiracy theories because he was addressing “matters of concern.”
“The pursuit of so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ concerning controversial government activities has been a part and parcel of American political discourse since our Founding, and it is protected by the First Amendment,” his lawyers wrote.
Jones has also argued that the suit lacked standing because Texas libel laws require harmful speech to be directed at specific people, and Jones didn’t name any of the family members during his shows.
Lawyers for the Sandy Hook families argued otherwise, saying that Jones “accused family members participating in a hoax ‘for nefarious purposes.'”
“Mr. Jones’ fantasy about a shadowy government conspiracy to murder first-graders and then exploit the event with the help of the media and actors is the very definition of ‘improbable,” lawyer Mark Bankston wrote.
Bankston on Friday said that the defendants “are pleased Mr. Jones is learning that his frivolous efforts to delay this case will not spare him from the reckoning to come.”
