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This is great news, but we should temper our expectations: It's likely that Jones will appeal and keep this tied up for years before he has to pay anything. Eve

This is great news, but we should temper our expectations: It's likely that Jones will appeal and keep this tied up for years before he has to pay anything. Even if he is eventually obligated to pay some amount, it is unlikely to be what the jury just decided. And even if it is what the jury just decided, Jones' company is already "bankrupt" (yet still on the air) and he will almost certainly avoid liability through all the useful tools and entities available to a person who has hundreds of millions of dollars in the first place. And through all this, he will probably remain on the air spouting his lies - as he is literally right now as I write this post. 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.

tptacek 4y ago
Remarkably, I think this is all economic damages --- they haven't reached the punitive damages phase. Furthermore, Connecticut doesn't have caps on compensatory damage for emotional distress. 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.
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  I know your latter statement is true. Not sure about the former but IANAL. I do know attorney's fees are coming next. Still, I think the odds he actually is forced to pay almost any of this are vanishingly small.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I'm less certain. It looks like this mostly hinges on the bankruptcy filings, which weren't going great for Jones (as, of course, they should not, as they seem pretty bogus).
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Bankruptcy notwithstanding, he almost certainly does not have $1B. He's a celebrity figure of sorts, but pretty fringe. It's a symbolic victory. He'll have to liquidate the bulk of whatever assets he may have, and the plaintiffs will get a few dollars when it's all said and done.
      - tptacek 4y ago
        No, it seems like he has personal assets in the high tens of millions of dollars, and that Free Speech Systems was probably worth into the 9 figures. If the verdict stands, all of that will get wiped out, and the question remaining will be whether the damages, which stem from an intentional tort, will be dischargeable when Jones is forced into bankruptcy non-ironically, rather than using it as a ploy. Still a lot of "if's" here!
        pen2l 4y ago
        This always confused me, if someone is wiped out in this way how are they able to survive in the aftermath? Isn't this effectively sentencing them to homelessness forever, or is there a floor value in these wins that's always respected which accounts for some minimal cost amount of food+rent? 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?
        tptacek 4y ago
        I'm no expert but I think the general flow is that you wipe out all the debtor's assets, and then you arrange with the bankruptcy court to garnish their earnings until the matter is settled. That's for instance how it worked out with OJ.
        Kesseki 4y ago
        Yes, there is usually a floor value. Most states enumerate some types and amounts of property, and some amounts of income, that are exempt from civil judgment collection. It's the same thing for bankruptcy: there are exemptions that allow you to keep a certain amount. 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.
- donatj 4y ago
  How does one possibly cause $64 million in straight damages per plaintiff? This isn't even the punitive yet. You could take everything I own and prevent me from ever earning another dollar and it wouldn't be $64 million dollars.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    By making millions of dollars by deliberately amplifying the pain of a murdered parent, so that they're harassed and threatened, face to face, even when they visit states across the country from where they live. It's not complicated. Jones really did fuck these people's lives up, and he did so knowing that their lives had already been devastated. It's hard to even think of a way to profit from the mass murder of first graders, but Alex Jones literally found a way to do it; he might be the only person to have done so successfully.
    - donatj 4y ago
      His profit isn't "actual damages" though. They haven't even decided punitive damages yet. 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?
      - tptacek 4y ago
        Contrary to popular opinion, there is not in fact a $10,000,000 cap on wrongful death damages. Plaintiffs semi-routinely get multiples of that.
      - thwayunion 4y ago
        > I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million. 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. [1] eg, https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/benefits https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/benefits
zackees 4y ago
- dragontamer 4y ago
  You couldn't lie in the 1970s or 1980s. If you did, you would be sued for libel or slander (depending on how exactly you lied). In the 90s, 00s, and 10s, we somehow forgot about libel / slander laws. I'm happy to see that something as egregious as Alex's Jones's lies here are finally getting punished, but I'd like to see more protection from libel/slander in modern 2020s era America. ------ Lies, traditionally speaking, have NEVER been covered by the 1st Amendment. I dunno why we stopped punishing them as a society. But its a good thing that we're remembering about them today.
  - akerl_ 4y ago
    At risk of being pedantic, the bar for defamation is considerably higher than “lying”. Very relevantly for cases like this, the plaintiffs were required to show that the false statements caused them harm, where the easiest kind of harm is financial harm (like losing your job because of the lie). Notably, I can put up a billboard in my town that says “All of dragontamer’s code is buggy and it makes your computer smell bad”, and we’d be a long way off from you successfully suing me for defamation.
    - ggm 4y ago
      But it would naturally lead to lawyers letters and probably your apology and a costs settlement on the steps of the courthouse. The settlement might be zero sum, but you would expect a competent lawyer to advise you to back down gracefully all things being equal, assuming you lacked any evidence for a truth defence. Oftentimes, the outcome isn't about winning in court. It's about the restitution of the potential harm.
      - akerl_ 4y ago
        No it wouldn’t. That’s what I’m saying.
anonAndOn 4y ago
The key here will be if they can attach any of his assets despite his pleas of poverty and filing for bankruptcy. The victims may end up owning the studio he is currently broadcasting from (and his cars, home and anything else of value).
FireBeyond 4y ago
> And even if it is what the jury just decided, Jones' company is already "bankrupt" (yet still on the air) 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.
- glenstein 4y ago
  I am under the same impression. Everything I've heard re: the bankruptcy filings suggests that none of his machinations will protect his assets from the courts.
  - thechao 4y ago
    I live in Texas, but I'm (distantly) familiar with California: when the defendant loses & is a complete turd, judges have (delightedly) "peered through the corporate veil".
pessimizer 4y ago
> 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. 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.
samstave 4y ago
shadowgovt 4y ago
The only organ of society that really could hold him to account (and historically has held those such as him to account) would be broadcasters. Jones airs on the Genesis Communications Network, which could choose to cease to carry his content if it wanted. He'd drop into the obscurity of online self-publishing almost immediately. (This thought feels familiar).
robotresearcher 4y ago
BBC reports that Jones asked live on air for financial donations during the proceedings. He will be bringing money in over this long before paying any out. He's proved himself to be utterly shameless.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
This is terrible news for free speech. But maybe great news for the unvaccinated who will be able to go after all the people that spread lies about them, and ostracize them from society for two years.
- CyberDildonics 4y ago
  Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
- skymer 4y ago
  Unfortunately, Jones lost both his cases by default -- there were no trials. The jury trials were only on the amount of damages. So if the unvaccinated start suing everyone who defamed them and worse, this case sets no precedent. But it might indicate a ballpark figure for their damages. If 30% of Americans are unvaccinated, their Jones-damages could be 100 Million x $50 Million. That could cause a few bankruptcies.

tptacek 4y ago

Remarkably, I think this is all economic damages --- they haven't reached the punitive damages phase. Furthermore, Connecticut doesn't have caps on compensatory damage for emotional distress. 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.

ivraatiems 4y ago
I know your latter statement is true. Not sure about the former but IANAL. I do know attorney's fees are coming next. Still, I think the odds he actually is forced to pay almost any of this are vanishingly small.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I'm less certain. It looks like this mostly hinges on the bankruptcy filings, which weren't going great for Jones (as, of course, they should not, as they seem pretty bogus).
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Bankruptcy notwithstanding, he almost certainly does not have $1B. He's a celebrity figure of sorts, but pretty fringe. It's a symbolic victory. He'll have to liquidate the bulk of whatever assets he may have, and the plaintiffs will get a few dollars when it's all said and done.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      No, it seems like he has personal assets in the high tens of millions of dollars, and that Free Speech Systems was probably worth into the 9 figures. If the verdict stands, all of that will get wiped out, and the question remaining will be whether the damages, which stem from an intentional tort, will be dischargeable when Jones is forced into bankruptcy non-ironically, rather than using it as a ploy. Still a lot of "if's" here!
      - pen2l 4y ago
        This always confused me, if someone is wiped out in this way how are they able to survive in the aftermath? Isn't this effectively sentencing them to homelessness forever, or is there a floor value in these wins that's always respected which accounts for some minimal cost amount of food+rent? 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?
        tptacek 4y ago
        I'm no expert but I think the general flow is that you wipe out all the debtor's assets, and then you arrange with the bankruptcy court to garnish their earnings until the matter is settled. That's for instance how it worked out with OJ.
        Kesseki 4y ago
        Yes, there is usually a floor value. Most states enumerate some types and amounts of property, and some amounts of income, that are exempt from civil judgment collection. It's the same thing for bankruptcy: there are exemptions that allow you to keep a certain amount. 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.
donatj 4y ago
How does one possibly cause $64 million in straight damages per plaintiff? This isn't even the punitive yet. You could take everything I own and prevent me from ever earning another dollar and it wouldn't be $64 million dollars.
- tptacek 4y ago
  By making millions of dollars by deliberately amplifying the pain of a murdered parent, so that they're harassed and threatened, face to face, even when they visit states across the country from where they live. It's not complicated. Jones really did fuck these people's lives up, and he did so knowing that their lives had already been devastated. It's hard to even think of a way to profit from the mass murder of first graders, but Alex Jones literally found a way to do it; he might be the only person to have done so successfully.
  - donatj 4y ago
    His profit isn't "actual damages" though. They haven't even decided punitive damages yet. 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?
    - tptacek 4y ago
      Contrary to popular opinion, there is not in fact a $10,000,000 cap on wrongful death damages. Plaintiffs semi-routinely get multiples of that.
    - thwayunion 4y ago
      > I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million. 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. [1] eg, https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/benefits https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/benefits

zackees 4y ago

dragontamer 4y ago
You couldn't lie in the 1970s or 1980s. If you did, you would be sued for libel or slander (depending on how exactly you lied). In the 90s, 00s, and 10s, we somehow forgot about libel / slander laws. I'm happy to see that something as egregious as Alex's Jones's lies here are finally getting punished, but I'd like to see more protection from libel/slander in modern 2020s era America. ------ Lies, traditionally speaking, have NEVER been covered by the 1st Amendment. I dunno why we stopped punishing them as a society. But its a good thing that we're remembering about them today.
- akerl_ 4y ago
  At risk of being pedantic, the bar for defamation is considerably higher than “lying”. Very relevantly for cases like this, the plaintiffs were required to show that the false statements caused them harm, where the easiest kind of harm is financial harm (like losing your job because of the lie). Notably, I can put up a billboard in my town that says “All of dragontamer’s code is buggy and it makes your computer smell bad”, and we’d be a long way off from you successfully suing me for defamation.
  - ggm 4y ago
    But it would naturally lead to lawyers letters and probably your apology and a costs settlement on the steps of the courthouse. The settlement might be zero sum, but you would expect a competent lawyer to advise you to back down gracefully all things being equal, assuming you lacked any evidence for a truth defence. Oftentimes, the outcome isn't about winning in court. It's about the restitution of the potential harm.
    - akerl_ 4y ago
      No it wouldn’t. That’s what I’m saying.

anonAndOn 4y ago

The key here will be if they can attach any of his assets despite his pleas of poverty and filing for bankruptcy. The victims may end up owning the studio he is currently broadcasting from (and his cars, home and anything else of value).

FireBeyond 4y ago

> And even if it is what the jury just decided, Jones' company is already "bankrupt" (yet still on the air) 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.

glenstein 4y ago
I am under the same impression. Everything I've heard re: the bankruptcy filings suggests that none of his machinations will protect his assets from the courts.
- thechao 4y ago
  I live in Texas, but I'm (distantly) familiar with California: when the defendant loses & is a complete turd, judges have (delightedly) "peered through the corporate veil".

pessimizer 4y ago

> 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. 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.

samstave 4y ago

shadowgovt 4y ago

The only organ of society that really could hold him to account (and historically has held those such as him to account) would be broadcasters. Jones airs on the Genesis Communications Network, which could choose to cease to carry his content if it wanted. He'd drop into the obscurity of online self-publishing almost immediately. (This thought feels familiar).

robotresearcher 4y ago

BBC reports that Jones asked live on air for financial donations during the proceedings. He will be bringing money in over this long before paying any out. He's proved himself to be utterly shameless.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

This is terrible news for free speech. But maybe great news for the unvaccinated who will be able to go after all the people that spread lies about them, and ostracize them from society for two years.

CyberDildonics 4y ago
Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
skymer 4y ago
Unfortunately, Jones lost both his cases by default -- there were no trials. The jury trials were only on the amount of damages. So if the unvaccinated start suing everyone who defamed them and worse, this case sets no precedent. But it might indicate a ballpark figure for their damages. If 30% of Americans are unvaccinated, their Jones-damages could be 100 Million x $50 Million. That could cause a few bankruptcies.