The context is that Jones blew up the court process every chance he got, setting a new record for contempt fining. The most important piece was refusing to comply with discovery (his lawyer was so bad-behaved here he ended up with a disciplinary suspension). As a result Jones received a default judgement, i.e. the plaintiffs win by default and he doesn't get to argue his case. This also means the plaintiffs get everything they were asking for. 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.
> 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.
That was an impressively stupid and/or lazy fuck up, to a point where I think Jones could have a lawsuit against his attorneys there.
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.
No, the lawyers can argue about the scope of what they show the jury during trial. There are plenty of rules against biasing or inflaming the jury with unrelated material.
It's even worse than that. Because despite his commitment to non-compliance and general contempt for the entire process he managed to comfound his own defense resulting in his legal team accidentally disclosing way too much including the smoking gun that proved his guilt beyond a doubt.
Jones basically handled his defense like Donald Trump handles congressional subpoenas, but Jones doesn't have the Supreme Court covering for him so he got burned to a crisp. I think in his heart of hearts he thought he was going to get some kind of pardon that would make all of the problems go away. He doesn't think he's the kind of person that would ever have to face the consequences of his own actions.
I don't think so. With how much money was made and direct attacks on individual members on the legal system, I think it's a breath of fresh air to see the rich and influential actually get punished. There's frustrating the legal system, and then there's lying under oath and executing smear campaigns against judges.
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.
What is your threshold for rich and influential? You don't have to have Musk money to have sufficient pull to escape the consequences most people would face for action X. I don't think this is a difficult or controversial observation.
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.
Besides Jones and his lawyer absolutely botching his defense and basically giving up the case (and pissing off the courts as I understand it, which is a bad fucking idea and usually also leads to larger fines), the $1.4 billion is just what Jones managed to rack it up to before entering bankruptcy proceedings, which froze his debt collectors out for a bit.
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.
Jones lawyers were so bad that part of me believes they intentionally sabotaged him. His lawyers (or an assistant on the team) sent an image of his cell phone data to the prosecuting attorneys on accident, which means 2 years of his text messages were used against him. His lawyers could have taken it back but failed. It's insane how this trial went down.
I don't the president can pardon away a lawsuit. He could pardon away a crime, and sometimes the crime can be a basis for a civil lawsuit, but in this case I don't think anyone has seriously considered criminally charging Jones for anything here.
> I don't [think] the president can pardon away a lawsuit.
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".
It's honestly kind of chilling just how effective smear campaigns can be.
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".
It was considerably less on appeal and the mcdonalds lawyers didn't anatagonize the court every chance they got and it was literally 30 years ago and there was only one victim.
Just with inflation (6.4m) and number of victims (22?) you get a much larger number real quick.
It is absurdly large and deliberately so. First of all this was a class action suit representing 22 plaintiffs. Secondly, the number was large to punish the defendant for continuously disrespecting the count with bad repeated behavior. Third, there was no defense because the defendant failed to work with the court resulting in a summary judgment.
> I’m not entertained that the court is playing an unrealistic and hyberbolic game.
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".
His lawyers were terrible. Nobody arguing otherwise on that point. Jones wasn't personally directing the legal strategy, he was doing the same thing you'd do.
> Jones wasn't personally directing the legal strategy, he was doing the same thing you'd do.
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.
His lawyers were objectively bad. You'd bring in a new team and fire them also.
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.
That was literally the last lawyer he had which ran the trial (Reynolds).
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 is a pragmatic result. The defendant had every opportunity to raise a valid defense. Instead they ignored the court and were a continual harassing ass to the plaintiffs. One way to punish bad behavior is to increase the level of punishment proportional to the harm inflicted.
This punishment reflects not just the conduct at question by the law suit, but also the conduct during the law suit.
What do you feel would be an outcome to this situation that aligns to the realism and pragmatism you believe the court system should have?
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...
I can only speak for myself, but punitive damages of 1-2 million per complainant (22 I think) seems entirely reasonable and in line with previous rulings? But let me also flip the on it's head, if 1.4 billion dollars is an appropriate punishment to you then is there any amount of money that would be too much?
I don't think your values are sufficient deterrent for the kind of behavior Alex Jones and InfoWars exhibited and substantially profited from. They made more than the 22-44 million you're suggesting. They would still have profited from their actions.
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.
So that kinda sums it up then, people who disagree with you (including me) think that the punitive damages should be rooted in punishing Alex Jones et al, not in destroying him forever.
>think that the punitive damages should be rooted in punishing Alex Jones
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.
The punishment was made to be a deterrent for all who might consider doing the same as Alex Jones. You have made a straw man about destroying him forever.
Not the person you asked, but the sensible thing is of course that the court decides the amount - not the plaintiffs. That's how it works in other places.
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.
The court does decide, but the plaintiffs are allowed to present their opinion on what it should be and if you manage to screw up your defense enough then the jury gets told to agree with the plaintiff.
This is also the result of multiple lost lawsuits as well as additional penalties from not complying with court directives during the cases.
Yes, I'm aware and I didn't think I had to spell it out: the court should decide the amount according to their own opinion of what is fair, rather than accept a demand from one side.
I mean, typically you have the defense and plaintiffs go back and forth on this. Turns out it doesn't pay to be a criminal loser and try to ignore the court.
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.
Imagine if you tried to antagonize court at every possible point.
Now imagine someone did it worse.
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
The settlement needed to be large enough to stop the behavior. Based on Jones' past behavior, I think it's reasonable to believe that only such a massive settlement would do so. Otherwise, the lawsuit just becomes a cost of doing business.
IIRC, the judge specifically said the amount was not about harm but specifically about shutting down InfoWars. So, give them such a heavy fine that would be impossible to pay.
Yes, at first. If it was a typical defamation case based on a single incident or short pattern of conduct, and if Jones behaved like a typical defendant, hiring a competent lawyer and mostly complying with court orders, the judgment would have been a few million dollars. That's not what happened.
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.
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.
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.
>Nothing stopping him from lying publicly about anybody or anything
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.
I’m just not sure you can make the claim that this is an issue between the outlet and the establishment. It’s had hosts like Roger Stone doing 5 episodes a week. He’s the former campaign advisor for the sitting president of the United States, and advisor to Dole, Bush (both), and Reagan.
It doesn’t get more establishment than that. So the “down and out anti-establishment underdog” narrative doesn’t apply in my opinion.
To people like that, random college students are "establishment" because they are lefty, and the literal President of the United States is "anti-establishment" because he uses slurs on social media.
If people want to get their "hard truths" out, they shouldn't contaminate them with 9/10 parts of lies, and they certainly shouldn't run a harassment campaign against the parents of murdered children.
He had every possible chance to argue his case, both against culpability and then against the specific damages, but both he and the lawyers he hired refused to do so. This 1.4b dollars was not a particularly harsh judgment coming down from the establishment (note that the establishment is the president Jones was a paid campaign member for), it was the result of his implicit acceptance of every claim the Snady Hook parents made.
You should read how this particularly huge settlement was achieved. It’s on Alex Jones for refusing to participate in the legal debate, contemning the court, refusing discovery, et cetera.
With better legal defence he may have to pay much and much less.
As a drive by reader that votes, I can guess why you copped a few whacks;
The tone is off and it appears to carry the implication that you might believe that none of the above (Jones, Piker, Owens) should be landed with fines despite on the face of it saying the opposite.
A cleaner comment would be better; just explain what it is that Piker has done that is equivilant to Jones' multi decade harrassment of the Sandi Hook parents, ditto Owens.
( for record, I'm non-USAian and unfamiliar with either Piker or Owens )
It would have been far more interesting to read your reasoning instead of having you click that down-vote button. I don't agree with your reasoning but that is the point: we could discuss it, I could explain who Piker (a left-wing icon being pushed as a 'bro' by the party while he spouts utter tripe and nonsense, calling for murder of political opponents) and Owens (a right-wing podcaster who used to be part of the right-wing establishment until she went fully anti-Semite and general conspiracy theorist). I'm not American either but whatever happens there affects us directly or indirectly so I do keep check on the news from the west.
> It would have been far more interesting to read your reasoning instead of having you click that down-vote button.
Ahhh, I read https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments feed and saw your "Can the down-voters for once let go of their pacifiers" which prompted me to look at context.
As a general rule I prefer to engage with things I disagree with rather than simply downvote or flag.
I note now (I'm GMT +8 and have been asleep since last here) that both your comments above are [flagged] and [dead].
The HN mods, dang and tomhow, really do like to push content, engagement, curious discussion, etc. over snark, partisan whiplash, cranky shit, etc.
Re: Piker .. the name came up again in some other context (some speculation about a recent interview in or with the NYT) and so I watched a recent (last 14 days IIRC) interview with him with someone from Mother Jones .. on the bases of that single exposure I personally wouldn't dot point summarise him as "spouting utter tripe and nonsense" - he is capable of debating his opinions, has a good grasp of the political landscape, and is clearly a devisive figure in the US political landscape that would get a lot of hot takes and slanting.
Again, I've only a 20 minute exposure, but he does have a good point that he has literally thousands of hours of live twitch streaming, discussion, and in the moment rambling through hypotheticals before landing on a position - ie. he's someone that anyone can build a rolltape of short clips of and easily misrepresent and take out of context.
Addendum: from your peer comment:
> just like Hasan Piker ('the Jews are behind all it all'),
uhh, my take from a 20 minute discussion is that he's strongly against Israel "the aparthied state", the zionist attitude, the current holders of power in Israel.
Piker is the "progressive bro" version of Carlson: both can produce cohesive narratives based on faulty premises, in Piker's case it mostly revolves around "thirld-worldism", i.e. all the woes of the world are due to the "west" being bad while Carlson used to come from the opposite direction but has moved to a sort of arch-conservatism where authoritarian rules and rulers are preferable over that messy (small-D) democratic system. Piker and Carlson unite in their anti-Jewish rhetoric, where they differ is in their icons. Piker hails communist leaders as heroes, terrorist organisations like Hamas as 'freedom fighters' while Carlson sees autocrats like Putin, (Qatar's) al Thani and Xi Jinping as examples of "strong and steadfast leaders protecting their culture".
He's being pushed as the fresh face of "democrat resistance" with all the right attributes: young, "edgy", anti-west, pro-palestine, "anti-zionist" (which translates to anti-Jew). He travels in the "correct" circles, went on the pro-Cuban trip to the island where he stayed with an the other champagne socialists in a luxury hotel while professing the virtues of socialism versus the sins of the west, etcetera. He seems to have a number of skeletons in his closet related to his treatment of women, his 'fans' and his dog which can be used to ditch him once he has outlived his usefulness in more or less the same way as the party 'suddenly' realised Swalwell was a creep when his candidacy for the position of governor of California made it less likely for a "democrat" to win due to the open primaries in that state where too many "democrats" in the race make it harder for one of them to end up in the top 2 for the final round of voting.
The influence America and most things American have on us here in Europe. Also, the way our state media and state-sponsored media here in Sweden report on it which is anything but objective. If you want to know what really happens you need to go and look for it yourself.
Your comment was bad because you don't know the context of Jones' case and how the penalty was arrived at, and are thus extrapolating without any merit to other people.
Neither Hassan Piker nor Candace Owens, nor any other of the many inflammatory voices on the left or right of the new media ecosystem, have done anything remotely close to the type of harassment that Alex Jones exposed the Sandy Hook victims to. Directly accusing grieving parents and children of being completely fake paid "crisis actors", again and again, with images and "analysis" and so on, is beyond anything another media personality has had the poor taste and temerity to try - perhaps in history, certainly in America.
Even then, the only reason the judgement ended up at such a gigantic number is that Alex Jones and his lawyers refused to argue their case to any extent, and in fact directly attacked and antagonized the court and the judge. They lost the case through summary judgement after repeated refusals to follow the normal procedural rules or even to show up in court. Then, they repeated the same refusal to participate or argue their case during the damages settlement, again forcing the court to simply award the amount requested by the plaintiffs, which is always set to a huge number as a negotiating tactic.
So no, the fact that someone argues that Alex Jones deserved this punishment fully is not in any way in conflict with believing that Hassan or Candace Owens or any other new media personality deserves anything similar.
> If you weren't grayed out something would be serious wrong with this site.
If [a questioning or dissenting voice] is not suppressed something would be serious (sic) wrong with this site
Not where I come from. I prefer to discuss these issues, even with ideologues and their followers even though it often seems pointless.
To put this in perspective: Ales Jones is a conspiracy theorist just like Hasan Piker ('the Jews are behind all it all'), Candace Owens (same as Piker, now also 'Erika Kirk is behind the murder of her husband'), Tucker Carlson (same as Piker), Nick Fuentes (...same as...) and many others.
