The Liberty Daily 
(The Epoch Times)—The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 14 rejected radio talk show host Alex Jones’s appeal of a $1.4 billion defamation judgment related to his description of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting as a hoax.
The court denied the petition in Jones v. Lafferty in an unsigned order without comment. No justices dissented.
The Infowars host, who called the large civil judgment “a financial death penalty,” had argued that a judge was wrong to find him financially responsible for defamation and infliction of emotional distress without first conducting a trial regarding the allegations made by relatives of the victims. The shooting led to the deaths of 20 first graders and six school employees in Newtown, Connecticut.
Jones filed for bankruptcy in 2022. His attorneys told the Supreme Court that the “plaintiffs have no possible hope of collecting” the full judgment.
In a separate proceeding, Jones is appealing a $49 million judgment in a related defamation lawsuit in Texas. He allegedly failed to hand over documents sought by the parents of a Sandy Hook victim.
In the Connecticut case, the judge entered a default judgment against Jones and his business in 2021 after saying Jones had repeatedly not abided by court rulings ordering him to produce evidence.
In 2022, a jury returned a $964 million verdict against Jones. The judge later added another $473 million in punitive damages against Jones and Free Speech Systems, which is Infowars’s parent company.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
