Alex Jones ordered to pay $45m to Sandy Hook family

Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay $45.2m in punitive damages to the family of a six-year-old boy who was murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. After already ordering him to pay $4.1m to the child’s parents, the jury hearing the defamation case against Jones over his falsehoods about the massacre told him to pay another $45.2m to the family suing him.

The combined amount of $49.3m is below the $150m Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis – the parents of six-year-old Jesse Lewis – had demanded over Jones’s repeated lies that the Sandy Hook elementary school murders in Newtown, Connecticut, were an elaborate ruse carried out by “crisis actors” hellbent on forcing gun control reform.