US Top Court Rejects Right-Wing Commentator's Plea To Overturn $1.4 Billion Sandy Hook Judgment

Last Updated:October 15, 2025, 00:49 IST

The US Supreme Court rejected Alex Jones's appeal to overturn a 1.5 billion defamation judgment for Sandy Hook hoax claims, forcing him to sell Infowars despite his objections.

Alex Jones was ordered to make the payout in 2022 for claiming the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School - which killed 20 schoolchildren and six educators - was a hoax. (Pexels/Representative Image)

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s plea to overturn the nearly $1.5bn (£1.1bn) defamation judgment against him.

According to BBC, Jones was ordered to make the payout in 2022 for claiming the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School – which killed 20 schoolchildren and six educators – was a hoax.

To make the payout, Jones is being forced to sell his Infowars media company to news site The Onion. He informed the Supreme Court that the sale would cause irreparable harm to him and his audience of $30 million.

Jones has not yet paid any damages to the families of victims of 2012 mass shooting.

Jones’s lawyers informed the SC that he should have the same protections under the First Amendment of the Constitution that journalists have.

“The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions," told the Supreme Court in an appeal filed at the Supreme Court in September.

In a separate emergency appeal that Jones filed at the Supreme Court last week, he said his platform has an average of 30 million daily listeners. Without an intervention by the high court, his attorneys wrote, “these viewers/listeners will not have just been deprived of a valued source of information, the risk is they will have been greatly deceived and damaged by operation of media source InfoWars by their ideological opposites."

The SC on Tuesday did not explain its decision to deny its request.

BBC quoted Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families, as saying that the court “properly rejected Jones’s latest desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the harm he has caused. We look forward to enforcing the jury’s historic verdict and making Jones and Infowars pay for what they have done".

News world US Top Court Rejects Right-Wing Commentator's Plea To Overturn $1.4 Billion Sandy Hook Judgment

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