Alex Jones is now begging for money after being ordered to cough up a big sum of cash for claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.
A Connecticut jury ordered the far-right conspiracy theorist to pay USD$965 million (AUD$1.5 billion, £545 million) in damages to numerous families of victims of the 2012 mass shooting.
Jones was hosting his Infowars show as the verdict was being read out and he said he hopes to fight the amount through an appeal.
However, he said he needs help from his followers if he's going to do that.
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A fiery Jones got behind the mic to tell his fans that the verdict was merely used as a scare tactic.
He said: “They want to scare everyone away from freedom and scare us away from questioning Uvalde, and what really happened there or Parkland or any other event and guess what? We’re not scared, and we’re not going away, and we’re not going to stop.”
He continued: “Literally for hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can keep them in court for years, I can appeal this stuff, we can stand up against this travesty against the billions of dollars they want. It’s a joke.”
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The radio talk show host then urged his fans to visit the InfoWars website to purchase items, with proceeds going towards Jones continuing to fight his case.
Jones has famously argued for years that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting was ‘staged’ and ‘no one died’.
He claimed that the US government organised the fake shooting as a ploy to take away guns from Americans, as per BBC News.
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He also accused the parents of the victims of being ‘crisis actors’ while believing that some never existed.
In August, another jury found that Jones and his company InfoWars must pay USD$49.3 million (AUD$78 million, £27 million) to the victims' families in a separate defamation case in Texas.
During the trial, Jones finally conceded that the Sandy Hook shooting was ‘100 per cent’ real.
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Following the verdict, earlier today (Thursday, October 13), an attorney for the victims' families, Chris Mattei, praised the decision as it would become the precedent for those spreading misinformation on mass killings, as per The Guardian.
He said: “We are going to enforce this verdict as long as it takes because that is what justice requires.”
He added: “There will be more Alex Jones in this world, but what they learned here today is that they absolutely will be held accountable.”
Topics: News, Crime, Social Media
Charisa Bossinakis