(Washington) The far-right American conspirator Alex Jones was sentenced on Wednesday to pay almost a billion dollars in compensation to the families of victims of a massacre perpetrated in 2012 in a school, which he had denied the reality.
Posted at 4:16 p.m.
Updated at 4:39 p.m.
Alex Jones had notably claimed that the relatives of the students killed in the school Sandy Hook, in Connecticut, were actors. A jury in that state decided that he should pay them and an FBI agent $965 million in damages for defamation and moral damage.
These families had launched lawsuits against Alex Jones, explaining that they were harassed by fans of the conspiracy, believing firmly that the massacre had never taken place and that the grieving relatives played a role.
In 2012, a young man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 20 children and six adults in Sandy Hook.
Present in the courtroom, relatives of the victims cried when the verdict was announced.
Alex Jones followed the hearing live on his Infowars site and indicated that he intended to appeal, claiming that he did not even have “two million in money”.
The owner of the Infowars site had already been ordered to pay nearly $50 million in Texas to a couple whose six-year-old son died in Sandy Hook.
The conspirator had finally publicly admitted the reality of the killing. But he refused to cooperate with the courts, so magistrates in both states convicted him in absentia. They had left it to jurors to set the sentence.