Conspiracy made his fortune, and could ruin it.
Far-right host Alex Jones was ordered Thursday to pay more than four million dollars to the parents of a boy killed in the worst mass shooting ever at an American school, which he had denied was real.
This sentence, pronounced by a jury after ten days of trial, is only the first of a series of proceedings brought by the relatives of the victims of the Sandy Hook school against the founder of the Infowars site.
In 2012, a young man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 20 children and six adults in this establishment in Connecticut, causing fear in the United States and relaunching the debate on measures to regulate the sale of weapons to fire.
Alex Jones, a well-known figure on the far right and follower of conspiracy theories, had, against all evidence, affirmed on his site that the massacre was only a staging led by opponents of firearms.
More penalties to come
According to the parents of the victims, his lies had energized his hearings, allowing him to pocket millions of dollars, while they became the target of harassment campaigns.
Several families had sued him for compensation.
He had finally publicly admitted the reality of the killing, while refusing to cooperate with the courts.
Judges in Texas and Connecticut had therefore condemned him by default to pay damages to the plaintiffs, while leaving it to jurors to set their amount.
On Thursday, they awarded $4.1 million in damages to Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, whose six-year-old son died in Sandy Hook, and who initiated the lawsuit filed in Texas.
The jury is expected to decide on punitive damages on Friday, with more financial penalties expected to follow shortly that could rob Alex Jones of his platform.
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