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Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#241

Post by Pakdef »

Karupan wrote: post #233
Rackedup wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stjohnswarts - He added a lot of undue trauma and made them the target of his rabid followers and they were constantly (and still are) inundated with harassing calls/emails/etc up to and including regular death threats, and some of Jones' unstable cult are fully capable of being mentally ill enough to do that. What would it be like to constantly be looking over your shoulder for someone ready to blow your head off…

> ah ok... so if I say something, and someone else does something because they think they should, I am responsible for it If you deliberately keep spreading a lie to profit from it, you should be held responsible IMO.

> Karupan - If you deliberately keep spreading a lie to profit from it, you should be held responsible IMO.

By that definition, this should apply to Santa Claus story tellers and the Church? Can I sue them for poisoning the life of my kids? They are teaching kids that lying is ok, after all.

Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#242

Post by UIUC_06 »

gerdesj wrote: post #133
noduerme wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> He tried to convince the world that the crime didn't actually happen and even worse tried to convince the world that the dead were actors and other nonsense. I'm a Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors. I'm also American. I'm pretty happy our country has not adopted laws against holocaust denial in the way Germany or Canada have. I appreciate the thought behind those laws. But I appreciate freedom of speech more.…

"I'm a Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors. I'm also American." Fair enough. My Jewish roots (int al) are rather more convoluted than yours. "I'm pretty happy our country has not adopted laws against holocaust denial in the way Germany or Canada have." Both of my parents were soldiers and I grew up in West Germany and the UK in the 1970s-1990s (on and off, here and there!) Tort is to do with contract law. Be Ameri…

> Please don't mistake free speech for hate and spite

if you'd put this some other way, I'd be down with it.

However, people who say "hate speech is not free speech" are just plain wrong. Yes, it is.

Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#243

Post by kypro »

unixbane wrote: post #216
friesfreeze wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People should be able to monetize lies. What? No. > And people should be able to say things about people or companies that might cause a crazy person to do something crazy. Yeah sure, but that's not the issue here. > If the parents of Sandy Hook were harassed then the issue here is surely the harassers? False dilemma. > The reason I worry about this is because if I believe someone is doing something evil does that…

>> People should be able to monetize lies. >What? No. He was obviously arguing from a standpoint that there shouldn't be a law against that specifically (there isn't), due to the implications such a law would have.

Yes, but I think I probably could have been clearer. I don't think drug companies should be able to lie about the effectiveness of their products, for example.

What I mean is that I don't think it should be illegal to say what you think about something as an individual, even if you're lying. If you're trying to sell a product then you I don't think you should be able to lie about what the product does, but you should be free to lie about how much you like it.

Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#244

Post by Pakdef »

belltaco wrote: post #221
Rackedup wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...

In that section of the Wikipedia article, his name is not mentioned once... what is your point?

Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#245

Post by [deleted] »

wernercd wrote: post #151
bandyaboot wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposing, though not necessarily contradictory cliche is of course some variation of “a lie makes it around the world before the truth is out of bed”. That’s the problem, there’s plenty of situations where the lie has done it’s damage long before the truth can achieve much beyond the academic.

and it's still more important to have free speech because who decides "truth" and "lie"... and what happens when those in power switch and the other side decides. Want Biden or Obama to have some power? Are you going to be okay with Bush or Trump gets that power?

[deleted]

Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#246

Post by dragonwriter »

zackees wrote: post #181
dragonwriter wrote: post #23

Actually, no, the jury verdict on punitive damages is $45.2 million, but that is certain to be reduced before Jones is ordered to pay (there seems to be some dispute over whether a portion of the compensatory damages award is economic or not, and depending on the answer on that, the cap under Texas statutory punitive damages caps would seem to be somewhere between $750k and $1m; even if the plaintiffs succeed in thei…

Quoted post unavailable.

> The Judge overseeing the Alex Jones case declared him guilty herself, skipping the Jury trial, by claiming that he didn't provide evidence of his financials. . Jones on air claims he submitted it twice, but each time the judge told him it wasn't in the correct format. On the second submission, the Judge didn't give him an opportunity to fix it, instead she found him guilty by default, skipping the Jury trial and going straight to the penalty phase.

That's a nice story. Here's are the actual default judgement orders in the two Travis County cases. The current case is the Pozner case, where he never provided documentation, not the case where he eventually supplied limited at incomplete documentation.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21074211-alex-jones-...

Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#247

Post by DoctorOW »

roenxi wrote: post #108
dragonwriter wrote: post #23

Actually, no, the jury verdict on punitive damages is $45.2 million, but that is certain to be reduced before Jones is ordered to pay (there seems to be some dispute over whether a portion of the compensatory damages award is economic or not, and depending on the answer on that, the cap under Texas statutory punitive damages caps would seem to be somewhere between $750k and $1m; even if the plaintiffs succeed in thei…

If Jones can afford to pay any of these figures that it says interesting things about how ineffective deplatforming is and really rather undermines the "big tech is a monopoly!" argument. Most people can't make $4 million in a lifetime, let alone these figures.

The problem with addressing Alex Jones and the rest "censored" is that they don't believe ANYTHING they say. Or rather, their spoken beliefs are fluid to suit the argument. You can't convince people there's not a "Big Tech" conspiracy about all these companies being controlled by whatever minority is trendy to hate now... You can't logic someone out a position they didn't logic their way into.

Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#248

Post by brown9-2 »

unixbane wrote: post #214
brown9-2 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What damages were actually done here? $50m for "emotional distress" is ridiculous in any context. Let me guess: you don’t have kids

Quoted post unavailable.

how is tax money used in a defamation case?

Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#249

Post by hunterb123 »

xoa wrote: post #236
hunterb123 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, his "fuck up" was leaking it, second it's still protected under attorney client privilege if AJ didn't authorize it. Your attorney can't just leak (on purpose or accident) information you gave them and it be used against you. Just because you don't like X person don't allow the government to step on everyone's inalienable rights. If you went to trial for a traffic violation and your lawyer accidentally for…

>> gpm: The law is explicit in this case that the attorney client privilege is waived by the attorney not asserting it within 10 days > Please cite what you are referring to. So you're misunderstand a number of things here. First, to specifically clear up one explicit part of the law here for you, this is a state case not federal under Texas rules. The specific one here is Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 193.3 […

That clears up what you're referring to, but we're talking past each other here.

I'm not saying the information that he needed to disclose was protected, I'm saying the rest of the information on the phone that was leaked that wasn't relevant to the case was protected and can/should not be used in another investigation.

Re: Alex Jones must pay $50m in punitive damages for Sandy Hook hoax claim

#250

Post by paulcole »

russellbeattie wrote: post #124
lmeyerov wrote: post #42

"Bernard Pettingill told the court that records indicate Jones withdrew $62m for himself from his company in 2021 as his legal troubles grew." "The trial heard that Jones' business had earned about $800,000 in a single day selling diet supplements, gun paraphernalia and survivalist equipment." The court records here are great. I've never seen a good analysis on the economics of misinformation, especially the private…

I've been sort of flabbergasted at the amount of money involved. Evil pays quite well, apparently.

> Evil pays quite well, apparently

Yes this is surprising considering … gestures broadly at all of human history..

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