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Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

bbc.co.uk

601–610 of 787 posts

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to support that claim in some way. Most of Jones' opinions seem to revolve around the idea that cabals of conspirators are trying to trick people into accepting exploitation or tyranny. I don't keep up with all his different ideas, though.

You're asking me to support the claim that Alex Jones would rather try controversies with violence than in a court of law?

You claimed my opinion was adjacent to his. I would not 'rather try controversies with violence than in court' but nor am I completely opposed to people mutually agreeing to settle them directly (with formalities) rather than submitting them to a third party.

It seems like you dislike this idea, and are just associating with Jones who you also dislike. I don't see how you get from his conspiracy worldview to my opinion that an archaic social institution might be worth another look. I don't see duelling as incompatible with having a functional legal system.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>His speech isn't being suppressed. The government didn't arrest him. He's being sued for damages he caused to the families of the victims he lied about. That's as American as it gets. I'd add that he is still free to continue lying forever . No one is stopping him from doing so.

No one is stopping him from doing so. That ... may remain to be seen. Though it does seem to presently be the case.

>>No one is stopping him from doing so.

>That ... may remain to be seen. Though it does seem to presently be the case.

What legal mechanism might someone use to stop Alex Jones from saying whatever the hell he wants?

I mean, sure, a bullet to the brain or a successful car bomb would shut him up, but that's murder.

IIUC (IANAL), Alex Jones can, while in the United States (with certain very limited exceptions), say whatever he feels like saying.

If he defames someone (in the case we're discussing here, the families of children killed in Newtown, CT in 2012), they are also free (as they did) to sue him for such defamation.

What, exactly, do you see changing with respect to the current status quo? What legal basis would you base such changes on?

In preparing this reply, I noted this comment[0] of yours which reads, in part:

   I'm not sure this covers all cases of consequential burdening, but 
   it does seem to cover many of them. A future prohibition on speech, 
   gag order, banning from online or broadcast services, etc., might 
   be a harder case to make, though these could still be seen as 
   sanctions on behaviour rather than content.
I am unclear as to how any of that could happen under US civil law. There certainly are examples of such orders in criminal cases, but very different rules/laws/regimes apply between the two.

Unless Jones is criminally charged, I don't see how any of that could happen in a civil legal proceeding in the US.

Are you taking the idea that "speech has consequences" to its logical extreme and hypothesizing that private actors may curtail Jones' access to media?

I'd say that doesn't stop him from pontificating about anything on a bar stool (unless the bar owners don't like it and throw him out) or on his own private property.

Or are you hypothesizing that laws will change and his defamation activity will be criminalized?

If I misunderstand your point (always a possibility), my apologies. I'd just like to understand the mechanism(s) you're alluding to that could result in someone "stopping him from doing so[1]".

N.B.: I'll say it again: IANAL. Also, I find Jones' behavior reprehensible and hope he ends up destitute and living in a cardboard box under a highway overpass.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33185391

[1] "doing so" is, of course, referring to him spewing the slanderous bile he's been vomiting up for a decade.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#603
Bad reporting. This is symbolic only. The judgment is unsecured, uncollectable and unlike even a $500 student loan debt, dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Unlikely that the judgment creditors will ever see a dime--and someone has to pay for collection efforts on an hourly basis.

Because that's how the US justice system™ works.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he doesn’t make 100M in his lifetime. Infowars made $165 million in 3 years [1]. 1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/alex-jon...

Revenue or profit? It’s unclear. If it’s revenue, at 10% margin, I’d guess he’s close to broke after expenses.

> at 10% margin

Even legacy media manages 20%-40% margins; an outfit like InfoWars can probably get way over 50%. What exactly are their expenses?

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#605

As someone who's been closely following the Infowars/Free Speech Systems trials (watched all the depos, trial footage, etc.), all I can say is that I'm glad these families are finally getting justice. Even though I'm sure it'll be tied up in appeals for awhile (and reduced on appeal), hopefully it'll prevent future harassment campaigns against families when tragedies occur. And before anyone says "but why wasn't Jone…

The judge threatened to throw Alex in jail for saying he was innocent to the jury. You can't really get more dystopian than that. Imagine if that happened during your own trial, what would you do? Would you still want to testify. There were a few other things the judge barred him from saying during his testimony, yet the prosecution spent days talking about them. How is that even remotely fair. Ridiculous verdict from a ridiculous show trial. Kangaroos ashamed everywhere.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#606
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alex was free to say it and the people he defamed were free to sue him for saying it. Alex was free to hire competent legal counsel for the trial(s), and he hired a bunch of wacky, like-minded nincompoops instead. There were so many points in this saga where Alex could have made decisions that would have made the outcome less severe and he doubled down almost every time instead. Even as the last trial was wrapping up…

> There is such a thing as consequences for your actions. A system which produces effects extrinsically equivalent to direct proscriptions on free speech is not better than a system which explicitly proscribes some speech, and is arguably worse, because it tricks credulous people into thinking it's not as bad.

Exactly.

The state doesn’t need to directly destroy you financially like they do in China.

They just have a legal framework that allows lawyers to do it for them.

And we think we have so much more freedom in the west.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#607
post #470
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remarkably, I think this is all economic damages --- they haven't reached the punitive damages phase. Furthermore, Connecticut doesn't have caps on compensatory damage for emotional distress. So this isn't quite like the Texas situation, where Jones attorneys successfully convinced the jury to award relatively small compensatory damages and large punitive damages --- those Texas punitive damages will get knocked way…

How does one possibly cause $64 million in straight damages per plaintiff? This isn't even the punitive yet. You could take everything I own and prevent me from ever earning another dollar and it wouldn't be $64 million dollars.

> How does one possibly cause $64 million in straight damages per plaintiff? This isn't even the punitive yet.

I think people in this thread are massively underestimating the value of a lifetime of labor. This number is perfectly compensatory for eg a married couple that are both MDs, biglaw lawyers, FAANG engineers, finance professionals, or any number of other well-paying white collar jobs.

Being threatened the way that these families have -- after losing my child -- would absolutely wreck my mental health. There's no way that I or my wife would be able to live a normal life after the type of harassment incited by Jones. Certainly not hold down a job while looking over our shoulders and processing the trauma of losing a child and being hunted down by wackos in the aftermath.

The safe withdrawal rate on $64,000,000 when you're decades away from retirement age is probably closer to 2% than 4%, which puts us at $1,280,000 per year. That's $640,000 per earner. As a Senior at a FAANG -- which probably isn't my terminal level -- my income + benefits are north of this number.

Now allocate 1/3-1/2 of that $1.2M/yr to personal security and the cost of not having employer-sponsored healthcare and retirement benefits and you're already down to the equivalent of perhaps $250,000 - $400,000 per earner. That's fairly believable. And my only operating assumption is that this sort of trauma makes maintaining a white collar career path difficult/impossible.

And there are lots of other recurring expenses even aside from personal security associated with being hounded by a mob of armed wackos. I'd bet we would get down to $100,000 - $150,000 per earner per year of safe withdrawal income after extraneous expenses.

If I had to guess, the judge isn't going that much further than simply compensating these families for the cost of losing a lifetime of two normal incomes and compensation for other things that are necessary due to Jones's behavior.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accept that the jury labeled the amount as compensatory damage. But it is obviously the case that that amount of damage was not dealt. Nobody involved had a reputation that was worth $100 million dollars.

That's not obvious to me at all. Can a 9-figure media and supplements company inflict 25-50 million dollars on an individual? Sure they can. Selling the memory of a parent's murdered child and defaming them to the point where they are followed into different states by lunatics threatening their lives seems to easily cross that threshold. How disruptive would it be to my life if that happened to me? Over how many year…

> If only one parent had sued, we wouldn't be batting an eyelash at the resulting damages.

This is not really a convincing response to my comment on the per-family damages:

>> Nobody involved had a reputation that was worth $100 million dollars.

You can't lose value you never had.

> How disruptive would it be to my life if that happened to me? Over how many years?

However disruptive it was, the damages could not reach $100 million unless you either (a) spent $100 million dealing with the disruption, or (b) forwent $100 million of earnings in order to deal with the disruption. (Or any combination.) Again, that hasn't happened. You can't deal $100 million of economic damage to someone who doesn't possess assets worth $100 million. That is a major reason for the concept of punitive damages.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#609
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but absolutely none of that, save the encouragement of harassment, has any bearing on what the victims suffered from the behavior the lawsuit is fundamentally about. These damages are, supposedly, compensatory, and so the only relevant factor is supposed to be what the victims actually suffered.

Forgive me for wondering whether an account created 27 minutes ago is arguing in good faith on a topic that frequently gets brigaded by FUD trolling. An actual lawyer will have to weigh in on whether this fits the damages awarded in similar cases.

I think the point here is that it doesn't really matter whether the lawyers call it "compensatory" or not. Many legal terms don't really mean what it says on the tin. But we're talking here from a common-sense perspective: is the intent behind this fine, however it is described, to compensate for actual damages suffered, or to punish the conduct? And for it to be the former, it has to be in line with actual damages.

Re: Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

#610
post #250
post #72

"CIVIL-RIGHTS LAWYER NARRATOR: But punitive-damages awards aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy. So Alex Jones will be paying off these debts from wage garnishments, attachments, & sheriff’s sales of his stuff for the rest of his wretched, pathetic, worthless life." from: https://twitter.com/SubodhChandra/status/1580285453348921344

Honest question - could Jones sue Subodh Chandra for defamation given that his life was just valued at at least a billion dollars by a jury?

He could try, but he'd lose because he's on the wrong side of the political spectrum.
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