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

You'd also be on the hook for the costs of any associated medical care, seeing eye dogs, etc. I believe I mentioned this:

>> damages could not reach $100 million unless you either (a) spent $100 million dealing with the disruption

You would additionally have some criminal liability, but that doesn't affect damages.

I think you'd find --- criminal liability aside --- that you'd be on the hook for more than the lifetime earnings of a Starbucks barista and the cost of medical care and a seeing eye dog.

I make the comparison because the judge denied Alex a jury trial, based on him not turning over evidence, and not him missing court dates. Some of the evidence he failed to turn over is financial data. The argument made was that the lack of this evidence would prejudice the jury from finding Alex guilty. The judge sided with the prosecution on this so she defaulted him. Specifically the prosecution was making the argument that Alex would see his google analytics go up when he talked about Sandy Hook, and responded to it. While plausible, it hasn't really been proven that he ever even looked at his google Analytics. He blabbers on like a radio talk show host. As a percentage of all he said, Sandy Hood was a very small part of his coverage.

This gets even more murky because the financial evidence, such as his earning, is relevant to damages, and not really to guilt. And really, in the end the prosecution was able to estimate his earnings by expert testimony during the damages portion. So was it actually critical. Yet Alex was found guilty based on failing to provide it. And if it was critical, at most it established damages, not guilt.

Also, can you imagine how much the prosecution is prejudiced in a criminal trail where the defendant fails to hand over the murder weapon. Yet a jury trail is still allowed proceed.

* Default Judgment:

I'm not aware of Alex missing any days where he needed to be there pretrial. He sat through 10 days of depositions. Any specific articles you can link where he missed a pre-trial date he had to be there for?

* Not having evidence. a) What does genuinely contested really mean? b) That did not happen. The prosecution found an email with an attached screenshot containing a keyword. This was the gotcha moment in his previous trial. Just very dubious. Since attached screenshots are not easily searchable for keywords, and could have been easily missed without any malice by his lawyer.

* Jones was never allowed to take part in a "take part in the trial that would have determined whether he was guilty or not". Every interview on the subject, Jones decries not being allowed do process. He wanted to be able to state facts of his case to a jury, his lawyers wanted to make constitutional arguments to the jury, and so on.

> Doesn't "you" imply that "you" were actually named.

No, defamation doesn't require you to specifically be named. It's enough for them to be identified with enough specificity that they are harmed.

> If a politician says the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading the disease

There are two claims in the phrase "the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading disease".

The first claim, that they are terrible people, is not a statement of fact, but is rather an opinion. There is no factual, objective, way to determine whether someone is "a terrible person". So that part would not create the potential for liability.

The second claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" _could_ potentially be defamatory, but truth would be an absolute defense. The truth also doesn't have to be _perfect_ so long as it's "correct in the main". First, note that the claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" is still true even if the vaccinated are also spreading disease. So, your defamation claim would need to first convince the jury that the implication of the statement is "the unvaccinated are spreading disease *more than the vaccinated*". I think that implication is there, but it's a little more tenuous of a claim. Second, I don't think there would be any liability, since the vaccine has some efficacy. To defend against the defamation claim, it would be sufficient to show that the vaccine has any significant efficacy. You wouldn't need to demonstrate that the vaccine has perfect efficacy. The vaccine does have efficacy against COVID-19, so I think a defamation claim would fail here.

Finally, you'll need to go to the harms. It's going to be very difficult to demonstrate significant harm to any individual unvaccinated person, when the group includes 100M people. The harm is going to be _very_ diffused, and I think it would be difficult to demonstrate any economic harm.

So, on balance, I think a politician would still be very safe making the statement you suggested, even in light of the fact that a person doesn't need to be specifically named to press a defamation claim.

I mean, it's basically the very core of the typical harms that arise from defamation.

Almost always the economic harms that arise from defamation are the result of third parties responding to the defamatory content. If you couldn't incorporate the actions of third parties into the calculation of economic harm, then there would almost never be economic harm from defamation.

As for specific court cases, take a look at Gibson Bros., Inc v. Oberlin College. A jury awarded Gibson's Bakery $11M in compensatory damages (and another $33M in economic damages). Of the compensatory damages, Gibson had argued that, among other things Oberlin college should be responsible for the damages arising from:

"They blamed Oberlin for repeated vandalism and property damage and for Grandpa Gibson breaking his back while investigating the source of someone pounding on his apartment door in the middle of the night"

https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/9/2022/2022-O...

Two other examples, of course, would be the recent Alex Jones cases in TX and CT where the same reasoning also let to economic damage awards...