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Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

nytimes.com

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Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#461

Post by acdha »

netbioserror wrote: post #383
Sparkle-san wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about having people threatening to rape and murder your family because they're convinced your lying and know where you live so you constantly have to move and try to hide your whereabouts. https://apnews.com/article/shootings-school-connecticut-alex...

[flagged]

This was extensively covered in multiple court cases which are public record. Why don’t you familiarize yourself with them and come back go this thread once you have a better understanding of what it’s about?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#462

Post by IncreasePosts »

mdorazio wrote: post #269
impossiblefork wrote: post #249

I really don't understand how a judgement this large can be reasonable in a case where nobody has had his house burned down. A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments. I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't…

Look up "nuclear verdicts". The unreasonably large dollar amount is intentional and not meant to reflect the real value of harm caused.

But the ruling was for compensatory damages - that is, the compensate the victims. It wasn't a punitive damages - which would make more sense - basically "You don't get to have your infowars any more".

Compensatory damages is making the claim that the sandy hook families actually suffered $1B in damages.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#463

Post by ehaughee »

stronglikedan wrote: post #451
jmward01 wrote: post #42

It is clear that Jones and his relatives have moved money and assets around in order to shield them from the verdict. Now, money that should have been already given to the victims is being used to steal back the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place. The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences.…

[flagged]

Would you mind elaborating?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#464

Post by busterarm »

skulk wrote: post #456
busterarm wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true either though. The default judgment was for not complying with the discovery process to the satisfaction of the court. Other options like perjury charges were available to the court, but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones. Also in many cases courts will allow you to walk back from the circumstances that ended up with a person in default and to proceed with a fair trial. I even…

I'm not going to dig up the transcripts, but I was following this pretty closely when it happened. If memory serves right, Jones was given several chances to comply with discovery requests and was constantly attempting to misdirect and otherwise disrupt the proceedings. It's not like the court balked at the first weird thing the defense did and immediately entered into a default judgement. I believe the default judge…

Parties play games in cases of this nature all the time. Court battles like this can be bitter.

Perjury is a criminal charge. Contempt is an option to. Judges use the lever of jail time to deal with situations like this all the time (again, direct experience here -- a surrogate court judge put two 70+ year old ladies in Rikers for a month for failing to comply with the court repeatedly over years). Going to default was exceptional behavior that nobody shed a tear for because it's Alex Jones.

Edit: To answer your question > How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?

If you're looking to make a political statement, sure none. If you're looking to have a fair trial, there's still steps A, B and C.

Even the fact that he had to fight all those cases for the same thing separately is a deliberate step to fuck him. Then the court treating giving the same data in each trial as a separate offense is certainly cherry-picking.

I'm not really complaining though because the concept of a fair trial does not exist. Civil or criminal. Do whatever you can not to end up in court. It always boils down to who has the most resources and the appetite for battle. Some pockets (like the state's) are near-infinite.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#466

Post by impossiblefork »

probably_wrong wrote: post #449
impossiblefork wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we don't have that in Sweden except for criminal acts, and then the fines are a certain number of days of your income as a substitute for imprisonment. In civil cases our judgements are usually not enormous. I don't feel that your reasoning above makes the judgement more reasonable. Maybe he does reach that many people, but he obviously makes nowhere near that amount of money and it's out of line with other def…

> it's out of line with other defamation judgements. This point made me curious so I quickly looked around. Fox News paid a $787.5 million settlement [1] for making false claims about Dominion. Given that this happened as the trial was about to start, it's reasonable to assume that Fox News expected to lose even more if the issue went to trial. And that's for a party that arguably would have followed court orders, so…

Those are also extreme though.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#467

Post by mikeyouse »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #457
preciousoo wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I emphasized that it wasn’t just over words said, but the frequency of, audience size, and actual real world harm that’s taken place as a result. And as other commenters have pointed out, he acted in contempt of the court on several occasions

Have the families needed to engage private security? I wonder what their bills have been.

Several had to move..

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#468

Post by dublin »

jasonjayr wrote: post #144
wakawaka28 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What he did was beyond mere defamation. It was heinous, it was blatant and deliberate dishonesty, and targeted vulnerable victims. Repeating the verifiable lie that the Sandy Hook incident did not happen, and promoting violence against the surviving families, despite repeated opportunities to stop without penalty, is beyond forgivable. And this penalty is because he declined to defend this behavior. Remember, it's a…

No matter how heinous you may find his speech, in America, under the First Amendment, Jones (or any nutball or even Nazi you may choose to pick) has a right to say it - even if he has a large Radio and Podcast megaphone.

The First Amendment is nearly absolute, and must protect unpopular and offensive speech even more than it protects popular speech.

(Don't start with the bogus "fire in a crowded theater exception" - that wording comes from Schenk v. United States (which was not even a 1A case, but involved the Espionage Act), and was nearly entirely overturned in 1969's Brandenburg v. Ohio. The clear falsity of the "Fire!" claim has repeatedly and wrongly used as a justification for suppressing speech for a century, to the detriment of us all.)

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#469

Post by mikeyouse »

impossiblefork wrote: post #453
Eisenstein wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we have courts and juries, to make these evaluations. Why should your number should be used over theirs?

Because it's obviously crazy. 1 billion dollars is the 588 people's entire life income. It's just excessive.

Alex jones sold something like $165M in supplements in the 3 years preceding this case… this is somehow the opposite of people complaining that judgements against FB are too small based on the Revenue.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#470

Post by [deleted] »

busterarm wrote: post #464
skulk wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to dig up the transcripts, but I was following this pretty closely when it happened. If memory serves right, Jones was given several chances to comply with discovery requests and was constantly attempting to misdirect and otherwise disrupt the proceedings. It's not like the court balked at the first weird thing the defense did and immediately entered into a default judgement. I believe the default judge…

Parties play games in cases of this nature all the time. Court battles like this can be bitter. Perjury is a criminal charge. Contempt is an option to. Judges use the lever of jail time to deal with situations like this all the time (again, direct experience here -- a surrogate court judge put two 70+ year old ladies in Rikers for a month for failing to comply with the court repeatedly over years). Going to default w…

[deleted]
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