The families of the victims have detailed the harassment and death threats that they have suffered for years following the false allegations of the owner of the conspiratorial site Infowars.
Le Monde With AFP
He had already been ordered to pay almost $ 1 billion (981 million euros) to families of victims of the massacre in the primary school of Sandy Hook, whose reality he denied. Alex Jones will have to pay them additional $ 473 million in damages, decided, Thursday, November 10, Barbara Bellis, Magistrate of Connecticut.
In 2012, a young man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed twenty-eight people, including twenty children, in the school of Sandy Hook, in Newtown, in Connecticut. The owner of Infowars had affirmed on his site and on his social networks that the victims were “actors” and that the killing was a “staging piloted by opponents of firearms”. A conspiracy theory that has spread on the Internet, and encouraged many conspiratorial sympathizers to attack the families of the victims directly, as well as an agent of the FBI present on the day of the drama.
“behavior hateful, malicious and unjustified “
During this new trial, which lasted more than a month, the complainants have detailed the attacks they have suffered for years. Not only online harassment, threats of rape and death, but also the attacks of unknown people trying to enter them.
With his company Free Speech Systems, Alex Jones launched “attacks on complainants for almost a decade, including during the trial, wrote the judge after the trial. This hateful, malicious and unjustified behavior hurts the complainants “.
The accused considers that his trial is unfair, and that he represents an attack on his freedom of expression. He said Thursday that he had “only a few hundred thousand dollars” on his bank account. A third and final trial should take place by the end of the year, in Texas.