Texas Court Slashes Nearly $50M Alex Jones Judgment In Sandy Hook Case

NEWTOWN, CT — A Texas appeals court on Friday significantly reduced damages awarded against Infowars founder Alex Jones and his company in a lawsuit brought by the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

According to an opinion issued Friday by the Texas Third Court of Appeals, the court slashed the punitive damages portion of a nearly $50 million judgment against Jones and his company.

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The ruling reduced the exemplary damages awards to $750,000 each for Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, was killed in the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting in Newtown.

The unanimous appeals court found Heslin and Lewis had not presented sufficient evidence that the harassment fueled by Jones' Sandy Hook hoax claims met the legal standard required to exempt the exemplary damages from Texas' $750,000 statutory cap.

The decision stems from a Texas lawsuit over Jones' years of false claims surrounding the Sandy Hook shooting. Jones falsely claimed the massacre did not happen and was staged by the government as a pretext to tighten gun laws.

Heslin sued for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, while Lewis sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The Texas case is separate from the much larger $1.4 billion judgment Jones faces in Connecticut stemming from lawsuits brought by other Sandy Hook families.

The ruling does not affect that Connecticut judgment.