The right-wing conspiracy theorist was not in court as the jury in Travis County, Texas, returned its unanimous verdict against him late Friday afternoon. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose six-year-old son Jesse was among the 20 students and six adults killed in the mass shooting, sued Jones and media company Infowars over claims he made that the massacre was a “false flag ». operation and that the victims did not actually exist. The jury’s decision came just one day after it found Jones must pay $4.11 million in restitution to the family. Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis had sought $150 million in damages, and the jury’s award of punitive damages is designed to deter harmful conduct. After the ruling, family lawyer Mark Bankston asked the judge to decide whether he could release a copy of Jones’ phone data, which he revealed during the trial had been mistakenly sent to him by Jones’ legal team. Mr Bankston told the court that the January 6 commission and other law enforcement agencies have already asked him to hand over a copy of the data. Jones’ lawyers said they wanted the judge to rule that Mr Bankston could not turn over the text messages and emails contained on the phone, but she refused to get involved. “I’m not standing between you (Bankston) and Congress, that’s not my job and I’m not going to do it. I’m not getting in the middle of this fight,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble said. The judge went on to tell the court the case had been a “challenging and exhausting few weeks for all of us”. During the final day of testimony, the family’s attorney surprisingly informed Jones that his own attorney had accidentally sent them two years of his text messages. Jones claimed in discovery that he could not find text messages about Sandy Hook on his phone, but denied lying under oath. Before the court returned its verdict for damages, a forensic economist had given details of Jones’s estate. Bernard Pettingill told the court that Jones began putting $11,000 a day into a supposed shell company after he was found responsible for the Sandy Hook cases. He told the jury that his estimate was that Infowars earned $64 million last year and that Jones’ media company Free Speech Systems was worth between $135 million and $270 million. “As mischievous as he is, as much of an outsider as he is, he’s a very successful man,” Mr. Pettingill said of Jones. He went on to estimate that Jones’ personal worth was between $70 million and $140 million, and that he had brought in $165 million from September 2015 to December 2018. Mr Pettingil told the court that Jones had withdrawn $61.9 million from Free Speech Systems in 2021, the year the default judgment was entered against him.
