A Texas judge ordered InfoWars founder Alex Jones to pay $100,000 in legal fees in a defamation case brought by the father of a Sandy Hook school shooting victim, The New York Times reports.
Travis County Judge Scott Jenkins ordered Jones to pay legal fees after deciding that he and his attorney intentionally ignored an October court order to turn over materials and produce witnesses to Neil Heslin, who filed the suit.
Jenkins said that the decision to ignore the order “should be treated as contempt of court.”
Along with the legal fees, Jenkins denied Jones’ motion to dismiss the suit.
Jones claimed Helin’s murdered son was fake:
The suit was filed by Heslin, who lost his 6-year-old son Jesse in the December 2012 shooting, after Jones repeatedly claimed that the school shooting was fake.
“Mr. Jones is learning that he cannot treat the courts with the same contempt he showed my clients,” Heslin’s attorney Mark Bankston told The New York Times.
“In disobeying court orders, Mr. Jones has shown how desperate he is to ensure nobody finds out how Infowars really operates, or the lengths the company went to carry out its five-year campaign of malicious harassment against these parents,” he added.
Jones faces more lawsuits from Sandy Hook parents:
Heslin is not the only parent suing Jones.
“The families of eight victims of the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and an FBI agent who responded to the massacre are suing Jones, Infowars and others for promoting a theory that the shooting was a hoax. A 20-year-old gunman killed 20 first-graders, six educators and himself at the school, after having killed his mother at their Newtown home,” The Associated Press reported. “The families said they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers because of the hoax conspiracy.”
