A $50 million judgment against Infowars founder Alex Jones for falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting a hoax has been slashed to $1.5 million by a Texas court.
The 3rd Court of Appeals unanimously found the trial court erred in exceeding the state’s $750,000 cap based on evidence that failed to meet the legal standard for exceeding the statutory limit on awards.
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Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis was among 20 children and six educators slain, saw their awards cut to $750,000 each. Jones still owes Sandy Hook parents more than $5 million in other damages set by the same state District Court.
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The lawsuit and 2022 verdict against Jones marked the first time the Austin-based conspiracy theorist was held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre, claiming it was faked by the government as a way to tighten gun laws.
But the appeals court said Friday the lower court erred in allowing amended pleadings that led to the cap-busting damages.
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It was just one of two judgments against Jones. Another in Connecticut state court, which awarded the families $1.4 billion, still stands.
Since 2023, Jones has been fighting the judgments against him over his multiple claims that the shooting was staged and that the parents were actors. Heslin and Lewis testified that followers of the conspiracy-peddling website Infowars began harassing and threatening them in the wake of their child’s death.
Jones, who portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his First Amendment rights, conceded during the trial that the attack was “100% real” and that he had lied about it.
“All this is irrelevant,” Mark Bankston, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, said, noting the families have a joint-collection agreement on all the judgments. The $50 million represented only about 3% of the total judgments against Jones, he said.
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The appeals court could have come down either way on the trial judge’s decision to allow a post-trial amendment arguing for additional damages, he said.
“It was 50-50,” Bankston said. “A post-trial amendment is always dicey.”
The opinion is the latest in a long fight to hold Jones accountable as families have received no payments in the years-old disputes. Both judgments have been ping-ponging through state, federal and bankruptcy courts.
As the cases continue, attempts to sell or license assets of Free Speech Systems, the Infowars parent company, also have been paused.
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Jones shut down the Infowars website in May, starting another website in its place. On his streaming show Friday, he called the Texas ruling “a gigantic victory for the First Amendment,” and said he will continue to appeal the case to the state Supreme Court to get the remaining damages thrown out.
AT ISSUE: Judge rejects Alex Jones’ bid to shield Infowars from potential Onion deal
Efforts by the owner of satirical news website The Onion, which has been attempting to purchase the company, have so far been stymied by the courts. It has launched its own Infowars-branded programming on other social media platforms, employing characters making outrageous and absurd claims, at times about Jones himself.
Friday’s opinion was not all bad for the victims’ families. Jones, who had been trying to overturn the entire judgment, lost most of his appeal claims.
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Judge Maya Guerra Gamble gave Jones and Free Speech Systems a “death-penalty” default judgment without a liability trial over their “flagrant bad faith” violations of discovery rules.
She and other judges along the way have often reprimanded Jones and his attorneys for obstructing discovery: deleting information from the hard drives of computers and providing corporate witnesses who were unprepared to testify. One judge called their depositions “completely useless.” At another point, Jones provided more than a thousand pages of transcripts from Infowars videos that he previously said no longer existed.
The appeals court upheld the default judgment, saying the trial court had provided ample examples of discovery violations.
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“The families don’t care one iota about this decision,” Bankston said of Friday's action, adding that the only ones benefiting from the continuing appeals are Jones’ attorneys.
Aug 21, 2026|Updated Aug 21, 2026 2:40 p.m.
Paul Flahive is a business litigation and bankruptcy reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. He began his journalism career in the 2000s. Flahive was an accountability reporter for Texas Public Radio before coming to Austin. He exposed systemic problems in Texas’ unemployment system, prisons, foster care, and the treatment of child victims of sexual abuse. His reporting was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.” He was a Pulitzer Center StoryReach U.S. Fellow in 2025 and has won numerous state and national awards for his accountability and investigative reporting.