He Called a School Massacre a Hoax. A Texas Court Cut His Penalty.
A Texas appeals court on Aug. 21, 2026, threw out most of a roughly $50 million judgment against Infowars founder Alex Jones, who for years told his online audience that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting — in which a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six educators — was staged. The unanimous ruling left about $4.1 million standing for two grieving parents but capped the punitive damages a jury had imposed, even as Jones still faces more than $1 billion in Sandy Hook liability elsewhere.
The Texas Third Court of Appeals ruled on Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, that Jones must pay about $6 million to the parents of a child killed at Sandy Hook, sharply reducing a judgment that a jury in Austin had set at nearly $50 million, PBS NewsHour and CNN reported. The decision does not clear Jones of wrongdoing; it narrows the amount he owes in one of several cases brought by families he defamed.
What the Texas court changed
The unanimous opinion left intact more than $4.1 million in compensatory damages that a jury had awarded to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis for defamation and emotional distress, according to CBS News. But the court cut more than $45 million in punitive damages down to $1.5 million to comply with a Texas law that caps such awards at $750,000 for each plaintiff, PBS NewsHour reported. The judges found that Heslin and Lewis had not shown that the harassment stemming from Jones’ hoax claims rose to a level that would let them exceed the statutory cap, CBS News reported.
The hoax that hounded the bereaved
On Dec. 14, 2012, a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, CNN reported. For years afterward, Jones used his Infowars internet and radio platforms to push the false claim that the massacre was a staged event, Al Jazeera reported. At trials in Texas and Connecticut, relatives of the victims testified that Jones’ followers, believing the shooting never happened, subjected them to death and rape threats, in-person harassment and abusive messages online, according to CBS News. A Texas jury ordered Jones in 2022 to pay Heslin and Lewis, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, a total of $49.3 million, PBS NewsHour reported.
‘This changes nothing’
Jones welcomed the ruling, calling it “a gigantic victory for the First Amendment” and saying he would keep appealing in a bid to have the remaining claims dismissed, PBS NewsHour reported. Mark Bankston, an attorney for Heslin and Lewis, dismissed the decision as “irrelevant,” telling reporters that Jones “still faces over a billion dollars of liability, so this changes absolutely nothing,” and that the outcome only “highlight[s] the absurdity of Texas law,” according to CBS News.
A cap on the price of a lie
Friday’s ruling does not touch a separate judgment of about $1.25 billion that a Connecticut jury ordered Jones to pay relatives of the 20 children and six educators killed in the shooting, CBS News reported. The Texas defamation suits are among the few legal tools that have forced a measure of accountability on a broadcaster who turned a mass killing into viral disinformation; the appeals court’s decision shows how state damages caps can limit the financial penalty even where a jury has found the conduct egregious, Al Jazeera reported. Jones was first found liable in the Connecticut and Texas cases after refusing to comply with court orders during the litigation, NPR reported.