A Texas appeals court has reduced a multimillion-dollar judgment against Alex Jones and Free Speech Systems, the company that operated InfoWars, stemming from claims related to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
The Texas Third Court of Appeals issued a unanimous opinion in the case of Jones v. Heslin, which modified the award previously entered by a Travis County trial court.
The original judgment arose from a 2022 jury trial on damages following a default judgment on liability. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose six-year-old son Jesse Lewis was among those killed in the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting, had sued Jones and Free Speech Systems for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The claims centered on statements broadcast on InfoWars that described the shooting as a hoax involving crisis actors.
A jury awarded the parents more than $4.1 million in compensatory damages. Additional punitive, or exemplary, damages brought the total judgment to approximately $50 million.
In its ruling, the Third Court of Appeals left the compensatory damages intact, but with significant reductions. It reduced the exemplary damages from more than $45 million to $1.5 million, or $750,000 for each of the two plaintiffs. The modified total liability, including the compensatory portion, is approximately $6 million before prejudgment interest and certain attorney’s fees.
The court further determined that the trial court had abused its discretion by permitting a post-verdict amendment to the plaintiffs’ petition. That amendment sought to invoke an exception to Texas’s statutory cap on exemplary damages under the Civil Practice and Remedies Code.
The exception would have required findings related to injury to a disabled person that were neither pleaded prior to trial nor submitted to the jury. The appellate court reformed the judgment to reference the earlier petition and applied the $750,000-per-plaintiff cap.
BREAKING: A Texas court slashes the $50 million judgment against Infowars founder Alex Jones over falsely calling the Sandy Hook shooting a hoax. https://t.co/YCgo48qDLU
— The Associated Press (@AP) August 21, 2026
Friday’s Texas decision Texas decision is separate from a distinct judgment entered in Connecticut. In the Connecticut proceedings, Jones and related entities were found liable for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress to relatives of other victims of the same shooting as well as an FBI agent who responded to the scene. That case produced a judgment of approximately $1.25 billion.
The Connecticut judgement has generated significant controversy due to the scale of the penalty. Jones has appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, though the case was ultimately not heard.
