Exclusive-Inside the Alex Jones jury room: tensions, pizza and 'lizard
people'
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[August 15, 2022]
By Jack Queen
AUSTIN (Reuters) - As the jury in the Alex
Jones defamation trial gathered in a conference room in a Texas
courthouse on Aug. 5 to decide how much the U.S. conspiracy theorist
owed to two parents of a murdered Sandy Hook first-grader, sums at first
ranged from $500,000 to $200 million, a juror told Reuters.
"We saw those numbers on the board and someone said, 'Well, I guess
we're never leaving this room,'" said Sharon, a juror who asked that her
last name be withheld because she fears harassment by Jones' followers.
Sharon, the first juror to speak publicly about the case, wrote her
preferred number on a strip of paper and passed it to the front. One
woman pooled everyone's votes and wrote them on a whiteboard. Sharon
declined to share her number with Reuters.
Reuters was able to obtain contact information for two other members of
the 12-person jury panel. One declined to comment and another did not
respond to inquiries.
Because the judge overseeing the case had in September already found
Jones liable for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional
distress for claiming the killing of 20 children and six staff members
at the school in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged, the only question
facing the jurors in the two-week trial was how much money he had to
pay.
The high-profile trial was prompted by Jones' bogus claims that the
shooting was part of a government plot to confiscate Americans' firearms
and that the victims' families were complicit in the scheme. He
repeatedly aired the claims on his media outlet Infowars, which is owned
by Free Speech Systems LLC. Jones has since acknowledged the shooting
occurred.
The Texas case was brought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose
6-year-old son Jesse Lewis was murdered in the shooting. Jones is
awaiting trial over damages in two other Sandy Hook cases in which he
has also been found liable.
TOO NERVOUS TO EAT
The deliberation room in the Depression-era Austin courthouse was a
tight fit, and some jurors had to sit in chairs along the wall, Sharon
said. Over Domino's pizza, the panel wrestled for nearly seven hours
with the question of how much in punitive damages to award the parents,
Sharon said, though she was too nervous to eat. The vote on such
damages, which are meant to punish defendants for their conduct, was
required to be unanimous.
The plaintiffs' lawyers had asked for $150 million.
The previous day, the same panel after about five hours of deliberations
had voted 10-2 that Jones must pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages.
Those damages are meant to cover the plaintiffs' suffering and losses
and required only a majority of jurors to agree.
The judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, required the jury to separately decide
the two types of damages.
Sharon, a mother of two who works in the nonprofit sector, said she and
her peers struggled to arrive at either figure. There was tension during
deliberations over whether dollar values could even be assigned to the
abstract concept of emotional suffering, Sharon said.
At first, some jurors were skeptical that Heslin and Lewis were entitled
to any compensatory damages at all. The two parents had testified that
followers of Jones and his Infowars site harassed and sent them death
threats for years in the false belief that they were actors lying about
the death of their son.
"We all believed that Neil and Scarlett were credible," Sharon said.
"There just weren't tangible things behind their mental anguish, and we
were asked to award between $1 and $150 million without any guidance."
Heslin and Lewis couldn't point to specific monetary losses that they
suffered because of Jones' conduct, and neither side's lawyers offered
clear advice on how to quantify the emotional distress that the
conspiracy theorist caused them, Sharon said.
For instance, rather than easily quantifiable financial harm, she said,
the parents spoke about less measurable types of anguish, such as
sleepless nights and flashbacks to the day of the shooting.
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Alex Jones talks to media during a
midday break during the start of a jury trial that will decide how
much he must pay the family of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook
massacre that he falsely claimed was a hoax, at the Travis County
Courthouse in Austin, Texas, U.S. July 26, 2022. Briana Sanchez/Pool
via REUTERS/File Photo
Jurors didn't give much credence to the parents' lawyers request: $1
for every one of the 24% of Americans who doubt or don't believe
Sandy Hook happened, Sharon said. The figure was based on a single
poll, and jurors didn't think that was enough evidence to justify
the $150 million that the parents sought, Sharon said.
Instead, they calculated the damages based on their own formulas,
and by the end of the afternoon, the room resembled a math
classroom, she said.
Mark Bankston, an attorney for the parents, told Reuters in an email
on Sunday that "in a case with no concrete losses or economic
damages, the fact that the jury was prepared to award a multimillion
verdict speaks volumes."
Jones' attorney, Federico Andino Reynal, told Reuters on Sunday that
he was "pleased" with how the jurors assessed the evidence, but he
still believed the award was too high.
RAISED VOICES
Sharon said she knew little about Jones before trial. She described
herself as a left-leaning moderate but said she doesn't follow
political news closely.
At first she was even amused by some of the clips of Jones' show
played during the trial, such as ones in which an agitated Jones
railed against nefarious plots by a cast of villains including
"lizard people," she said. But conspiracies vilifying parents of
slain first-graders were different, she said.
"To say these things about this terrible tragedy -- elementary
school kids being murdered -- it's just different than if you want
to believe in lizard people," she said.
Jurors managed to keep politics out of the discussion, but as the
day dragged on, there were raised voices and tension over whether
one could put a price on mental anguish.
Eventually they arrived at $4.1 million total in compensatory
damages, apportioning different amounts for each parent according to
the jury's assessment of their past and present suffering. There was
a show of hands, and all but two jurors joined in, Sharon said.
Punitive damages were less difficult, she said, as the group
immediately agreed Jones and Infowars should be punished. They
disagreed, however on how severe the punishment should be.
Sharon said jurors decided to award punitive damages worth 10% of
Jones' net worth per parent. Jones is worth between $130 million and
$270 million, a plaintiffs' expert testified. The jurors' punitive
damages verdict was $45.2 million.
That award could wind up being slashed by the judge to as little as
10% because of a Texas law that caps punitive damages, legal experts
said.
Reynal said on Sunday that punitive damages should be reduced to
$1.5 million under the cap.
Lawyers for the parents told Reuters they will argue the cap does
not apply.
Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy in Texas midway through the
trial. A group of Sandy Hook parents intervened in the case and
asked a judge to freeze the company's assets to prevent Jones from
funneling cash to different entities.
The verdict has symbolic value, but it does not change the
underlying societal problems that make Jones' conspiratorial
thinking appealing to so many, she said.
"Nobody was super happy with it," she said of the verdict.
(Reporting By Jack Queen in Austin; Editing by Amy Stevens, Noeleen
Walder and Daniel Wallis)
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