The parents of a child killed in the worst school massacre in the United States asked jurors on Wednesday to sentence far-right conspirator Alex Jones to pay them $150 million for denying the carnage took place.
“We are here to make sure that Alex Jones and his company pay for the outright lies they have told,” said Kyle Farrar, lawyer for Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, after a ten-day trial in a Texas court.
The couple lost their six-year-old son when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut in 2012, killing 20 children and six adults.
Alex Jones, a well-known figure on the far right and follower of conspiracy theories, had claimed on his Infowars site that the massacre was only a staged scene piloted by opponents of firearms.
According to the parents, his lies had energized his audiences, allowing him to pocket millions of dollars, while they became the target of harassment campaigns.
Several families had sued him for compensation.
He had finally publicly admitted the reality of the killing, while refusing to cooperate with the courts.
Judges in Texas and Connecticut had therefore condemned him by default to pay damages to the plaintiffs, while leaving it to jurors to set their amount.