The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 14 rejected radio talk show host Alex Jones’s appeal of a $1.4 billion defamation judgment related to his description of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting as a hoax.

The court denied the petition in Jones v. Lafferty in an unsigned order without comment. No justices dissented.

The Infowars host, who called the large civil judgment “a financial death penalty,” had argued that a judge was wrong to find him financially responsible for defamation and infliction of emotional distress without first conducting a trial regarding the allegations made by relatives of the victims. The shooting led to the deaths of 20 first graders and six school employees in Newtown, Connecticut.

Jones filed for bankruptcy in 2022. His attorneys told the Supreme Court that the “plaintiffs have no possible hope of collecting” the full judgment.

In a separate proceeding, Jones is appealing a $49 million judgment in a related defamation lawsuit in Texas. He allegedly failed to hand over documents sought by the parents of a Sandy Hook victim.

In the Connecticut case, the judge entered a default judgment against Jones and his business in 2021 after saying Jones had repeatedly not abided by court rulings ordering him to produce evidence.

Eight of the victims’ relatives and one FBI agent testified that they were threatened and harassed by people who denied the shooting had happened.

The harassment went on for years, the plaintiffs said, and included strangers turning up at some of their homes, public abuse, and threatening messages online, including death and rape threats.

In 2022, a jury returned a $964 million verdict against Jones. The judge later added another $473 million in punitive damages against Jones and Free Speech Systems, which is Infowars’s parent company.

In his petition filed on Sept. 5, Jones’s attorneys said the judgment, which totals $1,436,650,000, is “believed to be the largest in American libel history,” and is an amount which “can never be paid” and “may not dischargeable in bankruptcy.”

The opinions Jones and some of his guests expressed on the mass shooting “focused largely on exposing what he believed were efforts by the mainstream media and the Obama Administration to convert the tragedy into a mass theatrical production in service of anti-gun legislation,” the petition said.

The petition said Jones pointed out “inconsistencies and oddities in the official narrative, which in turn had fueled public concerns that the public was being given false or incomplete information, and which ultimately gave rise to broader conspiracy theories about the event.”

Jones had asked his listeners to investigate for themselves instead of relying “on the politically motivated mainstream media,” according to the petition. Jones acknowledged in his broadcasts that the murders had taken place and offered his opinions of “media excesses” by using words such as “hoax” and “staged,” which were for the most part directed at “the media circus,” it said.

Leaving the judgment intact will lead to a “self-censoring fear of suits especially in small locales, where … news sources may be targeted for locally unpopular speech,” and will “chill the reporting of news.”

“It will also flood state and federal courts with demands for default judgments,” the petition said.

On Sept. 15, the lead respondent, Erica Lafferty, waived the right of all respondents in the case to respond to the petition.

In November 2024, a satirical media outlet, The Onion, was the successful bidder in an auction to sell off the assets of Infowars to satisfy the judgment. A bankruptcy judge later threw out the results of the auction, saying there were problems with The Onion’s bid and the process itself.

The attempt to liquidate those assets is now before a Texas state court in Austin. Jones filed an appeal of an order of that court that appointed a receiver to sell the assets, which include some personal property of Jones.

The Epoch Times reached out for comment to Jones’s attorney, Ben Broocks of Broocks Law Firm in Austin, Texas, and Lafferty’s attorney, Alinor Sterling of Koskoff, Koskoff, and Bieder, of Bridgeport, Connecticut. No replies were received by publication time.

The Associated Press and Kos Temenes contributed to this report.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Oct. 14, 2025, in The Epoch Times.