By Dietrich Knauth
(Reuters) – The parent company of far-right website Infowars agreed on Monday to face a second U.S. defamation trial stemming from the company’s false claims the deadly 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was a hoax.
Free Speech Systems’ attorneys told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston the company would no longer oppose a trial in Connecticut next month, even though the company’s bankruptcy would normally shield it from lawsuits.
The Connecticut trial will determine how much FSS and its founder, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, should pay in a defamation case brought by family members of children slain in the shooting.
On Aug. 5 a Texas jury decided Jones must pay the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the massacre $45.2 million in punitive damages – on top of $4.1 million in compensatory damages – for falsely claiming the shooting was a hoax.
The Sandy Hook gunman, Adam Lanza, used a Remington Bushmaster rifle to kill 20 children and six staff at the school in Newtown, Connecticut – a massacre that ended when he killed himself with the sound of approaching police sirens.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Mark Porter and Howard Goller)
