Alex Jones told to pay $965m damages to shooting victims’ families

The American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been told to pay $965 million in damages after he falsely claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. 

The families of eight of the victims and an FBI agent who responded to the attack had sought at least $550 in the defamation trial in Connecticut. 

Jones had spent a decade spreading misinformation and harassing the families. 

The Sandy Hook shooting saw twenty children and six adults killed. Jones – who founded the conspiracy-laden Infowars website and talk show, argued for years that the massacre was a “staged” government plot to take guns from Americans and that no one was killed. 

He now says he knows the attack was “100% real”.