Remarkably, I think this is all economic damages --- they haven't reached the punitive damages phase. Furthermore, Connecticut doesn't have caps on compensatory damage for emotional distress.
So this isn't quite like the Texas situation, where Jones attorneys successfully convinced the jury to award relatively small compensatory damages and large punitive damages --- those Texas punitive damages will get knocked way back, because there are local and federal caps on the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages.
By making millions of dollars by deliberately amplifying the pain of a murdered parent, so that they're harassed and threatened, face to face, even when they visit states across the country from where they live. It's not complicated. Jones really did fuck these people's lives up, and he did so knowing that their lives had already been devastated. It's hard to even think of a way to profit from the mass murder of first graders, but Alex Jones literally found a way to do it; he might be the only person to have done so successfully.
His profit isn't "actual damages" though. They haven't even decided punitive damages yet.
I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million. The US government values a human life at $10 million, is this 6x worse than what the killer did?
> I can't figure the math on how any of them could have been damaged $64 million.
You're massively underestimating both the impact of Jones's behavior and the value of a lifetime of earnings for many two earner families.
Assume both parents were the equivalent of senior SWEs at google and now cannot work. The assumption that they can no longer work is not an unreasonable assumption; their children were slaughtered and then they were threatened by angry mobs for years (and still are). I wouldn't be able to hold down a job.
$64M * 2% = $1,300,000 per year safe withdrawal. (The 4% rule is good if you are retired, but 2% is more realistic if you're eg in your early 30s.)
$1,300,000 / 2 = $640,000 income per earner.
Subtract $20,000 per person to compensate for typical healthcare and retirement benefits [1]. Actually that's a lower bound because of tax implications. We're now at $620,000 per earner.
I'm actually surprised that there aren't at least a few families for whom the number is higher; eg two surgeons, a surgeon and a lawfirm partner, a principal engineer and a VP, etc. would all have lost far more than $640K/yr/earner. These aren't typical pairings, but they're also not particularly rare, and the Sandy Hook community's family median income is nearly 2x the national average so it's the type of place you might expect to find these sorts of people over-represented.
So anyways, we are already within the Senior FAANG salary range and haven't even considered the various serious damages caused by Jones's behavior, beyond his victims' inability to hold down fairly normal upper middle class jobs. Many of them had to move multiple times, probably now have serious and life-long mental health issues from the harassment piles on top of trauma, etc. Once you include those damages, you probably end up with that $64M principal translating to something that is not far from the median family income for Sandy Hook.
He made money from lying about them. That's what the market paid for the plantiff's reputation. When the market pays a price for something, that's it's value. By lying he was harming their reputation without their consent, they bore the costs of it, while he made the profit. That looks similar to theft. I don't see why the damages shouldn't be for the demonstrable value of the harm.
> How does one possibly cause $64 million in straight damages per plaintiff? This isn't even the punitive yet.
I think people in this thread are massively underestimating the value of a lifetime of labor. This number is perfectly compensatory for eg a married couple that are both MDs, biglaw lawyers, FAANG engineers, finance professionals, or any number of other well-paying white collar jobs.
Being threatened the way that these families have -- after losing my child -- would absolutely wreck my mental health. There's no way that I or my wife would be able to live a normal life after the type of harassment incited by Jones. Certainly not hold down a job while looking over our shoulders and processing the trauma of losing a child and being hunted down by wackos in the aftermath.
The safe withdrawal rate on $64,000,000 when you're decades away from retirement age is probably closer to 2% than 4%, which puts us at $1,280,000 per year. That's $640,000 per earner. As a Senior at a FAANG -- which probably isn't my terminal level -- my income + benefits are north of this number.
Now allocate 1/3-1/2 of that $1.2M/yr to personal security and the cost of not having employer-sponsored healthcare and retirement benefits and you're already down to the equivalent of perhaps $250,000 - $400,000 per earner. That's fairly believable. And my only operating assumption is that this sort of trauma makes maintaining a white collar career path difficult/impossible.
And there are lots of other recurring expenses even aside from personal security associated with being hounded by a mob of armed wackos. I'd bet we would get down to $100,000 - $150,000 per earner per year of safe withdrawal income after extraneous expenses.
If I had to guess, the judge isn't going that much further than simply compensating these families for the cost of losing a lifetime of two normal incomes and compensation for other things that are necessary due to Jones's behavior.
You can probably divide the number you're working from roughly in half, because probably half the damages in each case are for emotional damages, which don't compensate lost earnings but rather mitigate suffering already undergone or that will continue to be undergone. It's a distinction big enough that the IRS taxes those damages differently.
Thanks. The point is that it's not at all hard to see how purely compensatory damages can get into the $64M range for two middle class or especially upper middle class people.
I'm less certain. It looks like this mostly hinges on the bankruptcy filings, which weren't going great for Jones (as, of course, they should not, as they seem pretty bogus).
Bankruptcy notwithstanding, he almost certainly does not have $1B. He's a celebrity figure of sorts, but pretty fringe. It's a symbolic victory. He'll have to liquidate the bulk of whatever assets he may have, and the plaintiffs will get a few dollars when it's all said and done.
No, it seems like he has personal assets in the high tens of millions of dollars, and that Free Speech Systems was probably worth into the 9 figures. If the verdict stands, all of that will get wiped out, and the question remaining will be whether the damages, which stem from an intentional tort, will be dischargeable when Jones is forced into bankruptcy non-ironically, rather than using it as a ploy.
This always confused me, if someone is wiped out in this way how are they able to survive in the aftermath? Isn't this effectively sentencing them to homelessness forever, or is there a floor value in these wins that's always respected which accounts for some minimal cost amount of food+rent?
And doesn't the responsibility to pay up remain for money made after the bankruptcy event? Or does declaring bankruptcy ensure a clean slate such that income from new ventures is safe from being confiscated?
Yes, there is usually a floor value. Most states enumerate some types and amounts of property, and some amounts of income, that are exempt from civil judgment collection. It's the same thing for bankruptcy: there are exemptions that allow you to keep a certain amount.
A bankruptcy discharge does usually ensure a clean slate for new ventures. However, some types of debt are "nondischargeable" and can survive a bankruptcy. That includes "intentional torts" like these instances of defamation. So, it's likely that these plaintiffs/creditors will be able to go after his new ventures.
I think if I was in law school and I was being told about these defamation laws and the potential for someone to be sued out of virtually their entire wealth, that would not have sat well with me. But here we are, and Alex Jones' antics prove to be an excellent rejoinder to those doubts.
Still however, I wish the laws were more selective about which funds are ripe for being taken from. E.g., Alex Jones should have to pay up for money that was made from the source of the problem (the podcasts in this case), if he had, say, funds attained from a side-business of roofing, those should be untouched. And if he continues with his roofing business, maybe we shouldn't be taking all of those funds. Otherwise, I fear we are really just erecting disincentives for them to be good and upstanding contributors to society. As losing defendants of these battles are likely to be a perilous group, the issue probably deserves more careful handling. What are your thoughts?
That's an interesting point about the disincentive. I fear, though, that rules around this wouldn't be feasible to administer; it could open a whole new world of hiding assets, which is already pretty easy to do.
I'm no expert but I think the general flow is that you wipe out all the debtor's assets, and then you arrange with the bankruptcy court to garnish their earnings until the matter is settled. That's for instance how it worked out with OJ.
>effectively sentencing them to homelessness forever
Not if you have lived in Florida for the past 40 months[0], which is why many professional athletes change their residency to Florida and start the clock on the day they sign their professional contract. It appears Alex missed a trick here.
Yeah I think the object here is not to enrich the families but to make the costs actually matter instead of being a line item on his annual financials.
So this isn't quite like the Texas situation, where Jones attorneys successfully convinced the jury to award relatively small compensatory damages and large punitive damages --- those Texas punitive damages will get knocked way back, because there are local and federal caps on the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages.