He caused his fans to harass families of murdered children for years, several had to move, some multiple times. All the while Alex Jones was raking in millions in cash off it.
Alex Jones is directly inciting people to go harass the plaintiffs so he bears liability for his actions.
Im genuinely asking because i don’t understand how this works.
I was under the impression that saying “Trump is a murderous liar” is fine, if I say “Go kill trump”etc then thats incitement.
Does that make sense?
If Alex Jones said "go kill these families," he'd likely be facing criminal charges. Instead, he made up specific claims which he kept repeating even after being shown evidence a reasonable person would accept as refutation of said claims.
To your analogy: if you said "Trump is a murderous liar who buggered my pet rabbit last Tuesday in New York," then were shown evidence Trump was in London and up to no buggery, and yet you kept saying it, yes, Trump might have a claim against you.
You could argue that using drones to kill people is murdering, you can point to times when he lied. It also just strikes me as different when saying things about someone who is in public office and saying things about private citizens who aren't in the spotlight at all.
If this was a soccer game he basically walked to the edge of the field and sat there the whole game and then complained that the refs were in a conspiracy against him because the opposing team was able to score unopposed.
This is what he did, and it's defamation. If I say "go kill Trump" that might be incitement (although it might not be if it's not credible.) If I say "Trump is a murderous liar," that's really just a personal characterization that can't be disproven - you can find things in his past that can be interpreted as murder, and things that can be interpreted as lies, whether that makes him a "murderous liar" is just banter. If I say that Trump molested a child, and I clearly intend for the charge to be taken seriously, that's defamation unless I can show the kid.
He was not sued for "incitement", he was sued for defamation.
To prove defamation, you need to prove that someone lied about you, and that those lies caused material harms.
You saying "Trump is a murderous liar" is largely fine because:
- A reasonable reader, familiar with the context of the place you are writing, would understand that you aren't making a factual claim that Trump murdered a person but rather you are expression a rhetorical political opinion.
- Trump is a public figure, which means you must meet the "actual malice" standard of reckless disregard for the truth.
- Trump must have been materially harmed by your statements for it to be worth suing you.
If you, on the other hand, falsely and deliberately recklessly said: "Trump murdered person X", repeated that claim for years, and convinced hundreds thousands of people that it was true to the point where Trump had to move houses several times due to ongoing death threats, then you would probably be liable for defamation.
The _context_ matters. The _breadth of your reach_ matters. The _actual harms caused_ matter.
No, defamation doesn't require you to specifically be named. It's enough for them to be identified with enough specificity that they are harmed.
> If a politician says the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading the disease
There are two claims in the phrase "the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading disease".
The first claim, that they are terrible people, is not a statement of fact, but is rather an opinion. There is no factual, objective, way to determine whether someone is "a terrible person". So that part would not create the potential for liability.
The second claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" _could_ potentially be defamatory, but truth would be an absolute defense. The truth also doesn't have to be _perfect_ so long as it's "correct in the main". First, note that the claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" is still true even if the vaccinated are also spreading disease. So, your defamation claim would need to first convince the jury that the implication of the statement is "the unvaccinated are spreading disease *more than the vaccinated*". I think that implication is there, but it's a little more tenuous of a claim. Second, I don't think there would be any liability, since the vaccine has some efficacy. To defend against the defamation claim, it would be sufficient to show that the vaccine has any significant efficacy. You wouldn't need to demonstrate that the vaccine has perfect efficacy. The vaccine does have efficacy against COVID-19, so I think a defamation claim would fail here.
Finally, you'll need to go to the harms. It's going to be very difficult to demonstrate significant harm to any individual unvaccinated person, when the group includes 100M people. The harm is going to be _very_ diffused, and I think it would be difficult to demonstrate any economic harm.
So, on balance, I think a politician would still be very safe making the statement you suggested, even in light of the fact that a person doesn't need to be specifically named to press a defamation claim.
Where is this accusation made by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit? The only accusation I see is that Jones and his associates made defamatory false statements about the plaintiffs. As far as I can tell, that was the basis for the ruling, not any claims of incitement.
Of course, you can argue that there's no direct causal relationship because Jones or whoever can say 'I'm not saying to do something, but....'. But so what? If an outcome is statistically predictable there doesn't have to be a direct nexxus, a proximate one is sufficient.
That might be your personal opinion, but it's not the law. If nutjob A makes a defamatory statement about you, but doesn't tell anyone to do anything, and then nutjob B harasses you after hearing what nutjob A said, nutjob B is the one who is legally responsible for the harassment. Nutjob A is responsible for the defamation, but not for what other nutjobs might decide to do.
Now if nutjob A explicitly said things along the lines of "you should go after this person", instead of just making defamatory false factual claims about them, that would be different. But I have not seen any claims by the plaintiffs that Jones said anything like that. They're just saying he made defamatory false statements.
> If an outcome is statistically predictable there doesn't have to be a direct nexxus, a proximate one is sufficient.
This legal theory is a recipe for disaster. There's a reason why the law requires direct evidence for things like this.
I have, and I didn't see anything about claiming damages based on harassment.
> then you can express your opinion on how it's deficient
I haven't said anything was deficient.
Courts and jurors are completely fine with finding that the behavior of nutjob B (and C and D and E and F) that are predictable from the defamation are part of the damages associated with the defamation.
So, yes, nutjob A _does_ have legal liability for the damages caused by nutjobs B and C and D and E and F that are a predictable consequence of the defamation.
The law does not require "direct evidence" of the connection to every instance of harassment. It requires enough evidence that a jury can decide a "but for" causation is more likely than not. Jurors are perfectly capable of making deductions and inferences such as "person A with a massive platform lied repeatedly for years", and then "hundreds of nutjobs harassed plaintiffs based on the same lies", connecting those two facts, and deciding that it's more likely than not that the nutjobs wouldn't have harassed the person if not for person A's lies.
Do you have any actual cases where that was the ruling?
Almost always the economic harms that arise from defamation are the result of third parties responding to the defamatory content. If you couldn't incorporate the actions of third parties into the calculation of economic harm, then there would almost never be economic harm from defamation.
As for specific court cases, take a look at Gibson Bros., Inc v. Oberlin College. A jury awarded Gibson's Bakery $11M in compensatory damages (and another $33M in economic damages). Of the compensatory damages, Gibson had argued that, among other things Oberlin college should be responsible for the damages arising from:
"They blamed Oberlin for repeated vandalism and property damage and for Grandpa Gibson breaking his back while investigating the source of someone pounding on his apartment door in the middle of the night"
https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/9/2022/2022-O...
Two other examples, of course, would be the recent Alex Jones cases in TX and CT where the same reasoning also let to economic damage awards...
I understand that this is the opinion of you and others. That doesn't make it the law.
> take a look at Gibson Bros., Inc v. Oberlin College
In that case, there was evidence of communications by college officials saying things like "I hope we rain fire and brimstone down on that store". Also, the college has a responsibility for the behavior of its students that Alex Jones and his associates and employees do not have for the behavior of random nutjobs that have no association with them. So the facts in the cases are different and I don't think the Oberlin case shows a general justification for "damages from harassment" being part of a defamation claim.
> Two other examples, of course, would be the recent Alex Jones cases in TX and CT where the same reasoning also let to economic damage awards...
I didn't see that in any of the actual legal documents in those cases.
It's not really a question of law. It's more a question of fact ("were these claimed economic harms caused by the statement"), which means its a question for the jury. Which means it's the opinion of the jury that matters.
As far as "the law" on this topic, typically the most relevant thing will be the jury instructions. These will vary from state to state, but let's take a look at Virginia's since those were the first I found online.
I'll highlight again my claim that we're evaluating:
"Courts and jurors are completely fine with finding that the behavior of nutjob B (and C and D and E and F) that are predictable from the defamation are part of the damages associated with the defamation."
Let's look at the 37.100 for Actual Damages from the VA pattern jury instructions: https://www.vacourts.gov/courts/circuit/resources/model_jury...
> ...in determining the amount of damages to which he is entitled, you may take into consideration all of the circumstances surrounding the statement, the occasion on which it was made and the extent of its publication, the nature and character of the insult, *the probable effect on those who heard the statement*, and its probable and natural effect upon the plaintiff's personal feelings and upon his standing in the community and in business
I've indicated the key section which directly supports my claim. I'll turn it over to you. Can you find a state's pattern jury instructions that *don't* behave the way I suggest? I'm not familiar with all 50 states defamation laws, but I'll be very surprised if you find a single state that doesn't allow the jury to include the predictable actions of third parties based on the defamation as part of the harms of defamation.
"The probable effect on those who heard the statement" is ambiguous. Does it mean the effect on their opinion of the plaintiff? Or does it mean the effect on their actions?
Legally, I believe it's the first. The defendant can be held responsible for the probable effects of their defamatory false statements as far as inducing negative opinions in others regarding the plaintiff. But the defendant cannot be held responsible for some other nutjob, who is not an associate or employee or in some other relationship with the defendant, choosing to harass the plaintiff based on nothing more than defamatory false statements. There would have to be something in the statements that explicitly incited others to commit wrongful acts, instead of just inducing them to hold negative opinions. And, as I have said, in the Alex Jones case I have not found anything that alleges or attributes incitement on the part of Jones.
This is an instance of a more general legal principle that individuals are free agents and are presumed to be in control of their actions, so no third party can be legally responsible for what an individual chooses to do (in the absence of some legally recognized relationship such as principal-agent). Explicit incitement can go against that presumption, but simple false statements that could reasonably induce a negative opinion cannot.
They're jury instructions. There isn't further legal analysis. These words mean precisely what a jury of your peers interpret them to mean. That's it.
You don't get to make a legal quibble over a juror's reasonable interpretation of the instructions. If there's ambiguity, it's up to the jury to resolve at that point (and often jury instructions deliberately have some ambiguity to them—because the job of the jury is to apply sometimes ambiguous phrases such as "reasonable care" to specific facts).
So you can't say "oh, most of society is just misinterpreting the jury instructions", because that just means you might very well lose the argument before a jury!
You say there's ambiguity. Fine. I left a challenge for you. Can you find a single state where the jury instructions are unambiguous and foreclose on my interpretation? One state where the actual harm jury instructions clearly don't allow damages from the predictable actions of third parties?
Frankly, I'm done with the discussion until you try. I've put in effort to cite cases and jury instructions to support my positions, while you've cited nothing but your own opinion.
And how do we find out what that is? We find out by looking at what happened in actual cases.
In the Gibson case that you cited, I saw nothing that indicated that the jury awarded damages based on harassment by unrelated third parties. There is a mention of Grandpa Gibson "breaking his back", but there is nothing to indicate that the jury awarded any damages based on, for example, medical or other costs associated with that back injury. According to your position, damages for that should have been included. On mine, they shouldn't (the Gibsons would have to recover such damages from whoever was pounding on their apartment door in the middle of the night). So this instance supports my position, not yours.
Similarly, in the Alex Jones cases, I see no indication that the juries awarded any damages based on harassment by unrelated third parties. Which, again, is consistent with the position I have been arguing.
"I don't see something" is not evidence that it doesn't exist.
> So this instance supports my position, not yours.
Does it? You haven't cited anything beyond "I haven't seen it". If you want to claim it supports your position, show your work.
Show the breakdown of the $11M in damages, and show that it excludes property damages, and the medical damages.
"I see no indication that..."
Again, I'm not going to carry this conversation forward unless you actually start citing sources, and pointing to the breakdown of damages if you claim it supports your position.
For all you've demonstrated, "I've seen no indication" may only be evidence that you haven’t looked.
Their actions come closer to criminal. Alex Jones isn't being criminally investigated; this is all civil.
Obviously, it's easier for the authorities to act first, then the families can sue.
The whole thing is senseless, the harassers are crazy people who believe that it was all "false flags" (for what? who knows), when these kids did die. Each harasser that is caught need to be shown the photos of these poor dead kids and forced to watch them, it will haunt them forever. As for Jones, he is a billionaire, this tragedy made is filthy rich, that's the only reason he exploited it. He probably never believed himself in these things.