Episode Details

Defamation law may turn out to be America’s most important weapon against rightwing media lies.

On Friday, Infowars star Alex Jones’ parent media company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy in the midst of a defamation damages trial underway in Austin, Texas.

Jones, you may recall, had portrayed the Sandy Hook school shooting massacre as a hoax involving actors, aimed at increasing gun control. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, was among the 20 children and six educators killed, have sued Jones and his media company for $150 million. Courts in Texas and Connecticut have already found Jones liable for defamation.

To win a defamation lawsuit, a plaintiff must show four things: the defendant made a false statement purporting to be fact; the statement was published or communicated; the defendant failed to exercise reasonable care or, worse, knew the statement was incorrect and hurtful but made it anyway; and the plaintiff suffered harm as a result.

By these criteria, it’s no wonder Jones will soon be paying out a fortune in damages. Declaring bankruptcy won’t save him.

Defamation litigation is slow and expensive and, like all litigation, it enriches lawyers. It can also be abused. Anyone remember what happened to Gawker after its tech blog published a post under the headline, “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”? Billionaire Thiel quietly bankrolled Hulk Hogan, the professional wrestler, to sue Gawker for defaming Hogan in a totally unrelated story — and Hogan’s nine-figure defamation award bankrupted Gawker Media.

But at a time when social media can’t be trusted to police itself against weaponized lies, and when much of the public doesn’t trust government to regulate social media, defamation lawsuits may be the best we can hope for.

One America News (OAN), a right-wing media organization that pushed conspiracy theories about the election, is facing so many defamation lawsuits from those injured by the network’s lies that its future is now in doubt.

Five years ago, Trump was ecstatic about OAN’s flattering coverage of him. By the summer of 2020 -- dissatisfied with what he considered insufficient gushing by Fox News – Trump was urging his followers to switch to OAN and Newsmax, calling them “much better” than Fox. He did the same after the election, when OAN’s journalists were more willing than many Fox correspondents to continue pushing Trump’s Big Lie.

Last December, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, Georgia election workers, sued OAN hosts and guests, including Rudy Giuliani, for baselessly accusing them of committing election fraud and engaging in a criminal conspiracy. Freeman and Moss said OAN’s lies subjected them to an onslaught of harassment and racist threats, leading one of them to leave her home for months at the recommendation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

OAN ultimately settled the case for an undisclosed sum. Apparently as part of the settlement agreement, OAN admitted on air that Freeman and Miss “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.”

Meanwhile, Dominion Voting Systems, which provided voting machines to 28 states in the 2020 election, has accused OAN of defaming the company and its products by airing false reports that its machines switched votes from Donald Trump to President Biden, thereby hurting its business and putting its employees in danger. (One of