https://www.mediaite.com/ .. r-court-hears/


The defamation trial of far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones continued on Friday as parents of a child murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 seek punitive damages against Jones for calling the shooting a hoax.

Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of murdered 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, were awarded $4.1 million by a Texas jury on Thursday in compensatory damages.


Lawyers for the parents put forensic economist Bernard Pettingill on the stand Friday morning to lay out the net worth and financial operation behind Alex Jones and Free Speech Systems LLC (FFS), the company behind his InfoWars conspiracy theory show.

“Alex Jones was a revolutionary, a maverick,” Pettingill said on the stand, praising Jones as a “very successful guy.”

“He did not ride a wave, he created a wave,” Pettingill said of Jones’s business model, which he praised as an innovative operation that harnessed the power of the internet and has gained scores of “rabid” fans that pour money into InfoWars buying all kinds of products from merchandise to vitamins


When confronted with the fact that Jones was banned from social media platforms in 2018 for hate speech directed at various minorities, which Jones has claimed “cost him millions,” Pettingill contradicted the notion the ban hurt InfoWars.

In fact, Pettingill’s research, which he testified to on the stand, showed Jones only increased his revenue stream after the bans. The fact that Jones was able to self-monetize InfoWars flies in the face of conventional wisdom that deplatforming hate speech helps to curb it

Twitter

In the Alex Jones trial, forensic economist Bernard Pettingill now talking about how InfoWars made MORE money after being deplatformed from Facebook and Twitter in 2018Â*— the opposite of what Jones has been claiming to his viewers for years.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) August 5, 2022

Jones is the “key man of this organization if he had to buy insurance on himself” guess it would “be in the billions” of dollars Pettingill said at one point in his testimony.

Overall, Pettingill noted that without Jones’s tax returns he could not make a precise evaluation of FSS’s worth, but argued the company was worth somewhere between $135 and $270 million.

Pettingill noted that he had documentation that Jones paid himself 6 million dollars a year for three years and argued “$60-70 million” is the “foundation, the starting point for determining the value of FSS or InfoWars


Pettingill was also asked to speak to Jones and his company declaring bankruptcy in recent days


He laid out the various debts Jones carries and argued, “He can say he’s broke, he has no money but we know that’s not the fact.”

Dude been a fraud. Knew this sh*t back in 08, 09. Thats why they would let him talk. He would stir up bullsh*t. Some truth mixed with bullsh*t. He literally became a millionaire by selling his merchandise. Dude was a finesser for real. Especially during that OG Youtube era.

dude is morphing into a comic book villain

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Inb4

"He was right sometimes. This is a sham to silence him"