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A Texas appeals court has slashed the $50m judgment to $1.5m against Alex Jones, founder of the rightwing platform Infowars, over falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut a hoax.

The ruling does not affect a $1.4bn judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a significant legal victory for Jones after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.

The unanimous opinion issued by the Texas third court of appeals found that Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis did not show sufficient evidence that harassment enflamed by Jones’s hoax claims rose to a level that would allow them to exceed the state’s $750,000 cap on damages.

Last year, the US supreme court refused to hear an appeal from Jones over the larger award but did not provide a reason for its decision.

Jones’s efforts to meet the awards have been subject to legal wrangling. In 2024, Jones dropped a petition and placed himself and his company into bankruptcy, admitting he had to pay the Sandy Hook families. Bankruptcy legal proceedings continue.

Jones has fought to retain control of Infowars, the influential rightwing business and platform he founded in the late 1990s that he used to broadcast conspiracy theories – and enrich himself with millions of dollars by marketing herbal supplements in the process.

Earlier this year, the satirical website the Onion announced plans to take control of Infowars and turn it into a parody of itself under a leasing agreement provisionally approved by a Texas court. However, a completed deal remains in limbo due to legal appeals.

Under a proposed deal with court administrators, Infowars would be leased by Global Tetrahedron, a Chicago-based company that owns the Onion, for $81,000 a month – money that would go toward paying the judgments against Jones.

Comedian Tim Heidecker, Infowars’s creative director, said “it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity.”

Heslin and Lewis’s six-year-old son, Jesse, was among 20 young children and six educators killed in the 2012 attack on Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The lawsuit and 2022 verdict against Jones marked the first time Jones was held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre, claiming it was faked by the government to tighten gun laws.

Jones, who portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his first amendment rights, conceded during the trial that the attack was “100% real” and that he was wrong to have lied about it. But Heslin and Lewis told jurors that an apology wouldn’t suffice and called on them to make Jones pay for the years of suffering he had put them and other Sandy Hook families through.

Jones’s trial attorney, Andino Reynal, had said immediately after the verdict that Jones would appeal against the damages amount, and predicted it would be reduced to $1.5m.

The Associated Press contributed reporting