A jury has ordered conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $965m in damages to families of those killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting.

After a gunman killed 20 children and six members of staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012, Jones accused bereaved relatives of being actors who had faked the massacre.

During closing arguments in a defamation case at a state court in Connecticut, lawyers for eight families said Jones had used lies about the shooting to drive traffic to his Infowars website and boost sales of various products it offered.

In addition, the families have endured a decade-long campaign of harassment and death threats by Jones’s followers, lawyer Chris Mattei said.

“Every single one of these families (was) drowning in grief, and Alex Jones put his foot right on top of them,” Mr Mattei told jurors.

Jones’s lawyer, Norman Pattis, claimed during his closing argument that the plaintiffs had shown little evidence of quantifiable losses.

“This is not a case about politics,” Mr Pattis said. “It’s about how much to compensate the plaintiffs.”

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Jones has now acknowledged that the shooting did take place.

But he threw the trial into chaos as he railed against his “liberal” critics and refused to apologize to the families.

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