On August 21, the Texas Third Court of Appeals modified the damages awarded to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis in their case against Alex Jones and Free Speech Systems.

The original damages totaled $49.31 million.

They came in two boxes:

  • $4.11 million in compensatory damages.
  • $45.2 million in exemplary damages.

The court reduced the second box. It applied the statutory cap and set the exemplary damages at $750,000 for each parent, or $1.5 million altogether.

It did not reduce the first box.

Here is the difficult part:

$4.11 million compensatory
$1.50 million exemplary
--------------------------
$5.61 million in damages

That is before prejudgment interest and separately awarded attorney fees and costs.

The court therefore cut $43.7 million in damages. This was a very large reduction. It required no help from journalism.

Help arrived anyway.

Mediaite announced: “Payment to Families Slashed from $50M to $1.5M.” Its opening used the same total-payment formulation.

Bloomberg Law said the verdict had been “Cut to $1.5 Million.” A brief report in The Guardian said the appeals court had slashed the judgment to that amount.

The $1.5 million figure was real. It was simply not the whole surviving damages award. It was the surviving exemplary portion.

The missing $4.11 million consisted of $110,000 awarded to Heslin for defamation and $2 million awarded to each parent on their intentional-infliction-of-emotional-distress claims. Those awards remained in place. The Austin American-Statesman correctly reported that Jones still owed more than $5 million in other damages from the same Texas court.

The reason for the reduction was also less sweeping than the headlines suggested. The appellate court held that the trial court improperly allowed a post-verdict pleading amendment to invoke an exception to the exemplary-damages cap without the required pleaded elements and jury findings. Default liability after discovery sanctions did not supply those findings.

Jones called the result “a gigantic victory for the First Amendment,” according to the Associated Press. He certainly obtained a large financial reduction. The court described its work more quietly: “We affirm the judgment as modified.”

The official docket put it this way: “Affirmed in part; Modified and, as Modified, Affirmed in part.”

This is how courts sing.

The record does not tell us why several outlets chose their wording. It does not need to. Motive is unnecessary here. Addition will do.

A headline cannot carry an entire appellate opinion. It can avoid replacing one number with another number that means something else.

The modified Texas damages were $5.61 million before interest and separate fees and costs.

Not $1.5 million.

This is not nuance. It is arithmetic.