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When Will the Victims of Oil Companies’ Lies Get Their Day In Court?
It’s past time for the fossil fuel industry to face the same type of courtroom reckoning the tobacco industry did in the late 1990s and Alex Jones faced yesterday
The victims of Alex Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook slaughter of their children were just awarded about a billion dollars by a jury of his peers. Jones made tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions peddling lies leading to years of stalking, harassment, and emotional torture of the families of the children who died.
Which raises a vital question: When will the victims of oil companies’ lies — which have led to far more deaths than happened that terrible day in Connecticut — get their day in court?
There’s an amazing backstory here.
During the week of Christmas, 1953 a group of tobacco executives met discreetly with John Hill of Hill & Knowlton, then the largest, most powerful, and most prestigious PR firm in the world, at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
News that tobacco caused cancer had leaked into the mainstream press with recent stories in TIME magazine, Readers’ Digest, and Life magazine telling the stories of scientists who had reached that conclusion and the…
