That was one bizarre case indeed. I had to look it up a bit.
So the supreme court ruled in 1990 that ‘there is no separate constitutional privilege for “opinion” if a statement implies an assertion of objective, verifiable fact that can be proven false.’
So they got him on defamation, but it still doesn’t fully make sense to me.
Either you have freedom of speech or you don’t.
Thank you for this analysis, because so far I was only getting rather miserable excuses from people in the US who said something to the effect that 'it's civil litigation so it's different'... as if it changed anything for Jones 😀 As for the 'freedom of speech' I think any legal definition of that term assumes it's not absolute, that is you can't run around and say your neighbour is a pedophile who should be lynched and claim you're only executing your 'freedom of speech' even if it's entirely invented. One reason for that is that less perceptive members of the community may actually go and actually go and lynch him, which would mean you executing your freedom of speech at the same time violated his freedom to live.
