Christopher M. Mattei

Fifteen Plaintiffs

On December 14, 2012, twenty first-graders and six educators were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

In the years that followed, broadcasts and online material told the families that the murders had been staged, that the school was a stage set, that the children had never existed, and that the parents grieving them were actors hired to perform.

Fifteen plaintiffs brought the Connecticut case: fourteen relatives of victims and one first responder. Mattei served as lead counsel for the families. The trial team at Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder also included Joshua Koskoff, Alinor Sterling, Matt Blumenthal, Sarah Steinfeld, Colin Antaya, and Lorena Thompson.

Two Records

The case arrived at its damages trial in Waterbury, before Judge Barbara Bellis, with liability already established.

The default followed repeated discovery failures. The trial court found willful noncompliance, the withholding of critical data, and a violation of a protective order — after warnings, and after lesser measures had been tried. The Connecticut Appellate Court later affirmed the sanction on that record.

Mattei's assignment therefore began with two records at once, doing two different kinds of work.

One documented how the defendants had handled the court's demand for evidence. That record determined posture: it was why liability was no longer in dispute.

The other documented what the families had endured after the murders. That record would determine damages.

With liability fixed, the damages trial turned entirely on magnitude: what happened to each plaintiff, how the harassment unfolded, and why it continued for a decade. The proof burden concentrated on the families’ experiences and the evidence connecting the broadcasts to the abuse that followed.

Measuring an Injury Made of Words

At trial, family members described the threats, the harassment, the accusations that they were actors, and the claims that their murdered relatives were imaginary or still alive. They described what it is to be recognized in public by a stranger who believes your child was never born.

Proving that kind of harm requires more than testimony that it occurred. It requires a mechanism — an account of how a statement made on a broadcast becomes a stranger at a front door.

An expert estimated that the defendant's Sandy Hook material achieved at least 550 million social-media impressions between 2012 and 2018.

The estimate established the scale, repetition, and audience of the Sandy Hook material. Each broadcast was not a discrete insult but an instruction issued to a very large number of people, some fraction of whom acted. The testimony showed how the volume of the material and the size of its audience intensified each plaintiff's harassment and grief, and it allowed the jury to see the difference between being defamed and being hunted.

Defamation law grew up measuring injuries to reputation in a town. Mattei's proof translated it for an era in which a lie can be industrialized — manufactured, distributed, and monetized at broadcast scale for years. The verdict that followed was the jury's answer to what that costs the people it lands on.

The Judgment and Its Defense

On October 12, 2022, the jury awarded $965 million in compensatory damages.

The court later added $321.65 million in common-law punitive damages and $1,489,555.94 in costs. The trial judge denied the defendants' request to set aside or reduce the awards.

The Connecticut Appellate Court affirmed the default sanction, the compensatory award, the common-law punitive award, the costs, and the remittitur ruling. The Connecticut Supreme Court declined further review. On October 14, 2025, the United States Supreme Court denied certiorari and a stay, leaving a principal judgment of $1,288,139,555.94 in place.

Preserving a verdict of that size is separate work from the trial that produced it. It requires a record built for appellate review — evidentiary rulings preserved, damages testimony tied to specific proof, and punitive findings supported under the standard a reviewing court will apply. Mattei's team carried the families' evidence through the damages trial and preserved the principal judgment through every level of review available to the defense.

The same firm represented Sandy Hook families in the litigation against the manufacturer of the rifle used in the shooting, which resolved for $73 million in February 2022.

The Note That Was Not There

Mattei's practice extends well beyond that case, and the proof problem in the next one was its inverse: not too much recorded material, but a record with a hole in it.

In Estate of Sobin v. Orthopaedic Sports Specialists, Peter Sobin underwent knee-replacement surgery in September 2015 and later died from an acute pulmonary thromboembolism associated with the surgery and with reduced mobility. His estate and his widow alleged that a physician assistant failed to order an ultrasound or otherwise respond appropriately after Sobin developed calf symptoms.

The office notes documenting that contact were missing.

Mattei represented the estate and the widow at trial. Alinor Sterling, with Mattei, represented them on appeal, and Colin Antaya appeared on the appellate brief.

Proving a Conversation

When the chart is silent, the plaintiff has to reconstruct the encounter from everything that surrounded it.

The plaintiffs addressed the missing notes with circumstantial proof: family testimony about what Sobin reported at the time, text messages sent contemporaneously, and medical and expert evidence establishing what his symptoms signified and what the standard of care required in response.

Contemporaneous messages are powerful in this posture precisely because they were not written for litigation. A text describing a swollen calf, sent to a spouse on a Tuesday afternoon, fixes both a symptom and a date, and it does so without the retrospective coloring that defense counsel can fairly probe in recollection alone. The absence in the chart never got to stand alone; it stood surrounded by everything the family had kept without knowing why it would matter.

After a nine-day trial in April 2023, the jury awarded $5.5 million on the wrongful-death claim and $3 million for loss of consortium. The Appellate Court later rejected the trial-error arguments and affirmed both judgments. The jury had credited the circumstantial, family, medical, and expert evidence the trial team assembled.

What an Offer of Compromise Adds

The estate had made a $1 million offer of compromise.

Connecticut, like a number of states, attaches a consequence to the refusal of a reasonable settlement offer: where a plaintiff's offer is rejected and the eventual recovery exceeds it, interest runs on the judgment from an earlier date than it otherwise would. The rule exists to make delay expensive for a defendant who declines a fair number and litigates anyway.

Here it produced $2,484,453.48 in interest on the wrongful-death count. Together with the jury awards, the total judgment reached $11,016,583.38 and carried seven percent postjudgment interest.

The offer had been made years before trial. Because the eventual recovery exceeded it, the verdict triggered the statute's interest consequence.

The Prosecutor's Habits

Before joining the plaintiffs' bar, Mattei was a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, where he led the United States Attorney's financial-fraud and public-corruption unit and tried the government's case against former Governor John G. Rowland in 2014.

His public-corruption and financial-fraud work involved large documentary records, chronologies tested through cross-examination, proof of intent from conduct, and preservation of issues for appellate review. His civil cases similarly require reconstructing events from available evidence and building a record that can survive review.

His plaintiffs' practice at Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Bridgeport includes medical-malpractice, civil-rights, and catastrophic-injury litigation.