Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has filed for bankruptcy, less than two months after a jury ordered him and his InfoWars parent company to pay nearly $1 billion to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting.
Jones’s bankruptcy petition, filed on Wednesday in Texas, reported that he has between $1 million and $10 million in assets and between $1 billion and $10 billion in liabilities. The filing listed seven creditors owed more than $1 million each, including the Sandy Hook families, who were awarded a total of $549.6 million in damages by two juries earlier this year.
On his far-right conspiracy channel InfoWars, Alex Jones spent years repeating lies about the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Conn., calling it an “inside job” or a “government operation.” A group of Sandy Hook families filed suit in 2018, saying that they had endured stalking, harassment and death threats as a result of Jones’s lies. Another family sued in Texas later that year.
The verdicts from those two cases arrived less than two months ago, ordering Jones and his InfoWars companies to pay a total of $812 million to the 22 plaintiffs—18 of whom are parents of Sandy Hook victims—in compensatory and punitive damages. According to the New York Times, Jones has called the suits against him “fake” and said that he would not pay any money to the Sandy Hook families.
“Like every other cowardly move Alex Jones has made, this bankruptcy will not work,” “The American judicial system will hold Alex Jones accountable, and we will never stop working to enforce the jury’s verdict.”
Chris Mattei, an attorney representing Sandy Hook families.
It remains to be seen how much Jones will actually have to pay the Sandy Hook families, if anything at all. But one thing is certain: with this bankruptcy filing, Alex Jones is trying to avoid being held accountable for his role in spreading dangerous conspiracies about the Sandy Hook massacre.
Be First to Comment