Alex Jones files bankruptcy petition
Sandy Hook families face hurdle to collect nearly $1.5B verdict
Infowars broadcaster and right-wing provocateur Alex Jones filed for personal bankruptcy in Texas on Friday, creating a new obstacle for the relatives of Sandy Hook shooting victims trying to collect the nearly $1.5 billion they won in a suit against the conspiracy theorist for his claims that the school massacre was a hoax.
The voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition stops, at last temporarily, all post-trial activity in Superior Court by Jones and the 15 people who sued him in Connecticut, notably efforts by the families to collect and stop Jones from hiding assets, and his attempts to reverse the verdict or reduce the damages award. Efforts to collect now shift to bankruptcy court, which will identify Jones’ assets and decide on how they are distributed.
In the filing, Jones says he has from $1 million to $10 million in assets, and owes from $1 billion to $10 billion to as many as 100 creditors and that the Sandy Hook relatives who won massive defamation verdicts against him in Texas and Connecticut are his largest unsecured creditors. Jones previously put his business into bankruptcy.
Lawyers for relatives, who persuaded juries that Jones’ Sandy Hook denial broadcasts made them targets for a decade of threats and abuse, called the bankruptcy filing a ploy to avoid or at least postpone payment of what he owes.
For more than four years, Jones has stonewalled on providing business records, financial information and other records in the Sandy Hook cases. In a separate lawsuit, the victims’ families accused Jones of improperly siphoning assets from his business and channeling them to himself and his family. He will now ostensibly be required to reveal more about those assets.
“Like every other cowardly move Alex Jones has made, this bankruptcy will not work,” said Christopher Mattei, one of the lawyers representing the families. “The bankruptcy system does not protect anyone who engages in intentional and egregious attacks on others, as Mr. Jones did. The American judicial system will hold Alex Jones accountable, and we will never stop working to enforce the jury’s verdict.”
Bankruptcy experts predicted Jones will use the filing in an effort to protect whatever assets he can. But they said it is also an acknowledgment by Jones that he owes far more than he can pay and whatever he has is now under the control of the court,
“From Alex Jones perspective, it’s one more thing to fling at the wheels of justice that are turning towards him,” said UConn law professor Minor Meyers. “I’m not sure at the end of the day it affects the dollars that change hands. I’m sure what he says is the value of his estate is carefully curated to exclude things he would like to keep his paws on. That’s what people do when bankruptcy approaches.”
“How do you divide up what is there?” Meyers added. “That will now be for the bankruptcy court to decide. Not for Alex Jones.”
Hours after the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting of 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, Jones began spreading lies that the massacre was planned by the government as a pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms and that the families were complicit in the plot. He continued lying about the shootings for years, exposing the families to online abuse, confrontation and death threats by people who believed the false claims.
Jones earns up to $70 million a year selling products tailored to his audience’s distrust of government and established science, including diet supplements and quack cures, survivalist gear and gun paraphernalia.
In court in Texas this summer, a forensic economist, Bernard Pettingill, estimated that Jones and his business were worth $130 million to $270 million.
His biggest creditor is Robert Parker, whose daughter Emilie died at Sandy Hook. Jones for years played a videotape on Infowars of Parker’s tearful news conference the night after his daughter’s murder, calling the grieving father an “actor” and the news conference “disgusting.” Conspiracy theorists who believed Jones’ lies tormented, threatened and personally confronted Parker and his family.
In October, the jury in Connecticut ordered Jones to pay Parker $120 million, as part of the $1.4 billion judgment.
At the core of his bankruptcy claim is Jones’ assertion that Free Speech Systems, which he owns, owed $54 million to PQPR Holdings, a company owned and operated directly and indirectly by Jones and his parents. The debt is fictional, the families’ lawyers said in a Thursday filing, and “a centerpiece of Jones’ plan to avoid compensating the Sandy Hook families.”
In Superior Court in Waterbury on Friday morning, hours after the bankruptcy filing, Judge Barbara Bellis, who presided over the Connecticut trial, postponed a previously scheduled hearing on a motion by the relatives to attach assets the families said Jones is dissipating or hiding and forcing him to transfer the assets to Connecticut.