VICTORIA, Texas (AP) — Infowars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as the website’s founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones faces defamation lawsuits over his comments that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.
Texas’ bankruptcy filing on Sunday puts the civil lawsuits in jeopardy while the company reorganizes its finances.
Infowars claimed that its assets were $50,000 or less, and it has estimated liabilities between $1 million and $10 million. The bankruptcy filing lists relatives of several of the victims of the Connecticut school shootings in 2012, which resulted in the deaths of 20 students and six teachers.
The plaintiffs in that case have said they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers because of the hoax conspiracy that Jones promoted. Jones now admits that the shooting occurred. Jones has already been sued for defamation by his families.
Jones was also accused in a newly filed suit of hiding assets worth millions. “After Alex Jones was sued for claiming the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was a hoax, the infamous conspiracy theorist conspired to divert his assets to shell companies owned by insiders like his parents, his children, and himself,” reads the lawsuit, which was filed in April in Austin, Texas, by some of the Sandy Hook families.
Jones, according to the suit, is accused of taking $18million from Infowars over three years. This began in 2018, the year the defamation lawsuits filed. Jones is also accused of claiming a “dubious” $54 million debt around that time to another company, which the lawsuit alleges is indirectly or directly owned by Jones. An attorney for Jones has called that allegation “ridiculous.”
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