Alex Jones files for bankruptcy after billion-dollar Sandy Hook court ruling

 

Alex Jones files for bankruptcy after billion-dollar Sandy Hook court ruling

 

Infowars host and conspiracy theorist ordered to pay $473m in damages on top of nearly $1bn verdict handed down in October

 

Guardian staff and agencies

Fri 2 Dec 2022 13.37 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/02/alex-jones-bankruptcy-sandy-hook-court

 

Rightwing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to a court filing.

 

Jones was ordered by a Connecticut court last month to pay $473m in punitive damages on top of a nearly $1bn verdict handed down in October for his defamatory claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, after he claimed the massacre was faked.

 

A court filing showed Jones filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors with the US bankruptcy court in Houston. The filing said Jones has between $1m and $10m of assets and between $1bn and $10bn of liabilities. It also refers to Free Speech Systems, a Jones affiliate and Infowars’ parent, as having filed for bankruptcy in July.

 

In October, a Connecticut jury in a case brought by relatives of more than a dozen Sandy Hook victims ordered Jones and Free Speech Systems to pay nearly $1bn in damages.

 

In a separate case in Texas, a jury in August decided Jones must pay the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook massacre $45.2m in punitive damages, on top of $4.1m in compensatory damages.

 

Jones claimed for years that the 2012 killing of 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged with actors as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns. He has since acknowledged the shooting occurred.

 

More details soon ….