Alex Jones arrives on the court house as he faces a second defamation trial over Sandy Hook claims in Waterbury, Connecticut, September 22, 2022.
Michelle McLoughlin | Reuters
Infowars host Alex Jones filed for private bankruptcy protection on Friday on the heels of a Connecticut jury and judge ordering him to pay $1.44 billion in damages to relatives of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting massacre victims, a recent court filing shows.
An attorney for Sandy Hook families later told CNBC that Jones’s move won’t shield his assets from the legal damages imposed on him for making false claims that the shooting that killed 20 first-graders and 6 adults was a hoax.
Jones filed a voluntary petition under Chapter 11 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, court records show.
In that filing, the notorious conspiracy theorist estimates his liabilities to be between $1 billion and $10 billion, against assets of between $1 million and $10 million.
He also estimates he has between 50 and 99 creditors.
The creditors identified by name within the bankruptcy filing include parents of kids murdered on Dec. 14, 2012, on the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school, who had sued him successfully for defamation, in addition to an FBI agent who responded to the scene of the massacre.
The biggest unsecured creditor within the filing was Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter Emilie was killed that day. Parker, who was awarded $120 million in damages from Jones, was accused with others by Jones of being “crisis actors” who participated in a conspiracy to stage the shooting.
An attorney for the Sandy Hook families told CNBC in an email, “Like every other cowardly move Alex Jones has made, this bankruptcy won’t work.”
“The bankruptcy system doesn’t protect anyone who engages in intentional and egregious attacks on others, as Mr. Jones did,” said Chris Mattei, a lawyer with the firm Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder.
“The American judicial system will hold Alex Jones accountable, and we’ll never stop working to implement the jury’s verdict,” Mattei said.
A Connecticut jury in October ordered Jones to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to Sandy Hook relatives. The judge in that case added $473 million in punitive damages to that bill the next month.
Jones’ company, Free Speech Systems Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection in July. That filing got here weeks before one other civil jury in Texas awarded damages of $50 million from Jones and his company to the mother of a baby murdered at Sandy Hook.
Relatives of Sandy Hook victims have said the harassment they received on the heels of the shooting by individuals who believed the massacre was a hoax has continued until this 12 months.
On Thursday, Jones conducted an interview with Ye, the rapper formerly generally known as Kanye West. During that Infowars appears, Ye made a series of antisemitic comments, praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and talked about his recent dinner with former President Donald Trump and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
