Faced with numerous defamation lawsuits, the far-right InfoWars website voluntarily filed a Chapter 11 insolvency lawsuit in federal court in Texas on Sunday.
The insolvency proceedings under Chapter 11 stop all civil litigation faced by companies applying for protection and allow them to draw up recovery plans while remaining operational.
Alex Jones, founder of InfoWars, has been found responsible for damages in three lawsuits filed last year after he falsely claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a fraud.
Jones claims that the shooting at the school in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six employees, was fabricated by advocates of gun control and the media. He accused several families of victims of being paid actors trying to promote gun restrictions.
Jones has spent the past four years fighting numerous defamation cases in Connecticut and Texas over Sandy Hook’s conspiracy theories, which he promoted.
In 2019, a Texas judge ordered Jones to pay $ 100,000 in a defamation lawsuit. In November 2021, another judge in Connecticut found that Jones was responsible for damages in a lawsuit filed by 13 plaintiffs who are relatives of the victims of the shooting. The judge said Jones and his companies, including InfoWars and Free Speech Systems, failed to provide documents on the process, such as internal records showing whether Jones and his companies benefited from talks about Sandy Hook and other mass shootings.
In the Connecticut case, Jones has to stand trial this year before a jury that will decide how much he owes the plaintiffs.
Jones’ attorneys questioned whether the Connecticut judge, Barbara Bellis, was impartial. In November, Jones complained on his radio show that he was unable to argue his case before a jury.
“They know that the things they said I did didn’t happen,” he said. “They know they have no compensation case. So the judge says you’re guilty of damages, now the jury decides how guilty you are. He is not guilty until proven guilty.
In late March, Jones offered to pay each plaintiff $ 120,000 to resolve the case. The court documents read: “Mr Jones apologizes wholeheartedly for all the suffering caused by his remarks. The families were quick to reject the proposal, saying it was “a transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape public account under oath with his fraudulent, profit-making campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook.”
The families Jones is targeting say his conspiracy theories have led to death threats and harassment from Jones’ followers. One father, Lenny Posner, whose six-year-old son was killed in the attack, said his family had become a target of Jones’ conspiracy theories and had to move several times in response to ongoing threats from his followers. A woman in Florida who sent death threats to Posner was sentenced to five months in prison in 2017.
Posner, who told PBS he lived in hiding, said he was glad he and other Sandy Hook families had sued Jones over his conspiracy theories.
“It simply came to our notice then. I’m proud to file a lawsuit, [it] it brought a lot more attention to who he really is and what his show is about, ”he said.
According to the bankruptcy petition on Sunday, the U.S. Insolvency Court for the Southern District of Texas, InfoWars listed its estimated assets in the range of $ 0- $ 50,000 and estimated liabilities in the range of $ 1 million to $ 10 million.
Jones, a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, was previously summoned by a House of Representatives committee investigating the January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters.
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