Infowars’ Alex Jones files for bankruptcy over $1.5B Sandy Hook lies
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones filed for bankruptcy Friday over the nearly $1.5 billion he’s been ordered to pay for his cruel lie that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax.
The Infowars host filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in court in Houston, Texas, just weeks after being ordered to pay the series of mammoth court judgments.
Jones, 48, listed his assets as being between $1 million and $10 million — but his liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion.
The bankruptcy filing was widely expected after Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages to relatives of victims of the 2012 Connecticut school shooting for repeatedly calling it a hoax.
He finally admitted in court that he was wrong to suggest that the 20 students and six staff killed in Newton had been crisis actors in a government plot to seize Americans’ guns.
A Connecticut jury in October awarded the families $965 million in compensatory damages, and a judge later tacked on another $473 million in punitive damages. Earlier in the year, a Texas jury awarded the parents of a 6-year-old victim $49 million in damages.
Jones’ company, Free Speech Systems, is also seeking bankruptcy protection.
An attorney representing Jones in the bankruptcy case did not immediately return a message seeking comment, nor did the Connecticut and Texas Sandy Hook plaintiffs.
Jones previously laughed off the court losses while live streaming the decision on Infowars — calling the payout a “joke,” and even dismissing the pain he caused by callously quipping: “I killed the kids.”
“Do these people actually think they’re getting any of this money?” he asked at the time. “Ain’t gonna be happening. Ain’t no money.”
In documents filed in Free Speech Systems’ bankruptcy case in Texas, a budget for the company for Oct. 29 to Nov. 25 estimated product sales would total $2.5 million, while operating expenses would be about $740,000. Jones’ salary was listed at $20,000 every two weeks.
Friday’s filing came a day after Jones hosted a surreal interview with Kanye West, in which the disgraced rapper now known as Ye wore a hood covering his head — and repeatedly confessed his love and admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazis.
During that chat, Jones suggested that the anger at Ye’s anti-Semitism was comparable to his own Sandy Hook statements in that neither of them had physically hurt anyone, despite the widespread pain both have caused.
With Post wires