Professional troll Alex Jones filed for bankruptcy on Friday after he and the parent company of his InfoWars website were ordered to pay almost $1 billion in damages to the families of victims killed in the Sandy Hook massacre.
The filing for personal Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Southern District of Texas valued Jones’ assets to be between $1 million and $10 million and his liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion. The legal move comes the day after Kanye “Ye” West used Jones’ InfoWars show to lavish Adolf Hitler with praise.
It also follows bankruptcy protection filings for several of Jones’ companies earlier this year. Three of his businesses—including the InfoWars site—filed in April while the site’s parent company, Free Speech Systems, filed in July.
Jones’ business empire was a central issue in litigation brought against him by the relatives of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. For years, Jones spread malicious lies that the Connecticut massacre—which claimed the lives of 20 children and six members of staff—had been a hoax designed to undermine the Second Amendment.
In October, a jury in Connecticut ordered Jones and Free Speech Systems to pay out almost $1 billion in damages in a defamation case brought by the Sandy Hook victims’ families. Another ruling last month added a further $473 million in punitive damages. And just last week, the right-wing host was unsuccessful in a bid to decrease a separate $50 million Texas ruling he was ordered to pay to a victim’s family member.
As cases against him mounted, Jones eventually admitted that the massacre was in fact real. But even in recent months he has remained stubbornly unapologetic about the incalculable harm created by his smears, telling a court in September that he was “done saying sorry” and using an interview to sarcastically declare: “I killed the children.”
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