Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones will have to sell his Infowars’ assets to pay more than $1 billion he owes to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, according to a Texas court ruling.
A court-appointed receiver will be responsible for taking over and selling the assets of Infowars to pay off Jones’ debts to Sandy Hook families, according to an order signed by Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Austin on Wednesday.
The order has the potential to shut Jones out of his studio in the coming days — forcing the conspiracy theorist to fork over the company’s property, recording equipment, and brand name, the filing indicated.
His debts amount to a whopping $1,288,139,555, according to court documents.
The Wednesday ruling appeared to restart an effort by The Onion to buy Infowars and its assets to turn the platform into a parody site.
“We’re working on it,” Ben Collins, chief executive of The Onion, said in a social media post Wednesday.
Last year, the satirical outlet won a bankruptcy auction for Infowars, backed by Sandy Hook families. But a federal bankruptcy judge halted the sale in December of last year, criticizing the bidding process as flawed.
On his daily show on Thursday, Jones blasted the court order as improper, claiming he already has another studio set up in the event Infowars is shut down.
“People want to hear this show,” said Jones, who is based in Austin. “I will continue on with the network. They can harass me forever. … And they won’t get me off the air,” he said.
Relatives of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting sued Jones in Connecticut Superior Court in 2018 after he spread the baseless claim that the massacre was a fabricated pretext to take Americans’ guns.
He was found guilty in 2022 for defamation after his false claims that the 2012 massacre, which killed 26 people, including 20 children, was a hoax.
Mentally ill killer Adam Lanza, 20, used a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle in his rampage, leading to widespread debate about gun control in the country. Lanza committed suicide after the massacre.
Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit committed to ending gun violence that was founded after the Sandy Hook shooting, previously said it would advertise on a relaunched version of the site under The Onion if the sale of the platform went through.
“Today’s order brings us a critically important step closer to achieving the goal that the Connecticut families have spent years fighting for: holding Alex Jones accountable for years of harm,” Christopher Mattei, one of the lawyers for the families, said in a statement to the New York Times.
A contact for Jones’ attorney was not immediately available for comment.
With Post wires
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