Fringe political broadcaster Alex Jones, who owes more than $1.5 billion in defamation judgments to the families of Sandy Hook shooting victims for his years of claims they were paid actors in an elaborate hoax, has moved to liquidate his assets in order to pay. The Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing is a reversal of Jones’s previous efforts to separate his ownership of Free Speech Systems, the LLC that owns Jones’s Infowars platform, from his personal bankruptcy.
The move comes as a result of building legal pressure on Jones, who up to this point had avoided paying out any of the money he owes while his business has continued operating, even as Free Speech Systems itself has also been under bankruptcy protection and the technical control of a court-appointed restructuring officer.
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Put simply, attorney Avi Moshenberg the filing leads the way for Jones’s ownership of Free Speech Systems to be sold off, with the proceeds going towards the judgments against him. Chris Mattei, an attorney representing Sandy Hook families in the case, put it like this to CNN:
“Converting the case to Chapter 7 will hasten the end of these bankruptcies and facilitate the liquidation of Jones’s assets, which is the same reason we have moved to convert his company’s case to Chapter 7.”
Now, a judge will determine the path forward for both Jones and Infowars, but even if Jones’s ownership in the company he founded in the 90s is completely liquidated, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Infowars itself will dissolve. If the trustee put in temporary control of the company sells to a sympathetic owner, for instance, such a buyer could choose to keep the business running. On a recent broadcast of his own “Alex Jones Show,” Jones claimed that the “made-up kangaroo court debt” was an attempt to shut down his platform.
The move comes after Jones attempted a settlement with the Sandy Hook families whereby he would pay them $55 million over the next ten years, an arrangement that was reportedly rejected unanimously.
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