HOUSTON — Infowars conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones, who faces more than $1.4 billion in legal damages for defaming the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, has devised a new way to taunt them: wriggling out of paying them the money they are owed. Jones, who has an estimated net worth as high as $270 million, declared both business and personal bankruptcy last year as the families won historic verdicts in two lawsuits over his lies about the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders an
Conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones prepares to host his live show in his studio in Austin, Texas on Feb. 17, 2017.
The families now face a stark reality. It is not clear whether they will ever collect a significant portion of the assets Jones has transferred. So their ability to get anything remotely close to the jury awards is inextricably tied to Jones’ capacity to make a living as the purveyor of lies — including that the shooting was a hoax, the parents were actors and the children did not really die — that ignited years of torment and threats against them.
Although Infowars has estimated revenues of some $70 million a year — hardly a mom-and-pop shop — Jones was able to file for Chapter 11 under the more lenient bankruptcy rules of the Small Business Reorganization Act, known as Subchapter V. The law first took effect in early 2020 but was soon broadened to assist small businesses struggling during the pandemic.
Jones and a dozen members of his legal team did not respond to questions from the Times about his finances or his bankruptcy cases. In December 2012, only days after the Sandy Hook shooting, Jones began claiming on air that the massacre was a plot by the government to confiscate Americans’ firearms. Traffic to his website surged. Lenny Pozner, the father of Noah Pozner, a 6-year-old who died at Sandy Hook, had to move a dozen times after conspiracy theorists repeatedly posted his home address on the internet.
He struck a contract in July with another new company, Blue Ascension, founded only a few months earlier by his former personal trainer and assistant, Patrick Riley. In early August, Jones’ financial empire began to unravel. The Texas jury ordered Jones to pay the parents of the victim nearly $50 million, and two months later, a Connecticut jury awarded the families of eight Sandy Hook victims an extraordinary nearly $1 billion. A judge awarded them almost $500 million more. In December, Jones declared personal bankruptcy.
In late January, under pressure from the bankruptcy court, Jones submitted a personal balance sheet detailing about $5.6 million in total assets, including $368,899 in bank accounts, $682,899 in something called “inventory platinum” and a $2.2 million homestead.
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