Alex Jones, whose critics have long accused him of being morally bankrupt, has filed for personal bankruptcy. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing Friday in the southern district of Texas, the Infowars founder cited assets between $1 million and $10 million and debts one thousand times that, between $1 billion and $10 billion, the Washington Post reports. Free Speech Systems, Infowars' parent company, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, before courts in Connecticut and Texas ordered Jones to pay almost $1.5 billion to relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting. Jones had long claimed that the massacre was a hoax intended to justify stricter gun control laws.
Jones also filed a notice in Connecticut Friday, saying his bankruptcy filing halts all proceedings in a defamation case where he was ordered to pay $965 million to Sandy Hook families, the AP reports. An order to pay another $473 million in punitive damages came weeks later. The filing immediately halts the ability of the families to collect judgments against him and shifts the issue to bankruptcy court, the Wall Street Journal reports. They will now need to seek payment alongside other creditors—Jones estimated in his filing that there were 50 to 99 of them—but the move could also lead to a higher degree of scrutiny of Jones' finances, reports the New York Times.
Lawyers have accused Jones of moving money between relatives and shell companies to conceal his assets. In a Texas trial this year, where Jones was ordered to pay $49 million to the parents of one of the 20 children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, a forensic economist estimated that Jones and Free Speech Systems could have combined net worth as high as $270 million, the AP reports. (More Alex Jones stories.)
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