Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ fiction-spewing media empire Infowars will be shut down and its assets sold for parts, his bankruptcy court-appointed trustee, Christopher Murray, confirmed in an emergency court filing, HuffPost reported.
Earlier this month, a bankruptcy judge ordered Jones to liquidate his personal assets to pay nearly $1.5 billion to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. However, at the time the judge also ruled that Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, didn’t need to be liquidated because that would be costly time and money-wise.
Now, with the dismissal of the bankruptcy case against the outlet's parent company, families have the liberty to go after assets like Infowars in state court; since Jones was the owner of the parent media company, a trustee had to be appointed by the court to take charge of it as it underwent bankruptcy proceedings, CNN reported.
In the court filing, Murray wrote that he had been "planning to wind-up (Free Speech Systems’) operations and liquidate its inventory” ever since he was first appointed. But the process was “derailed” when one of the victims’ parents filed a motion in a Texas court to turn over the assets of Infowars’ parent company. Other families
Because of this, Murray was forced to file for an emergency stay in the case so they could conduct “an orderly wind-down and sale process” of Infowars, he wrote.
Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis won a $50 million verdict against Jones in 2022 because of his lies that the mass shooting that killed 20 children and six adults was a staged government ploy to confiscate guns, HuffPost reported. The Texas judge had ordered the assets of Free Speech Systems to be handed over to them. But the trustee, in his filing, said that could derail the Infowars business and efforts to compensate others.
In a statement, an attorney for Sandy Hook families, Christopher Mattei, said: “This is precisely the unfortunate situation that the Connecticut families hoped to avoid when we argued that the Free Speech/Info Wars case should have remained with the bankruptcy court rather than being dismissed."
Referring to the parent’s attempt to go after Free Speech Systems, Mattei continued: “The Connecticut families are disappointed by this attempt to undercut the orderly and long overdue wind down of Alex Jones’ InfoWars platform."
