Alex Jones has filed for personal bankruptcy protections weeks after the conspiracy theorist and the company behind his InfoWars platform were ordered to pay roughly $1.5bn in damages for defaming the families of victims from the Sandy Hook school shooting massacre.
He filed for bankruptcy on 2 December in Texas where his InfoWars site already is under chapter 11 bankruptcy protections.
Last month, a Connecticut court ordered him to pay $473m in damages in addition to a nearly $1bn verdict following a defamation case brought by the families of victims of the 2012 massacre that he falsely claimed was faked.
His own filing halts their ability to collect judgments against him.
The filing in Houston claims that Jones has between $1m and $10m of assets and between $1bn and $10bn in liabilities. He estimates that he owed between 50 and 99 creditors.
His personal filing on Friday comes after his failed attempt in a Texas court to limit the damages he has been ordered to pay.
In October, a Connecticut jury awarded 15 plaintiffs $965m for lies he told about the mass shooting, including baseless claims that the massacre was a government-fabricated “false flag” hoax to legitimise government gun control efforts.
Last month, he was ordered to pay an additional $473m in punitive damages.
In the wake of the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 people were killed, including 20 children between six and seven years old, Jones baselessly repeated that families and first responders were “crisis actors”.
A verdict in October followed four weeks of fraught courtroom testimony as families testified to the immense toll that the conspiracy theorist’s lies had taken on their families. A decade on, families have endured death threats, social media abuse and in-person harassment targeting them and their surviving children.
Jones also had filed a notice in Connecticut, where a judge was scheduled to hear arguments related to a motion from Sandy Hook families to attach the assets of Jones and his company to secure the money awarded to them.
That filing from the the families also asks the judge to prohibit Jones from transferring or disposing his assets without the court’s permission.
Jones has largely dismissed the judgments, telling his InfoWars viewers that he does not have enough money to his name to pay out court-ordered damages.
