Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars media platform and its assets will be liquidated in an auction set for November to help pay off the massive $1.5 billion debt Jones owes for repeatedly making false claims about the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, a federal bankruptcy judge indicated on Tuesday.
Houston judge Christopher Lopez said he will approve the auction that starts on November 13, meaning InfoWars‘ intellectual property such as trademarks, copyrighted material, social-media accounts, and websites are for sale, according to the Associated Press.
Before approving the order, however, Lopez said he must first change a previous order to ensure that the trustee overseeing Jones’s bankruptcy case, Christopher Murray, controls the assets of InfoWars‘ parent company Free Speech Systems. Jones fully owns the parent company.
Murray said on Tuesday that he may seek a court’s permission to liquidate Jones’s personal social-media accounts, which are excluded from the mid-November auction. Lawyers representing Jones oppose liquidation of the assets not already up for sale. Murray is expected to sell many of Jones’s personal assets.
Other InfoWars assets — computers, video cameras, and other studio equipment — are expected to be sold at a separate auction on December 10.
Jones filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022 after the families of Sandy Hook victims won roughly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional-distress damages that year. The combined award for the families was the end result of three lawsuits against Jones, who is based in Texas.
Jones repeatedly said on his talk show that the 2012 school shooting, which killed 20 first-grade students and six teachers in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax led by “crisis actors” to get gun-control legislation passed in Congress.
Jones conceded in court in 2022 that the shooting was, in fact, “100 percent real,” NPR reported at the time. Still, he is appealing the civil-jury verdicts in Texas and Connecticut.
“Alex Jones will no longer own or control the company he built,” said Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families who won the Connecticut lawsuit. “This brings the families closer to their goal of holding him accountable for the harm he has caused.”
Tuesday’s development comes after Judge Lopez ordered the liquidation of Jones’s personal assets in June. At the time, he also dismissed Free Speech Systems’ bankruptcy case because it was in the best interest of Jones’s creditors and his estate.
The families in the case also could not come to an agreement, with those in Texas seeking a dismissal of the parent company’s bankruptcy case while the Connecticut families wanted to see Jones’s media empire shut down.
Amid his ongoing bankruptcy troubles, Jones has suggested that his supporters could buy InfoWars‘ assets, which could allow him to continue hosting his talk show as an InfoWars employee.
“It’s very cut and dry that the assets of Free Speech Systems, the website, the equipment, the shopping cart, all that, can be sold,” Jones said recently. “And they know full well that there are a bunch of patriot buyers, and then the operation can ease on.”