Sandy Hook victims’ families asked a federal bankruptcy court on Thursday to order the Infowars conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones to relinquish control over his company, saying he has “systematically transferred millions of dollars” to himself and his relatives while claiming to be broke.
In a filing in the bankruptcy court in Houston, the families of nine Sandy Hook victims said they sought to have a bankruptcy trustee who is already monitoring the case take control of Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Jones’s misinformation-peddling media outlet. The families are also seeking a court-appointed oversight committee to restrict Jones’s ability to control Infowars’s finances, according to The NY Times.
Jones’s claimed insolvency is at the heart of his efforts to avoid paying for the damage done by his Sandy Hook lies. Earlier this month, a Texas jury ordered him to pay the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting nearly $50 million in compensatory and punitive damages for spreading the falsehood that they helped stage the massacre.
At the core of his bankruptcy claim is Jones’s assertion that Free Speech Systems owes $54 million to PQPR Holdings, a company owned and operated directly and indirectly by Jones and his parents. The debt is fictional, the families’ lawyers said in Thursday’s filing, and “a centerpiece of Jones’s plan to avoid compensating the Sandy Hook families.”
For years Mr. Jones broadcast lies on his show that the shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn., was staged by the government as a pretext for gun control and that the victims’ families were “actors” in the plot. Conspiracy theorists tormented the victims’ families online, defaced and stole memorials to their murdered loved ones, confronted them on the street and threatened their lives.
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