The conspiracy website Infowars has filed for bankruptcy protection as founder Alex Jones faces multiple defamation lawsuits tied to his false comments labeling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.
According to documents filed Sunday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, three companies owned by Jones are seeking Chapter 11 protection, which would put civil litigation on hold while the companies restructure their finances.
Jones is being sued by the families of several victims of the mass shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 children and six school employees. Jones falsely claimed the massacre was fabricated by gun control advocates and the mainstream media, who he said pursued a “false flag” operation staged by “crisis actors.”
The families accused him of grifting off those false claims while defaming their loved ones. They rejected settlement offers from Jones.
Jones later said in a sworn deposition that he believes the shootings did occur, and said he “almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’m now learning a lot of times things aren’t staged.”
Jones has been found liable in two separate cases, one in Texas, where he and Infowars are based, and another in Connecticut where the mass shooting occurred.
Last year, a judge in the Connecticut case found Jones liable by default, citing his refusal to abide by court rulings or turn over evidence, according to the ...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...