After being in the headlines this week for his wild interview with Kanye West, Alex Jones has returned to the top news as he has just filed for personal bankruptcy protection in Texas.
He filed this Friday for personal bankruptcy – a move to protect his assets from the $1.5 billion court judgments over conspiracy theories he spread about the Sandy Hook school massacre. As we previously reported, he claimed the mass shooting was a complete hoax.
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As a result of his actions, a Connecticut jury awarded the families $965 million in compensatory damages, and a judge later added another $473 million in punitive damages back in October. Earlier in the year, a Texas jury also awarded the parents of a child killed in the shooting $49 million in damages. Jones has not shown any interest in paying at all. Instead, he has laughed off the awards on his Infowars show, saying he has less than $2 million to his name and won’t be able to pay such high amounts.
As the news site notes, Mr. Jones has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in bankruptcy court in Texas, Houston. His filing lists $1 billion to $10 billion in liabilities.
More On What Alex Jones Said
In 2012, Alex Jones called the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting a hoax on his radio show “Infowars.” He also said he believed it was “staged” by the government so they could “go after our guns” and “start a civil war.” Following the aftermath of the tragedy, Jones called the shooting “completely false” and accused grieving parents of being “crisis actors.”
In his deposition back in July, Jones claimed he was not responsible or “trying to cause pain and suffering.” Despite that, he said at the time that the victims of Sandy Hook and their parents were being used to diminish the First Amendment.
“If questioning public events and free speech is banned because it might hurt somebody’s feelings, we are not in America anymore. They can change the channel. They can come out and say I’m wrong. They have free speech,” Jones said.
More On Alex Jones Losing The Case
Connecticut judge Barbara Bellis had initially temporarily blocked Jones from moving any personal assets out of the country at the request of the plaintiffs, who claimed Jones was trying to hide assets to avoid paying — promoting him to come up with a different option to opt out of paying. Aside from this, a third case is pending in Texas.
More On What Happened In 2012
On Dec. 14, 2012, a gunman named Adam Lanza murdered his mother, then killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School before taking his own life. As a result of the conspiracy theories shared by jones and on the Infowars website, it led to years of threats and other harassment of the parents of the murdered children.
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