The ruling will allow Alex Jones to continue broadcasting on Infowars, while the Sandy Hook families continue to pursue payment of $1.4 billion in defamation damages awarded them.
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Alex Jones speaking outside a federal courthouse in Houston on Friday.
A Houston bankruptcy judge on Friday ordered the personal assets of the Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to be liquidated and sold, with the proceeds distributed among the Sandy Hook families. But the judge spared him from having to liquidate his Infowars business empire.
The ruling will allow Mr. Jones to continue broadcasting on Infowars, while the families continue to pursue payment of the enormous defamation damages awarded them.
The outcome sharply divided the Sandy Hook families. Families who sued him in Texas favored Friday’s decision, which will keep Mr. Jones on the air but allow them to potentially receive more in damages. The families who sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut favored settling for less money and shutting Mr. Jones down, although they acknowledged it would perhaps not silence him entirely.
Either way, the families are not likely to see the damages anytime soon. Mr. Jones is appealing the judgments against him, a fight that is expected to take years.
Estimates in court filings place the value of Mr. Jones’s personal assets at less than $5 million, nowhere near the $1.4 billion that juries in Texas and Connecticut awarded the families in late 2022.
Dividing $5 million by the plaintiffs who are entitled to damages comes out to less than $250,000 each, but that does not include substantial bankruptcy-related legal and administrative costs, which are paid first.
The judge’s decision came nearly a dozen years after 20 first graders and six educators died in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012.
Mr. Jones spent years spreading lies that the massacre was a hoax aimed at confiscating Americans’ firearms, and that the victims’ families were actors complicit in the plot. The families suffered online abuse, personal confrontations and death threats from people who believed the conspiracy theory.
Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer for The Times, based in Washington. She has been a journalist for three decades, on three continents. More about Elizabeth Williamson
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Source: nytimes.com
