Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars will be sold for parts to pay towards the more than $1 billion he owes to families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
A Houston bankruptcy court said Tuesday that it plans to approve auctions for the assets of Jones’ company Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent. Everything from lighting fixtures used on the far-right network’s broadcast sets to the company’s dubious vitamin and supplement store will be up for sale beginning in November.
“FSS will now be sold at auction, meaning Alex Jones will no longer own or control the company he built,” Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Sandy Hook families, said. “This brings the families closer to their goal of holding him accountable for the harm he has caused.”
Jones spent years lying about the Sandy Hook shooting in which 26 people, including 20 first graders, were killed. He claimed the tragedy was staged and that the victims’ families were paid actors in a government plot to take Americans’ guns.
Some of the families were harassed and received death threats as Jones marshaled vitriol towards them during the most devastating point of their lives. (JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president in this year’s presidential election, told a group of young conservatives in 2021 that they should listen to “nonconventional” people like Jones.)
The Sandy Hook families won roughly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional distress lawsuits against Jones in 2022, the same year he and his company filed for bankruptcy.
The most high-profile assets that could be sold off at auction are Jones’ intellectual properties—depending on the buyer, the Infowars brand could live on under new management.
“What that suggests to me is that the highest monetary bidders are going to be entities who want to take this brand and run with it in some way,” Chris Hampson, a bankruptcy law expert at the University of Florida, told NPR.
Jones, who has vowed to continue broadcasting his conspiratorial nonsense via other means, has even suggested that some of his supporters—“a bunch of patriot buyers”—could buy the assets and let him continue to host Infowars as their employee.
Jones’ personal social media accounts, including his X account with 2.8 million followers, are not currently included in the assets up for sale, but the trustee overseeing Jones’ bankruptcy case said he may ask the court for permission to liquidate those assets. Jones, who has repeatedly cried censorship over the years when platforms blocked or demonetized his crazed ramblings, has resisted handing over his social accounts, which could set up another legal fight.
Meanwhile, court filings suggest the total payout from the auctions of Jones assets will be a mere $8 million, not even close to the $1.5 billion owed to the Sandy Hook families.
