Alex Jones Bombs Out Of Bankruptcy, Declares Flawless Victory, Cries

Awww, maybe rub some beet tincture on it?

On December 14, 2012, a lone gunman armed with a semiautomatic rifle murdered twenty first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Within hours, conspiracy grifter Alex Jones posted a video to his Infowars site claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” operation staged by the Obama administration.

“Why do governments stage these things? to get our guns!” he fulminated. “Why can’t people get that through their head?”

For months, Jones and his lackeys accused the grieving parents of being “crisis actors” and platformed cranks posing as “researchers” who claimed to have “proof” that the murdered children were either alive and well, or had never existed in the first place. 

“Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first,” Alex Jones said on a January 13, 2015 broadcast. “I knew they had actors there, clearly; but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors.”

Even as the parents of the slain children faced harassment and death threats by Jones’s deranged followers, he continued to flog lies alongside his dubious supplements.

And a whole lot of people listened. 

A decade later, 15-20 percent of Americans believed that “School shootings like those at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida, are false flag attacks perpetrated by the government." 

The Sandy Hook families spent years seeking to hold Jones responsible in court, with juries in Connecticut and Texas awarding them more than $1.4 billion in damages against Jones and Infowars’ parent company Free Speech Systems (FSS). But since April of 2022, Jones has largely relied on strategic bankruptcy filings to evade responsibility for the cruel and destructive forces he unleashed. That legal shell game may finally be coming to an end, however, or at least entering a period of clarity with a hearing at the end of this week on June 14th. 

FAFO

On April 17, 2022, after Jones’s absolute refusal to engage in discovery got him default judgments (AKA death penalty sanctions) in both Texas and Connecticut, Jones placed three worthless LLCs in bankruptcy. The Sandy Hook plaintiffs had named the shell companies as co-defendants to stop Jones from using them to hide assets. But that meant that declaring them bankrupt triggered an automatic stay of the trial court proceedings. Jones’s lawyer Norm Pattis, whose trial skills are about as compelling as his standup routine, boasted to the Wall Street Journal that his client planned to use the bankruptcy proceedings to “compel the plaintiffs to estimate the value of their claims in open court by discernible evidentiary standards.”

This was pretty ballsy, considering the move was designed to deny the plaintiffs their day in court. But the gambit ran aground almost immediately when the plaintiffs simply dismissed the shell LLCs from their complaints. 

Jones got a second bite at the apple that July, as the Texas case was on the eve of trial, by declaring FSS itself bankrupt. But almost immediately, US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez lifted the automatic stay and allowed the Sandy Hook cases to go forward. Then in December, Jones took yet a third bite, declaring personal bankruptcy in an effort to shield his personal assets from being seized. 

Both bankruptcies were filed under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code, which contemplates that the debtor will cooperate with his major creditors to come up with a plan of reorganization and then reemerge from bankruptcy in a financially viable position. And because FSS’s bankruptcy was filed before the verdicts were entered, the company was able to take advantage of Subchapter V of Chapter 11, a streamlined process for small businesses with debts of less than $7.5 million.

Except that Jones made clear that he never intended to cooperate with the plaintiffs — he intended to stiff them. As the Texas verdicts were being read out in court, Jones urged his followers to buy his supplements, promising that, thanks to the bankruptcy, none of the money would go to the Sandy Hook parents. During a Christmas show in 2022, he complained about being too poor to buy groceries while vowing that they’d soon be out of the Subchapter V process, “and they can’t shut us down, and we get our appeals.”

He also claimed that FSS had no money to pay the jury verdicts because it owed $55 million to it’s supplement supply company, a Nevada LLC called PQPR. 

In his telling, PQPR just forgot to invoice FSS for years, and then in 2021, right around the time Jones and FSS defaulted in the Sandy Hook suits, PQPR finally remembered to send a bill. FSS then executed a couple of promissory notes, allegedly secured by the company’s inventory, making PQPR a secured creditor, ahead of anyone else who might come along — like, say, a couple dozen defamation plaintiffs. Except that PQPR is wholly owned by Alex Jones and his parents, meaning that Jones claims that FSS can’t pay anyone else until it pays him under an agreement which he himself crafted.

Sometimes You Eat The Bankruptcy. Sometimes The Bankruptcy Eats You.

In every bankruptcy, a United States Trustee is tasked with representing the interests of justice and protecting the bankruptcy system itself. In a Subchapter V bankruptcy, the US Trustee is joined by a special Subchapter V Trustee whose job is to oversee the case and specifically to report criminal behavior by the debtor. 

Unsurprisingly, the Sandy Hook plaintiffs were unhappy about the PQPR debt, and so was Melissa Haselden, the Subchapter V Trustee. After ten months of investigation, she filed a 29-page report concluding that the debt was a sham and that it is “difficult to view FSS and PQPR as anything but one entity.”

Meanwhile, the parties were supposed to be working towards a plan of reorganization. Instead, Alex Jones submitted a nonsense plan that would pay the PQPR “debt” in priority, leaving pennies on the dollar for the Sandy Hook plaintiffs.

In response, the Sandy Hook plaintiffs filed a motion seeking to have their claims declared non-dischargeable. Ordinarily, debts are “discharged” or eliminated in bankruptcy, meaning that debtors emerge “clean,” and creditors take a haircut. But some debts, such as child support, spousal support, and alimony, are “nondischargeable” in bankruptcy as a matter of public policy. Similarly, under 11 U.S.C. § 523(a)(6), debts for “willful and malicious injury by the debtor to another entity or to the property of another entity” are nondischargeable, because it would be a moral hazard to allow someone to commit a malicious tort and then leave the victim with no recourse. 

The Sandy Hook plaintiffs argued that Jones’s conduct was “willful and malicious,” and thus the damages awards were nondischargeable, and, for the most part, Judge Lopez agreed, writing:

These are specific findings about an objective certainty of harm and a subjective motive to cause harm in connection with the defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress claims. They are not, as Jones argues, superfluous findings about intent related to the Plaintiffs’ harm. It is irrelevant that the state court could have awarded damages on reckless acts. What is important is what the court actually did. Here there are findings about a deliberate and intentional act meant to cause injury, not just a deliberate act that leads to injury. The state court also considered the additional factors listed above, but the focus remained on willful and intentional acts, and not on a lesser standard like recklessness. In sum, the state court made specific findings that went directly to the amount of punitive damages. They were necessary to the judgment.

On October 19, 2023, the judge ruled that $1.15 billion of the damages owed to the Connecticut plaintiffs and $4.3 million of the Texas plaintiffs’ claims were nondischargeable, effectively mooting Jones’s scheme to use the bankruptcy court to fob the Sandy Hook plaintiffs off with an underfunded litigation trust or a nugatory settlement.

Judge Lopez Says GTFO

During a May 21 status conference, Judge Lopez indicated that he’s out of patience. Setting a plan confirmation hearing date for this Friday, June 14, he promised that this case “is either going to get dismissed or confirmed” by then — although he left open the possibility that the parties would have “the opportunity to try to convince [the Court] otherwise.” In essence, he’s refusing to allow Jones to continue to abuse the bankruptcy process to evade his creditors.

Jones responded in a June 1, 2024 episode entitled “Breaking: Deep State Attempted to Shut Down Infowars Headquarters Last Night”:

So, the judge says a week and a half ago, no I’m not going to liquidate and shut down Infowars, I’m going to kick it out of bankruptcy and give it back to Alex Jones … He washes his hands like Pontius Pilate. ... If people want to get into a fight with me, then they better believe they got one … I will not sit there and play along with this bullshit. … You bit off a lot more than you can chew.

For good measure, Jones then recorded a second episode in which he invited felonious podcaster Steve Bannon on to applaud the end of the bankruptcy which Jones himself filed.

“Let’s get people down there and surround the building,” Bannon babbled, appearing to endorse a little light rioting in response to future legal collection efforts. “Make them come through a chain of patriots.” 

“That’s what I’m going to do,” Jones agreed. “We need to surround the building and just make a big issue of this and expose this.”

This is utter bullshit. 

The hearing isn’t being held to reward Alex Jones. It’s being held to stop Jones from jerking the bankruptcy court around for another two years. And if Judge Lopez ceases to interpose himself between Jones and his creditors, the Sandy Hook plaintiffs won’t have to wait for Alex Jones to move the court for permission to sell his ranch to pay them; they can and will simply seize everything he owns without the court’s help.

But ending the bankruptcy would have a disadvantage for the Sandy Hook plaintiffs as well, since it would also end their pending adversarial complaint to invalidate the PQPR claim. (Although Judge Lopez has not yet ruled, it seems likely that he will accept the recommendations made by the Subchapter V Trustee.)

As a result, after Jones’s defiant broadcasts, they raced to file a motion to convert the FSS bankruptcy from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7, which contemplates a liquidation, rather than a reorganization. If the motion is granted, FSS’s remaining assets would be sold under court supervision, and the proceeds would be distributed to its creditors. Or, as Jones howled, the court would indeed “liquidate and shut down Infowars.”

In that case, Judge Lopez would retain jurisdiction and presumably make a finding regarding the sham PQPR debt, and a Chapter 7 bankruptcy trustee would continue to oversee the liquidation and ensure that Alex Jones doesn’t hide assets or transfer (any more of) them to his family members.

Perhaps sensing that his track record has been 0-for-the past two years in front of Judge Lopez, Alex Jones has not yet taken a position as to whether the FSS bankruptcy should be dismissed or converted to a Chapter 7, even though it stands to reason that he would prefer the former. 

However, on June 5, Jones did move to convert his personal bankruptcy case to a Chapter 7 now that the court has approved selling off most of his assets (including the aforementioned ranch). Two days later, the Sandy Hook plaintiffs filed notice that they “support conversion of the Jones case to Chapter 7.” Which is almost certainly the only time the Sandy Hook plaintiffs have ever agreed with Alex Jones on anything.

That leaves for June 14 only the issue of whether Judge Lopez will convert the FSS bankruptcy to a Chapter 7, as the Sandy Hook plaintiffs want, or dismiss it outright, which is what Alex Jones’s lawyers will likely try to argue in court.

I know which horse I’m betting on, and it’s not the one represented by Norm Pattis.