Alex Jones Stomps Out Of Bankruptcy After Failing To Scare Off Sandy Hook Plaintiffs

You tried, sweetie.

alex jones

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Alex Jones’s companies are exiting bankruptcy exactly the way they entered it: with maximum histrionics and accusations of bad faith.

In April, Jones, a professional shitposter, placed three LLCs associated with his Infowars company in bankruptcy. The companies were named defendants in tort suits brought by survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting who’d suffered years of harassment after Jones called them “crisis actors” and accused them of lying about their dead children.

Jones spent years flouting discovery orders, going so far as to earn himself “death penalty” sanctions in Connecticut and Texas, leaving only the issue of damages to be assessed by a jury. He did everything he could to get out of answering for his conduct in court, even going so far as to tell a judge that he was too ill to be deposed at the very moment he was in-studio broadcasting his show, eventually netting himself a contempt finding. On the eve of his trial in Texas, Jones raced into the bankruptcy court, declared three companies with no substantial business or assets “bankrupt,” and successfully halted both Sandy Hook cases in their tracks.

If it wasn’t clear from his prior bad conduct that Jones was simply using the bankruptcy court to evade trials in Connecticut and Texas — without having to put his personal assets and those of his main company Free Speech Systems at risk — his filings made no bones about it. Jones’s lawyers set up a Litigation Settlement Trust to “provide a mechanism for the payment in full of the litigation claims,” promising to fund it with $10 million cash from Jones, provided that the Sandy Hook plaintiffs accepted the money as payment in full and dropped their claims against FSS and him personally.

And in case there was any remaining ambiguity, Jones’s lawyer Norm Pattis flapped his yap to the Wall Street Journal, bragging that, “We’re turning to the bankruptcy courts to compel the plaintiffs to estimate the value of their claims in open court by discernible evidentiary standards. The plaintiffs have turned this litigation into a macabre morality play and have refused to negotiate in good faith. We hope they will show respect to the federal courts.”

At which point, all hell broke loose. The US Trustee filed a furious motion accusing Jones of acting in bad faith, the Sandy Hook plaintiffs dropped the worthless LLCs as defendants in their state suits, and they all descended on US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez’s courtroom to yell about it.

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At the hearing, Jones’s bankruptcy lawyer Kyung Shik Lee proved that he’s no more susceptible to shame than his client, excoriating the Sandy Hook plaintiffs for their ingratitude that he was finally putting some money on the table, and all he’d heard was complaints. For comparison, FSS made $56 million in 2021 alone, and Jones was attempting to fob off the plaintiffs with an amount that wouldn’t even cover their accrued legal fees. Nevertheless, Lee huffed that there were “limited funds and we’re trying to maximize it so it goes to the plaintiffs.”

And after all that drama, the gambit didn’t even work. Once the LLCs were dismissed as defendants in the state suits, the tort cases were remanded back to Texas and Connecticut for trial. Which left the more-or-less worthless LLCs in a bankruptcy with virtually no creditors and only a super pissed-off US Trustee.

Which brings us to yesterday, where the LLCs made a great show of withdrawing from bankruptcy with the greatest reluctance in the world, protesting loudly about the scurrilous, untrue, not to say hurtful allegations that they had acted in anything less than good faith. The best faith! And they weren’t tapping out because the jig was up — they were being forced out virtually at gunpoint by the mean old Trustee.

“The Debtors’ former link to Alex Jones is too great a sin in the U.S. Trustee’s eyes for the Debtors to overcome,” the motion practically hyperventilates, adding later that “apparently the U.S. Trustee does not believe that paying creditors more than they would receive in a liquidation is a valid reorganizational purpose.”

The Sandy Hook plaintiffs are similarly to blame because they “decided that a jury verdict against Alex Jones and FSS was more important to them than maximizing their recovery.” Bookmark that one and see whether the jury awards them more than the piddling $10 million on offer here.

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The motion also makes some truly strange assertions, such as that the LLCs were “not contemplating any third-party releases” and “did not intend to deprive the plaintiffs of their jury trial rights.” Which is an odd way to describe a proposed Litigation Settlement Trust that was premised on the plaintiffs releasing Jones and FSS from all claims and not going to trial.

Indeed the motion concedes at multiple points that the primary purpose of the bankruptcy was to resolve the tort litigation: “Perhaps the U.S. Trustee believes that Jones should have been willing to contribute $7.7+ million for nothing, but that is not the way the world works outside of government,” his lawyers snark.

And so this entire sordid exercise is coming to an end, albeit after an extended display of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

“Nonetheless, the Debtors, under the management of their independent [restructuring officer], recognize that the dismissal is in the best interests of the Debtors and their estates because the U.S. Trustee continued opposition to the cases,” they sigh.

Yeah, yeah, tell it to the jury.

InfoW, LLC (22-60020) [Bankruptcy Docket, via Court Listener]


Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.