Three companies belonging to Alex Jones - InfoWars, IWHealth and Prison Planet TV, court documents filed at the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas on Sunday indicate.
The bankruptcy procedures are expected to give Jones temporary reprieve from civil litigation, allowing him to draft plans to turn the companies around earnings wise.
Jones was ordered to pay damages in lawsuits filed in late 2021 over his false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was “completely faked,” and that its 28 victims were “crisis actors” employed by the US government to push gun control.
Six families of Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent investigating the shooting took Jones to court in 2018. In 2019, a Texas judge ordered him to pay $100,000 in damages in a defamation lawsuit. In 2021, a Connecticut judge held Jones liable for more damages. The latter case is expected to go before a jury which will decide how much Jones has to pay later this year.
Jones accused the courts of bias, saying a jury of his peers should have decided on whether he was made to pay any damages, not a judge. “They know they don’t have a case for damages. And so the judge is saying you are guilty of damages, now a jury decides how guilty you are. It’s not guilty until proven guilty,” he said on his show in November.
Last month, Jones offered to pay $120,000 to each plaintiff in the case. The plaintiffs turned down the offer.
Jones has repeatedly expressed regret for his comments on Sandy Hook during appearances on Joe Rogan and other popular podcasts such as Flagrant 2, and claimed in a sworn deposition in 2019 that a “form of psychosis” caused him to believe that the shootings were staged.
In an appearance on Joe Rogan in 2020, the podcaster defended Jones, saying what he needed on his show was a fact-checker “who’s right next to you with a laptop going: ‘Alex, hold on, hold on. Just slow down.” Jones responded by insisting that he was “right 99 percent of the time,” pointing to topics he has discussed at length years ago which were dismissed as conspiracy theories at the time, but which have since proven true – such as the Jeffrey Epstein elite pedophilia and child sex trafficking scandal.