Per the Associated Press, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez has dismissed a bankruptcy protection case tied to Infowars, Prison Planet TV, and IW Health, three companies with far-right media personality Alex Jones at the helm. The companies agreed to set aside the bankruptcy case after individuals suing Jones for defamation said they’d no longer include the companies in their litigation.
Those suing Jones brought their claims in connection to Jones’s past questioning of the reality of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which obviously happened and wasn’t some kind of staged or “false flag” event. Parents of children who were killed in that incident sued Jones. “The judge’s action allows the parents’ defamation lawsuits against Jones to continue in Texas and Connecticut, where trials are pending on how much he should pay families after judges in both states found Jones and his companies liable for damages,” the Associated Press explains. Families of victims have been harassed and threatened by individuals who evidently took Jones’s past delirious rambling about the Sandy Hook tragedy seriously. An FBI agent involved in the initial response to the tragedy is also among those behind defamation litigation against Jones.
Lopez’s role involved approving the arrangement agreed to by the two sides. Families of Sandy Hook victims behind the defamation litigation and U.S. authorities wanted the bankruptcy case thrown out, characterizing it as meant to throw a wrench in the defamation proceedings. Federal attorneys Jayson Ruff and Ha Nguyen said it appeared like “Jones intends to leverage the bankruptcy filings of his holding companies to extend the automatic stays of pending litigation against Debtors to him and [Free Speech Systems], while he maintains full control of FSS and its assets going forward.” In other words, Jones seemed to want bankruptcy-associated protections from ongoing litigation to cover him in a personal capacity and Free Speech Systems, which is his largest “moneymaking company,” the Associated Press said. As attorneys for families suing Jones said: “What Jones and his affiliates want to avoid is the wisdom of juries that would have liquidated his liability and the liability of his affiliates.” Well, that potential plan has now clearly not worked out.
Jones’s other past claims include an allegation that the 2017 car ramming that claimed the life of a protester against white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, was staged. Jones was briefly featured in this past Thursday’s public hearing of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. The panel played a clip of an interview Jones did with Stewart Rhodes, the founder and national leader of the right-wing militia group known as the Oath Keepers. The clip illustrated pre-riot prep by certain groups for potentially deadly violence: “It’s either President Trump is encouraged and bolstered and strengthened to do what he must do, or we wind up in a bloody fight. We all know that. The fight’s coming,” Rhodes told Jones in November 2020. This dangerous rhetoric is the kind of thing that Jones regularly pushes.
Featured image: Jared Holt, available under a Creative Commons license
