Alex Jones Hiding Assets? No, That Can’t Be Right.

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(Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Now we know what Alex Jones has been doing in all the time he was ducking discovery and refusing to sit for a deposition in those lawsuits brought by surviving family members of the Sandy Hook shooting victims he called “crisis actors.” If a lawsuit filed yesterday in Texas is to be believed, he’s been frantically looting his company and socking away cash to make himself judgment proof when those plaintiffs come to collect.

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Try to contain your astonishment.

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Courthouse News was first to flag the case, which was filed in a state court in Texas, where Jones lives and where the companies associated with his Infowars media brand are located. The plaintiffs allege that Jones and his company “doomsday prepped” for the inevitable defamation judgments coming their way by siphoning some $72 million out of the company, with $18 million going directly to Jones and another $54 million paid to “shell companies owned by insiders like his parents, his children, and himself.”

The most egregious scheme allegedly involved a Nevada limited-liability company known as PQPR Holdings which is “owned and operated directly or indirectly by Jones, his parents, and his children through an alphabet soup of shell entities.”

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According to the complaint, after Jones got sued, PQPR suddenly remembered that it had signed a licensing agreement seven years prior whereby it would provide Jones’s media company Free Speech Systems with supplements and swag for the podcaster to flog and was entitled to be reimbursed for the cost of the items plus 70 percent of the sales revenue. None of this money had ever been paid, but suddenly PQPR demanded some $54 million, which was more than the sum of all Free Speech Systems’ assets.

Nevertheless, Free Speech Systems immediately started shoveling cash out the door once it became clear that Jones was going to lose in spectacular fashion.

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In fact, the month the default judgments were rendered, Free Speech Systems started transferring to PQPR between $11,000 per day and $11,000 per week plus 60– 80% of Free Speech Systems’ sales revenue—supposedly just to pay the interest on the alleged $54 million debt. Free Speech Systems claims these payments are part of a “financial disentanglement between the two companies[.]” In reality, they’re transfers designed to siphon off the Jones Debtors’ assets to make them judgment-proof.

At the same time Jones personally took about $18 million out of Free Speech Systems over and above his yearly salary of more than $600,000, even though, on paper at least, the company was insolvent.

The plaintiffs seek to claw back all that cash under the Texas Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act (TUFTA) which classifies transfers made “with actual intent to hinder, delay, or defraud any creditor of the debtor” as fraudulent.

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They note that the factors used to determine the debtor’s intent include: whether the transfer or obligation was to an insider; whether the debtor retained possession or control of the property after the transfer; whether the debtor had been sued or threatened with suit before the transfer was made or obligation was incurred; whether the transfer was of substantially all the debtor’s assets; whether the value of the consideration received by the debtor was reasonably equivalent to the value of the asset transferred or the amount of the obligation incurred; whether the debtor was insolvent or became insolvent shortly after the transfer was made or the obligation was incurred; and whether the transfer occurred shortly before or shortly after a substantial debt was incurred.

And apparently PQPR only started collecting on its supposed debts after the cases were filed and Jones started hoovering up cash when his company was theoretically insolvent, which is … not a great look.

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Meanwhile Jones finally showed up in Connecticut to be deposed, after pissing off Judge Barbara Bellis so much that he got held in contempt and faced fines escalating by $25,000 every day he failed to appear.

Here he is mouthing off about the gross assault on his free speech rights waged by the plaintiffs who, uh, forced him to show up and speak.

JUST IN: Here’s what Alex Jones had to say regarding his deposition in Bridgeport today where he’s being questioned by lawyers for the families of Sandy Hook victims. A judge had ordered he be fined until he appeared. @News12CT pic.twitter.com/hSSLaZ5AEH

— Marissa Alter (@MarissaAlter) April 6, 2022

“I’m here because there is a war against the First Amendment, and the Democratic party and others are trying to use the Sandy Hook tragedy as a pretext to not just erase my First Amendment, but all Americans’ First Amendment,” he gabbled during a bizarre rant which referenced both weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Jussie Smollett. “This is all about cancel culture, this is all about censorship, it’s about the dying corporate media wanting to demonize the independent media.

“I believe Sandy Hook happened; I’m sorry for the families,” Jones said, after giving himself credit for apologizing for the years he spent questioning whether the plaintiffs faked their own dead children and dispatching hordes of his deranged viewers to harass them. “But they’re being used, in my view, as pawns by powerful Democrat law firms that want to try to shut down InfoWars and Alex Jones. And once that domino falls, they’ll be able to shut down anybody.”

We note that Jones’s First Amendment rights appear to be pretty well  intact as of this writing. Maybe he’ll actually shut up if the plaintiffs succeed in clawing back that $72 million though.

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

Topics

Alex Jones, Defamation, Government, Guns / Firearms, Sandy Hook