Alex Jones Just Got A New Boss Forever, And It Is The Sandy Hook Plaintiffs

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

From the moment the Sandy Hook jury verdicts were read on the air, Alex Jones assured his audience that he would never pay up.

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“Ain’t gonna be happening. Ain’t no money!” he said live on air, joking “I killed the kids folks,” and assuring his audience that they could safely buy his products because “the money you send does not go to these people.”

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Watching the Sandy Hook verdict live from his studio, Alex Jones makes an urgent plea to his audience for cash, and tells them that none of the money they send him will go the the families because he has filed for bankruptcy. pic.twitter.com/H658p5Sjiw

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 12, 2022

In December, he claimed he was too broke to buy groceries, but promised that all would be well once his company Free Speech Systems got through bankruptcy because “they can’t shut us down, and we get our appeals.”

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Turns out, not so much.

Last week, a judge ruled that Alex Jones cannot discharge more than a billion dollars in damages he owes to the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook. The conspiracy mongering podcaster will not be able to use bankruptcy to get out of paying what he owes to people who had their lives ruined after he called them crisis actors who faked their own children’s deaths as part of a government plot to take America’s guns. And they say we can’t have nice things!

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Jones’s machinations in bankruptcy have been anything but subtle.

“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,” Alex Jones’s lawyer Norman Pattis boasted to the Wall Street Journal in April of 2022 when the podcaster placed three worthless LLCs in bankruptcy on the eve of the first Sandy Hook trial in Texas.

When his ploy to fob off plaintiffs with a measly $10 million “Litigation Settlement Trust” failed, Jones declared Free Speech Systems, parent company of his Infowars show, bankrupt thanks to a recently remembered $50 million debt to it’s supplement supplier, a Nevada company known as PQPR Holdings Limited LLC. By sheer coincidence, PQPR is wholly owned by Jones and his parents! The Sandy Hook plaintiffs have challenged the validity of the debt, and discovery is ongoing.

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But Jones was found jointly liable with FSS, which meant he was personally on the hook for $1.5 billion of damages after the second trial. So he declared personal bankruptcy in December of 2022 in an effort to shield his assets from the plaintiffs.

In March of 2023, the Sandy Hook plaintiffs moved to block Jones from discharging the jury awards through the bankruptcy proceedings.

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“Under 11 U.S.C. § 523(a)(6), debts for ‘willful and malicious injury’ may not be discharged in a bankruptcy,” they argued. “This prohibition reflects an express recognition by Congress that certain actions are so inexcusable that a debtor cannot escape liability through the bankruptcy process, but rather must remain accountable for debts arising from such malicious harm for life.”

And on Thursday, Judge Christopher Lopez agreed, granting summary judgement to the plaintiffs on more than a billion dollars of damages.

Before trial, Jones’s persistent failure to comply with discovery led to default judgments in two courts in Texas, as well as in Connecticut, where the majority of the Sandy Hook plaintiffs filed their case. Jones insisted that this meant there was no binding jury finding that he willfully or maliciously injured the plaintiffs, or alternatively, that awards were unconstitutional under state or federal law and thus the court need not grant them full faith and credit. In contrast, the plaintiffs argued that the jurors calculated damages based on instructions describing Jones’s conduct as willful and malicious, and thus he was collaterally estopped from claiming otherwise.

Judge Lopez looked to the trial transcripts and sided with the plaintiffs. He noted that Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis had described Jones’s conduct as “intentional and malicious, and certain to cause harm by virtue of their infrastructure, ability to spread content, and massive audience including the ‘infowarriors,” adding that “This depravity, and cruel, persistent course of conduct by the defendants establishes the highest degree of reprehensibility and blameworthiness.”

“It is irrelevant that the state court could have awarded damages on reckless acts. What is important is what the court actually did,” Judge Jones wrote in the Connecticut plaintiffs’ order. Brushing aside Jones’s procedural claims, he granted partial summary judgement, holding that the $965 million jury award for compensatory damages and the $150 million of judicially imposed punitive damages under the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act are not dischargeable under US Bankruptcy Code. He denied summary judgment for the $323 million in attorneys fees awarded as common law punitive damages, reasoning that the jury could have awarded it based on mere recklessness by the defendant. But the difference between $1 billion and $1.3 billion in non-dischargeable debt by a defendant whose name isn’t Bezos or Musk, is perhaps negligible.

The Texas plaintiffs fared slightly less well than their Connecticut counterparts. Judge Lopez granted summary judgment as to $4 million in compensatory damages, but denied it with respect to the $41 million of exemplary (punitive) damages because the jury instruction described Jones behaving “intentionally or recklessly with extreme and outrageous conduct,” and debts arising from mere recklessness are dischargeable in bankruptcy.

“There must be a trial about the damages stemming from the admitted allegations constituting a willful and malicious injury. This Court can handle the trial,” Judge Lopez wrote. “And to be clear, this means that the Court will not retry Jones’s liability for intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

And every legal reporter in America said HOSANNA! Will we get a rematch between the plaintiffs’ counsel Mark Bankston and Jones’s counsel Andino Reynal? Will Jones’s lawyers accidentally reveal the contents of his phone to the plaintiffs? Will Jones faceplant again on the witness stand? Will we all be able to listen in because Judge Lopez livestreams all his hearings?

TL, DR? Unlike the New World Order and Jade Helm, “death penalty sanctions” are for real.

KA-CHING!

Alex Jones Bankruptcy [Docket via Court Listener]
Free Speech Systems LLC Bankruptcy [Docket via Court Listener]
Heslin v. Jones [Docket via Court Listener]
Wheeler v. Jones [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

Alex Jones, Government, Norman Pattis