Sandy Hook Plaintiffs Call Alex Jones Too Malicious To Discharge $1.4B Damage Award In Bankruptcy

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(Photo by Zach Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

From the moment the jury verdicts were read out in the Sandy Hook defamation lawsuits, Alex Jones assured his viewers that the grieving parents would never get paid.

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Here he is laughing on the air as the jury read out the damage awards last October, while assuring his audience that they can continue to buy his pills and potions without fear that any of the money will go to the families.

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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

And here he is just before Christmas claiming that his company Free Speech Systems just has to get through Chapter 11 Subchapter V “and they can’t shut us down, and we get our appeals.” In this same broadcast, he claimed to be close to the point where he couldn’t buy groceries, even as he was drawing a salary of $10,000 per week from FSS, plus thousands more in monthly perks.

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Yesterday the Connecticut plaintiffs moved to prove Jones wrong. In an adversary complaint filed with the bankruptcy court in Texas overseeing both Jones’s personal bankruptcy and that of his company, they asked the court to rule that the $1.4 billion in compensatory and punitive damage claim from their lawsuit be deemed not dischargeable in bankruptcy because it resulted from willful and malicious injury by the debtor.

“Under 11 U.S.C. § 523(a)(6), debts for ‘willful and malicious injury’ may not be discharged in a bankruptcy,” they argue. “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.”

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To footstomp this point, the plaintiff/creditors laid out every terrible thing Jones did to these plaintiffs. And it’s a lot.

They start on the day of the school shooting in 2012 when a disturbed young man killed 20 children and six staffers at the Connecticut elementary school. Within hours Jones published an article falsely claiming to have a witness who said the massacre was a false flag operation. The plaintiffs describe the times Jones had cranks on his show to spew nonsense about the parents who’d just buried their children, and then encouraged his viewers to investigate for themselves. They talk about the parents who had to leave their homes because of persistent harassment and threats from Jones’s deranged fans. One family reported their home being invaded by someone who walked in and demanded to see their dead child, saying, “I know he’s here. I know he’s alive.”

The complaint also describes Jones’s persistent bad conduct throughout the years of litigation, which earned him multiple rounds of sanctions, up to and including a default judgment for his refusal to cooperate with discovery. And indeed his lawyer Norm Pattis was suspended from the practice of law for six months, pending appeal, for his failure to safeguard the plaintiffs’ confidential medical and psychological records.

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This filing is just the latest bit of bad news for Jones in the bankruptcy court. On March 27, the court will hold a hearing on the plaintiffs’ motion to revoke the Subchapter V designation for FSS, on grounds that it’s a designation for small businesses and inappropriate for a business with upwards a billion dollars in debt. This motion is supported by the US Trustee.

There’s a pending dispute over somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million in debt to an LLC called PQPR which supplies the drug supplements which are FSS’s main source of income. PQPR is wholly owned by Jones and his parents, and after Jones defaulted in the Connecticut and Texas cases, FSS signed promissory notes securitizing a supposed debt for product already delivered and not billed. The plaintiffs claim the debt is spurious, and the court has directed the Trustee to investigate.

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And just last week, the court agreed with the plaintiffs that Jones had not been forthcoming on his financial disclosures.

So perhaps running to the bankruptcy court and assuming it would bail him out of the mess he got himself into by targeting the parents of dead children wasn’t the one weird trick Alex Jones thought it would be.

You love to see it.

Alex Jones Bankruptcy [Docket via Court Listener]
Free Speech Systems LLC Bankruptcy [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, Bankruptcy, Defamation, Government, Guns / Firearms, Sandy Hook