Judge rejects sale of Alex Jones’ Infowars to The Onion in dispute over bankruptcy auction

Polarising alternative news host Alex Jones and his company Infowars have been granted a big win following a rival company’s ploy to take over.

A US federal judge on Tuesday night rejected the sale of the conspiracy platform Infowars to The Onion satirical news outlet after Alex Jones claimed that a recent bankruptcy auction was fraught with illegal collusion.

The Onion was named the winning bidder on November 14 over the company affiliated with Jones, The New York Post reports.

US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez’s decision means Jones can stay at Infowars in Austin, Texas. The Onion had planned to kick Jones out and relaunch Infowars in January as a parody.

At the end of a lengthy two-day hearing in a Texas courtroom, Lopez criticised the auction process as flawed and said the outcome “left a lot of money on the table” for families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

“You got to scratch and claw and get everything you can for them,” Lopez said.

Lopez cited problems — but no wrongdoing — with the auction process.

The Onion offered $1.75 million in cash and other incentives for Infowars’ assets in the auction.

First United American Companies, which runs a website in Jones’ name that sells nutritional supplements, had offered $3.5 million.

Trustee Christopher Murray defended The Onion’s bid during the legal proceedings,

“Only two people showed up to bid and … one was just better than the other,” Murray said.

The issue was The Onion’s cash offer was lower than that of First United American, but it had also included a pledge by many of the Sandy Hook families to forgo $750,000 of the auction proceeds due to them and give it to other creditors. That caveat meant the other creditors would have received more money than they would receive under First United American’s bid.

Polarising alternative news host Alex Jones and his company Infowars have been granted a big win following a rival company’s ploy to take over.

Jones said ‘it’s head-spinning the stuff they did and what they claimed’. Sergio Flores/Getty Images/AFP

Jones did not attend the proceedings, opting to slam the legal battle via a broadcast from his Texas studio.

“I can’t imagine the judge would certify this fraud,” Jones said on his show Tuesday.

“I mean it’s head-spinning the stuff they did and what they claimed.”

X owner Elon Musk also joined the fray, joining the legal battle to try to block The Onion from obtaining any X accounts belonging to Infowars.

Two days after news broke that The Onion had moved to purchase the news channel, X filed a narrow objection to the sale.

X’s terms of service “make clear that it owns the X Accounts” and that X “merely grants its users a non-exclusive license to use their accounts,” lawyers for the company wrote.

“X Corp. is compelled to file this Objection to make clear that X Corp. does not consent to the sale or any other transfer of the non-assignable X Accounts, which in turn, means the X Accounts cannot be sold or transferred at this time,” X lawyers argued.

Jones’s accounts “may not be sold, assigned, or otherwise transferred as part of the Sale nor can any X account, including any maintained personally by Jones, including the Jones X Account, be sold to any third party,” they wrote.

Jones is still in deep legal drama, after an appeals court last week largely upheld a nearly $1.3 billion (A2.05b) defamation verdict.

But Jones is still in deep legal drama, after an appeals court last week largely upheld a nearly $1.3 billion (A2.05b) defamation verdict in a case accusing the Infowars founder of spreading lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting.

A three-judge panel of the Connecticut Appellate Court found that a jury’s October 2022 decision to award $965 million in damages plus attorneys fees and costs to families of the shooting’s victims was not unreasonable given the mental anguish they suffered due to the lies by Jones about Sandy Hook.

In affirming the verdict, the judges found fault only with a portion awarding $150 million in damages under a state unfair trade practices law, finding that should be thrown out because it did not properly apply to the facts of the case.

Polarising alternative news host Alex Jones and his company Infowars have been granted a big win following a rival company’s ploy to take over.

Jones claimed for years that the 2012 shooting deaths of 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., were staged with actors as part of a government plot to seize guns from Americans. He has since acknowledged that the mass shooting occurred, but plaintiffs said Jones cashed in for years off his lies about the massacre.

A lawyer for the Sandy Hook families, Alinor Sterling, praised the ruling.

“The jury’s $965 million rebuke of Jones will stand, and the families who have fought valiantly for years have brought Alex Jones yet another step closer to true justice,” Sterling said in a statement.

Jones’ lawyer Norm Pattis said in a statement that the jury was falsely led to believe Jones made millions of dollars off the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories and that Jones was to blame for the families’ anguish.

“We had hoped the Appellate Court would have seen through the charade and farce that this trial became. It didn’t,” Pattis said, adding that he plans to appeal to the Connecticut Supreme Court.

Jones and the parent company of his Infowars site, Free Speech Systems, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2022 after the verdict in Connecticut and another in Texas, where a jury in a similar case awarded other Sandy Hook parents $49 million.

Originally published as Judge rejects sale of Alex Jones’ Infowars to The Onion in dispute over bankruptcy auction