A court-appointed bankruptcy trustee signaled his intent on Sunday to shut down Alex Jones’ Infowars company, aiming to prevent a “money grab” by families who sued Jones over his false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Trustee Christopher Murray announced that he has begun planning to wind up Infowars owner Free Speech Systems’ operations and liquidate its inventory to help repay some of the $1.5 billion that Jones owes to the relatives of the 20 students and six staff members killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
Murray’s efforts faced challenges from some families’ recent attempts to collect their debts. Two Sandy Hook parents, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, sought a court order to seize FSS’s cash. Murray then asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez to block their request. “The specter of a pell-mell seizure of FSS’s assets, including its cash, threatens to throw the business into chaos, potentially stopping it in its tracks,” Murray wrote. “The Trustee seeks this Court’s intervention to prevent a value-destructive money grab and allow an orderly process to take its course.”
On June 14, FSS’s chief restructuring officer testified that the company had over $6 million in cash and about $1 million in unsold inventory, mostly health supplements. That same day, the court dismissed FSS from bankruptcy and placed Murray in charge of Jones’ finances. This dismissal allowed the company to continue broadcasting but also permitted creditors to resume collection efforts.
Families who sued Jones in Connecticut wanted the company shut down immediately to prevent Jones from hiding cash or undermining the company from the inside. Conversely, families who sued Jones in Texas believed he would pay more in the long run if he kept control of his business instead of “selling it for scraps.”
Jones filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2022 after courts in Connecticut and Texas ordered him to pay $1.5 billion to the Sandy Hook families for his repeated claims that the Sandy Hook killings were staged with actors as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns. Jones has since acknowledged that the shooting occurred. Unable to reach a bankruptcy settlement with the families, the judge overseeing his bankruptcy ruled that Jones could not use bankruptcy to wipe out the debt, because the legal judgments resulted from Jones’ “willful and malicious” conduct.
