Conspiracy Theory Website InfoWars Files for Bankruptcy

Ryan J. Farrick — April 19, 2022

Alex Jones in 2017. Photo by Michael Zimmermann, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0

InfoWars wrote in court documents that it has less than $50,000 in assets but up to $10 million in liabilities, most related to defamation cases brought by family members of mass shooting victims.

Infamous far-right conspiracy website InfoWars has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy as its founder, Alex Jones, continues to attract criticism and fight ongoing litigation.

As LegalReader.com has reported before, Jones is currently facing a long-standing defamation lawsuit.

The complaint was filed by family members of the victims of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School near Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty children and six educators were killed in the attack.

The shooter, Adam Lanza, also murdered his own mother.

Lanza committed suicide before he could be taken into custody.

Jones, however, called the mass shooting a conspiracy, concocted by government actors intent on eroding Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

In the days following the shooting, Jones went so far as to suggest that nobody was killed in the shooting, and that the “victims” were in fact paid crisis actors.

A gavel. Image via Wikimedia Commons via Flickr/user: Brian Turner. (CCA-BY-2.0).

After attracting extensive criticism, Jones later revised his position; he still maintains that the shooting may have been a conspiracy, but that people were killed in the event.

Jones’s comments are now being cited as the reason for InfoWars’ “financial distress,” prompting the company to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Texas.

InfoWars described itself in court filings as a “conspiracy-oriented website and media company,” and said that it possesses $50,000 or less in assets but holds between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities.

Jones, InfoWars, and several related defendants have allegedly spent $10 million on legal fees and costs related to the Sandy Hook defamation lawsuit and other conspiracy-related claims.

Despite its expensive defense, Jones and InfoWars have already been found liable for damages in two separate Sandy Hook defamation lawsuits, although the courts have yet to determine damages.

InfoWars said that once damages are determined in a Texas-based lawsuit, there will be nothing left for the Connecticut plaintiffs, as the company has “limited cash on hand.”

National Public Radio notes that InfoWars is also a named defendant in lawsuits relating to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, and another complaint charging Jones with moving InfoWars assets into companies owned by himself or family members.

Jones, who is an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump, has also been personally subpoenaed by the United States House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 attack on the national Capitol by Trump supporters who refused to believe their candidate—who lost the popular vote by significant margins in both 2016 and 2020—did not have enough electoral votes to remain in the presidency.

“We have only begun to resist the globalists. We have only begun our fight against their tyranny,” Jones told a crowd of Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., on the evening of January 5. “They have tried to steal this election in front of everyone.”

Ironically, the Southern Poverty Law Center later released purported communications between Jones sand a film producer, in which Jones lamented he wished he had “never met [Donald] Trump,” before asking for the comments to be removed from a documentary.

The comments were interpreted by the S.P.L.C. as evidence that Jones does not believe many of his own conspiracy-related claims and theories, but simply exploits conservative elements for financial gain.