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A court-appointed bankruptcy trustee has indicated plans to sell off right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars media empire to pay some of the $1.5b (£1.18b) he owes to families of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims.
In a court filing filed on Sunday, the trustee, Christopher Murray, said he was planning to close operations of Infowars’ owner Free Speech Systems and “liquidate its inventory”.
The news comes a week after a bankruptcy judge decided Mr Jones’ personal assets would be liquidated to pay back the victims for spreading misinformation about the deadly 2012 shooting at a suburban Connecticut school.
The judge appointed Mr Murray to oversee the liquidation of Mr Jones’ assets.
The conspiracy theorist and his company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy in 2022 after Mr Jones was ordered to pay the $1.5b in multiple defamation cases over false claims about the Sandy Hook shooting, in which 20 children and six adults were killed.
A judge ruled last year that Mr Jones would not be released from paying the settlement despite the bankruptcy filings.
But the Sandy Hook families have yet to collect any money from Mr Jones as the bankruptcy process has played out.
In his filing, Mr Murray asked a judge to put a pause on Sandy Hook families’ efforts to collect their payments from Mr Jones, as he argued that would interfere with the process to sell off his Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems.
He did so after Sandy Hook parents sought to seize money from Free Speech Systems, a move that Mr Murray said would “throw the business into chaos”.
“The Trustee seeks this Court’s intervention to prevent a value-destructive money grab and allow an orderly process to take its course,” he wrote in the filing.
The BBC has contacted Mr Jones and a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families for comment.
Mr Jones has previously said Infowars would only continue its broadcasts for a few months.
“I’m going to try to move forward and maximize the amount of money we can make at Infowars to then have a wind-down,” Mr Jones said outside the courthouse after a previous bankruptcy hearing, according to CNN.
For years, Mr Jones, 50, falsely claimed the Sandy Hook attack was “staged” in an elaborate conspiracy to limit gun rights.
The false theories led to harassment and death threats for victims’ families.
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