On Thursday, the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School victims claimed Infowars host Alex Jones funneled millions of dollars to enrich himself from his company he has now filed for bankruptcy as the families attempt to seek damages through defamation suits.
Part of their demands, according to Daily Wire, is to have Jones surrender control over his media company.
Parents of children killed in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 have asked a federal bankruptcy court Thursday to order Infowars host Alex Jones to surrender control over his media company.
Here’s what Kyle Farrar, a lawyer for the families, said, according to The New York Times:
“Alex Jones is not financially bankrupt; he is morally bankrupt, which is becoming more and more clear as we discover his plots to hide money and evade responsibility. He used lies to amass a fortune, and now he is using lies and fiction to shield his money.”
Accusing Jones of funneling cash from his business to himself and others in order to give the guise of bankruptcy as he faced defamation lawsuits, lawyers for the families insisted that a bankruptcy trustee should assume command of Free Speech Systems, the parent company for his media empire, according to a court filing.
The families’ lawyers called the debt “a centerpiece of Jones’s plan to avoid compensating the Sandy Hook families.”
Holdings have “no services, has no employees and has no warehouse,” the Sandy Hook lawyers claimed, adding that “money that Free Speech Systems pays PQPR ends up in Alex Jones’s pockets.”
“We will be filing a response soon,” R.J. Shannon, one of Jones’ lawyers in the bankruptcy matter, said Thursday. He declined to comment further.
The families said in their filing that Jones had siphoned nearly $62 million from his business into financial vehicles benefiting himself and his family beginning in 2018 when the Sandy Hook families first filed suit.
More from ‘The Daily Wire’:
Earlier this month, a Texas jury ordered Jones to pay $45.2 million in punitive damages to the parents of a 6-year-old child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting.
The hefty charge comes on top of another $4.1 million compensatory charge that the jury directed Jones to pay to Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse, who was killed at Sandy Hook alongside 19 other children and six educators. The trial is the first of three over conspiratorial comments Jones allegedly made following the Sandy Hook tragedy, denying it had happened.
Jones will sit for two more trials next month, one more in Texas and another in Delaware, and face the families of more victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. The families allege that Jones defamed them in the aftermath of the tragedy.
During the trial, Jones testified that the media and his critics had never allowed him to take back his comments, despite his retractions and admissions that he was wrong.
Heslin said that “the negligence and recklessness of Alex Jones” had made his life a “living hell.”
Jones is still set to face two more trials to determine how much he owes the families of other Sandy Hook victims he was found to have defamed with his destructive conspiracy theory comments.
Sources: DailyWire, The New York Times
