A former U.S. attorney has predicted that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones will be unable to financially recover for the rest of his life, even if he tries to wiggle his way out of paying the $965 million a jury determined he owes to several family members of those killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
“It’s an old sorry tale that it’s one thing to get a verdict and another thing to chase it,” Harry Litman, a former deputy assistant attorney general, said Wednesday on MSNBC. “You can attach his assets. I’m sure there will be subsequent litigation where he’ll say ‘bankruptcy’ and they’ll try to get forensic investigators and say he doesn’t have it.
“But we’re talking about such outsized numbers that even if he’s able to bob and weave some, I just don’t see how he winds up anything but basically broke now for the rest of his life.”
On his Infowars show Wednesday, Jones mocked the jury’s verdict as it was being read. “Ain’t gonna be happening, ain’t no money,” he said, as the live news feed showed a plaintiff crying in the courtroom.
Jones then encouraged viewers to donate to him and assured them the money would not go to the victims’ families but to pay to appeal the decision and save his company.
Multiple family members of Sandy Hook victims, as well as an FBI agent who responded to the 2012 shooting, sued Jones for his repeated lies that the massacre was a hoax. A Connecticut jury ruled on Wednesday that Jones must pay them a combined total of nearly $1 billion in damages, 10 years after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Connecticut.
Jones plans to appeal the verdict. His company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy protection in July during the early stages of another trial in Texas that ultimately determined he must pay $45 million to the parents of a child killed in the Sandy Hook shooting.
In April, Jones filed to put three small business entities linked to his Infowars empire into bankruptcy protection. A Justice Department monitor flagged the move as a potential abuse of the federal bankruptcy system and an apparent effort to delay damages trials.