Rightwing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones filed for personal chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Texas on Friday, according to a court filing, as he faces nearly $1.5bn in court judgments over conspiracy theories he spread about the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.
Jones was ordered by a Connecticut court last month to pay $473m in punitive damages on top of a nearly $1bn verdict handed down in October for his defamatory lies that the shooting was faked.
A court filing showed Jones filed for chapter 11 protection from creditors with the US bankruptcy court in Houston. The filing said Jones has between $1m and $10m of assets and between $1bn and $10bn of liabilities. It also refers to Free Speech Systems, a Jones affiliate and Infowars’ parent, as having filed for bankruptcy in July.
In October, a Connecticut jury in a case brought by relatives of more than a dozen Sandy Hook victims ordered Jones and Free Speech Systems to pay nearly $1bn in damages.
In a separate case in Texas, a jury in August decided Jones must pay the parents of a six-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook massacre $45.2m in punitive damages, on top of $4.1m in compensatory damages.
Jones claimed for years that the 2012 killing of 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged with actors as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns. He has since acknowledged the shooting occurred.
An attorney representing Jones in the bankruptcy case did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
The bankruptcy filing temporarily halted all proceedings in the Connecticut case and forced a judge to cancel a hearing scheduled on Friday morning on the Sandy Hook families’ request to attach the assets of Jones and his company to secure money for the nearly $1.4bn in damages awarded there.
Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Sandy Hook families in the Connecticut case, criticized the bankruptcy filing on Friday.
“Like every other cowardly move Alex Jones has made, this bankruptcy will not work,” Mattei said in a statement.
“The bankruptcy system does not protect anyone who engages in intentional and egregious attacks on others, as Mr Jones did. The American judicial system will hold Alex Jones accountable, and we will never stop working to enforce the jury’s verdict.”
In the Texas and Connecticut cases, some relatives of the 20 children and six adults killed in the school shooting testified that they were threatened and harassed for years by people who believed the lies told on Jones’s show. One parent testified that conspiracy theorists urinated on his seven-year-old son’s grave and threatened to dig up the coffin.
Erica Lafferty, the daughter of the slain Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, testified that people mailed rape threats to her house.
Jones has laughed at the awards on his Infowars show, saying he has less than $2m to his name and won’t be able to pay such high amounts.
The comments contradicted the testimony of a forensic economist at the Texas trial, who said Jones and his company Free Speech Systems have a combined net worth as high as $270m. Free Speech Systems is also seeking bankruptcy protection.