Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones files for bankruptcy in US state of Texas

By Darren Lyn

HOUSTON, United States (AA) - Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones filed for bankruptcy in a Houston, Texas court on Friday.

The Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing comes less than two months after a jury ordered Jones and Free Speech Systems -- the parent company of his Infowars fake news website -- to pay nearly $1 billion in compensatory damages to relatives of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting victims. He was also ordered to pay $473 million in punitive damages in that case.

Court filings showed that Jones has between $1 million and $10 million of assets and between $1 billion and $10 billion of liabilities.

Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy in July.

A judge had temporarily blocked Jones from moving any personal assets out of the country at the request of the plaintiffs, who claimed Jones was trying to hide assets to avoid paying.

Jones’ bankruptcy filing comes after he lost a bid in a separate case in Texas to reduce the nearly $50 million damages handed down by a jury earlier this year over his false claims about the Sandy Hook massacre.

The court filing listed the plaintiffs who won verdicts against Jones, including Robert Parker, father of six-year-old Emilie Parker, who was awarded $120 million by a Connecticut jury, and FBI agent William Aldenberg, who was among the first law enforcement officers on the scene of the 2012 massacre, which was one of the deadliest school shootings in US history.

Jones claimed for years that the killing of 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut was staged with actors as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns. He has since acknowledged that the shooting actually happened.

A trial was held in September and October in Connecticut, and the plaintiffs in that lawsuit throughout the trial described how the lies Jones had disseminated prompted unrelenting harassment against them and compounded the emotional agony of losing their loved ones.