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Infowars host Alex Jones filed for personal bankruptcy protection Friday after a Connecticut jury and judge ordered him to pay $1.44 billion in damages to relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, a new court filing shows.
An attorney for Sandy Hook families later told CNBC that Jones’ move would not protect his assets from legal damages levied against him for falsely claiming that the shooting, which killed 20 first-graders and six adults, was a hoax.
Jones has filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, court records show.
In that filing, the famous conspiracy theorist estimates his liabilities at between $1 billion and $10 billion against assets between $1 and $10 million.
He also estimates that there are between 50 and 99 creditors.
Creditors named in the bankruptcy filing include parents of children killed Dec. 14, 2012, at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, who had successfully sued him for defamation, and an FBI agent who responded to the scene of the massacre .
The largest unsecured creditor in the filing was Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter Emily was killed that day. Parker, who received a $120 million settlement from Jones, was accused along with others by Jones of being “crisis actors” who conspired to stage the shooting.
An attorney for the families, Sandy Hook, told CNBC in an email: “Like every other cowardly move made by Alex Jones, this bankruptcy will not work.”
“The bankruptcy system does not protect anyone who engages in deliberate and vicious attacks on others, as Mr. Jones did,” said Chris Mattei, an attorney with the firm Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder.
“The American justice system will hold Alex Jones accountable, and we will never stop working to enforce the jury’s verdict,” Mattei said.
A Connecticut jury in October ordered Jones to pay nearly $1 billion in restitution to Sandy Hook relatives. The judge in that case added $473 million in punitive damages to that bill the following month.
Jones’ company, Free Speech Systems Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection in July. That filing came weeks before another Texas civil jury awarded Jones and his company $50 million in damages to the mother of a child killed in Sandy Hook.
Relatives of Sandy Hook victims said the harassment they faced after the shooting by people who believed the massacre was a hoax continued into this year.
On Thursday, Jones conducted an interview with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. During this edition of Infowars, Yeh made a series of anti-Semitic comments, praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and talked about his recent dinner with former President Donald Trump and white racist Nick Fuentes.
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