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.
According to a report by The New York Times, Sandy Hook victims have accused Jones of funneling millions of dollars to himself and family members while claiming his pockets are empty.
“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,” Kyle Farrar, a lawyer for the families, said, according to The New York Times. “He used lies to amass a fortune, and now he is using lies and fiction to shield his money.”
According to filings in the Houston bankruptcy court, nine Sandy Hook victims’ families have urged a trustee to take control of Infowar’s parent company, Free Speech Systems, which owes $54 million to PQPR Holdings, which has ties to Jones and his parents.
The families’ lawyers called the debt “a centerpiece of Jones’s plan to avoid compensating the Sandy Hook families.”
Holdings has “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.”
Jones allegedly transferred approximately $62 million from his company to several accounts linked to himself and family members when the Sandy Hook families filed the lawsuit against him in 2018.
R.J. Shannon, a lawyer for Jones, said the team would file a response “soon,” with no further comment, according to The New York Times.
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.”
Tim Pearce contributed to this report.
Source: Dailywire
