Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been denied the use of his personal bankruptcy as a means to evade paying a minimum of $1.1 billion in defamation damages linked to his repeated false claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school tragedy, as ruled by a U.S. bankruptcy judge on Thursday.
While bankruptcy can absolve debts and legal judgments, it does not apply when the debts result from "willful or malicious injury" caused by the debtor, a decision made by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas.
Previous rulings in Connecticut and Texas have established that Jones intentionally defamed the families of schoolchildren who lost their lives in the mass shooting, ordering him to pay $1.5 billion in damages.
Judge Lopez determined that over $1.1 billion of these verdicts, primarily awarded for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. However, he left open the possibility of discharging other parts of the verdicts, including $324 million in attorneys' fees, which were designated as punitive damages in the Connecticut case.
The distinction between "willful" and "malicious" lies and "reckless" conduct will be resolved at a trial to ascertain the specific amount of damages that may be discharged.
Attorneys representing Jones and the Sandy Hook families did not offer an immediate response.
Jones' legal team had asserted that he had not spread falsehoods and that his actions were not malicious, contending that Jones "never said something on air that he did not believe to be true."
For years, Jones propagated the unfounded claim that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 students and six staff members lost their lives, was a staged event involving actors as part of a government conspiracy to confiscate firearms. Although he has since acknowledged the event's reality, the plaintiffs argued that Jones had profited for years from his false narrative regarding the tragedy.
Jones and his media company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy protection in December and July of the previous year, respectively.
Jones may face two additional defamation trials for plaintiffs who have not yet received a final judgment in their cases. Judge Lopez ruled that Jones could not evade the damages set to be awarded in one of these cases because he had previously been found liable for defaming Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa. Jones had falsely asserted that Veronique De La Rosa was an actor who "faked" a CNN interview about her son's death in the Sandy Hook incident.
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