Key takeaways after judge denies Sandy Hook families’ $16M deal over Alex Jones’ assets
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The immediate fallout from Wednesday’s ruling by a federal judge denying a $16 million deal between Sandy Hook families about sharing Alex Jones’ bankruptcy assets is that the prolonged defamation battle will go on longer still.
What does that mean for the two sides in the highest-profile bankruptcy case of its kind in the country?
For Alex Jones, who is appealing defamation lawsuits he lost to Sandy Hook families in Texas and Connecticut worth $1.4 billion, more time in court means more protection under federal bankruptcy laws from the families he defamed when he called the 2012 slaying of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School, “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax” and “completely fake with actors.”
More protection is a good thing, Jones’ bankruptcy lawyers Shelby Jordan and Ben Broocks wrote in a court document, which accused the Sandy Hook families of trying to “grab the dividend money before the appellate courts make a decision in the pending appeals, so that if the judgments are reversed there will be no way that Alex Jones may recoup those funds.”
For the Sandy Hook families who successfully sued Jones in separate cases in Texas and in Connecticut in 2022 and have not recovered any of the hundreds of millions Jones owes them, waiting is nothing new, but it comes at a cost.
“The Sandy Hook families … are motivated, justifiably, to both maximize their recovery in a timely manner and to protect themselves from Jones’ continued abuse and harassment,” a team of seven attorneys representing the families wrote on Monday to bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez. “Jones not only continues to spread lies about and defame the Sandy Hook families, but he does so while being paid $45,000 per month by the estate.”
The Sandy Hook families’ lawyers are referring to the fact that Jones remains the daily face of Infowars – a conspiracy news and merchandizing broadcast platform – which is under the control of a federal trustee who is liquidating Jones’ personal and business assets.
The judge’s confidence in that federal trustee came into focus on Wednesday when the judge abruptly denied the deal brokered by the trustee to pay the Sandy Hook families from the Texas case $4 million and a larger group of Sandy Hook families from the Connecticut case $12 million in liquidated Jones assets.
The judge’s ruling was abrupt, given it at the start of what had been billed as a day-long hearing, without allowing attorneys from either side to present their case.
The judge interrupted the Jones attorney Broocks in the middle of Broocks’ first sentence, and for the next 25 minutes the judge explained why he would not approve the $16 million deal, saying it involved a claim against the parent company of Infowars which the judge could not allow, because he dismissed the parent company from bankruptcy protection in June.
Wednesday marked the second time in three months that the judge struck down a plan brokered by the trustee to end Jones’ marathon bankruptcy case.
Content retrieved from: https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/sandy-hook-ct-alex-jones-infowars-newtown-20151419.php.
