A federal bankruptcy court trustee appointed to oversee the liquidation of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ estate is asking a judge to temporarily block families and other creditors from seizing assets related to his media company, as he readies “an orderly wind-down process” and sale.
The trustee, Christopher Murray, “seeks this Court’s intervention to prevent a value-destructive money grab and allow an orderly process to take its course,” according to his emergency filing Sunday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas.
The move came after families who won a 2022 defamation lawsuit in Texas against Jones asked a state district court judge to compel his Free Speech Systems, which operates the Infowars platform, to turn over “all money,” including “money held in any bank accounts or being controlled by any other third parties at the direction” of the media company.
But Murray said in his request that the “specter of a pell-mell seizure of FSS’s assets, including its cash, threatens to throw the business into chaos, potentially stopping it in its tracks, to the detriment of the interests of the chapter 7 estate for which the Trustee is responsible.”
The trustee’s challenge is only the latest in the legal saga involving Jones, who broadcasts in the Austin area. He was sued in Texas and Connecticut by families who claimed he defamed them and inflicted emotional distress by repeatedly suggesting on his show that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax. A gunman killed 20 first grade children and six adults at the school in Newtown, Connecticut.
The families were awarded $1.5 billion in total in their lawsuits, but they have been unable to collect anything from Jones, who has claimed he can’t afford that big a sum and filed for bankruptcy in the wake of the verdicts.
During a court hearing this month, federal Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez agreed to allow Jones to convert his bankruptcy filing into a liquidation of his personal assets to help pay off the settlements.
But, in a decision that Jones had favored, the judge dismissed a separate bankruptcy case involving Free Speech Systems. That has allowed Jones to continue broadcasting although the future of his show on Infowars remains uncertain and he had suggested for weeks that it could come to an end.
At his defamation trial in Texas in 2022, Jones generally blamed “corporate media” for twisting his words and misportraying him, but didn’t specify how.
Jones’ lawyer, Vickie Driver, said at this month’s bankruptcy hearing that there is money that can go to the trustee in the form of the sale of Jones’ $2.8 million Texas ranch.
Court filings indicate Jones has about $9 million in personal assets, while Free Speech Systems holds about $6 million in cash with more than $1 million in inventory.
Driver did not immediately responded to a request for comment Monday.
A lawyer for the families in the Connecticut lawsuit against Jones had said they supported liquidating Free Speech Systems because they worry it would lead to individual families battling over the company’s assets in state courts.
“This is precisely the unfortunate situation that the Connecticut families hoped to avoid when we argued that the Free Speech Systems/InfoWars case should have remained with the bankruptcy court rather than being dismissed,” lawyer Christopher Mattei said in a statement. “The Connecticut families are disappointed by this attempt to undercut the orderly and long overdue winddown of Alex Jones’s InfoWars platform.”
Murray wants the court to impose a 90-day pause on any collection action by creditors against Free Speech Systems. It’s unclear when the judge may rule.
