After The Onion was named the winning bidder for Alex Jones’ assets at a bankruptcy auction last month, the losing bidder tried to stop the sale, saying the process was rigged and “fatally flawed.”
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Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images
The owners of The Onion have just learned they are not the winners of Alex Jones’ Infowars company. Late Tuesday, a federal bankruptcy judge rejected their bid in last month’s auction, saying the offer and the process were flawed.
U.S. bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez took issue with what he called the lack of transparency in the process, the uneven playing field, and the failure to maximize value for the people to whom Jones owes money.
The decision is a significant — and rare — win for Jones who has been embroiled in a long legal battle with relatives of the 26 children and educators killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn, who sued Jones for defamation in 2018.
The families said Jones’ repeated lies that the 2012 shooting never happened prompted his followers to mercilessly stalk and threaten them for years. After Jones refused to cooperate at trial, Judges in Connecticut and Texas found him liable by default, and juries then awarded the families more than a billion dollars in damages, which Jones is still appealing. Under the weight of those verdicts, Jones declared bankruptcy, and Jones’ media company, Free Speech Systems, was ordered to be sold off to help pay at least a fraction of what he owes the families.
