- WaPo reported Alex Jones transferred millions from InfoWars’ parent company ahead of its bankruptcy.
- The company signed promissory notes to entities owned by Jones’ friends and family.
- Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages related to lies he spread about Sandy Hook.
A Washington Post report found Alex Jones transferred millions of dollars out of his InfoWars parent company ahead of its bankruptcy filing.
The radio host has been ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages related to lies he spread about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which judges in Texas and Connecticut have ruled were defamatory toward the surviving families. Jones’ recent financial maneuvers may be an attempt to shield his assets from being impacted by the landmark cases.
Twenty-six people died in the shooting, including 20 children.
According to records reviewed by the Post, between August 2020 and November 2021, Jones’ company, Free Speech Systems, began signing promissory notes for $55 million to a company, PQPR Holdings, owned jointly by Jones and his parents. Promissory notes are written promises to pay a sum of money at a future date — functionally a legal IOU.
“In the middle of this lawsuit, they started documenting debts that had no evidence of existing beforehand,” Sandy Hook attorney Avi Moshenberg told the Post.
Lawyers for the defamed Sandy Hook families have also argued in an additional suit that PQPR is “not actually an independent business” and that Jones’ fraudulent activities are intended to prevent his $270 million fortune from being turned over as a result of the awarded damages, the Post reported.
Jones’ financial records also indicate a company managed by his sister was listed as a “supplier or vendor” for Free Speech Systems and was paid $240,000 in at least one payment. This year, Jones also began paying his personal trainer $100,000 a week to help him ship supplements and merchandise, the Post reported.
Jones employed similar financial maneuvers when he was getting divorced in 2013. Though Jones maintains the creation of PQPR Holdings, just two months before their split, was intended to protect him from legal liability, his ex-wife, Kelly Jones, told the Post “he did that to hide his assets for when we broke up.”
Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, as did three other companies tied to Jones last year— Infowars, Prison Planet, and Infowars Health — in what a Sandy Hook parents’ lawyer told Insider was a stalling technique to “delay the inevitable.”
Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook shooting have spread pervasively since he began amplifying conspiracy theories that the shooting was faked and the victims’ families were crisis actors. Though he has been found guilty in multiple defamation cases for his comments, his oft-repeated claims that the shooting was a hoax created an army of Sandy Hook deniers who regularly harass surviving family members.
Representatives for Jones and Raymond Battaglia, a lawyer for Free Speech Systems, did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
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