Judge rejects Onion’s purchase of Alex Jones’ Infowars

The sale of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars website to parody news platform The Onion has been rejected by a US bankruptcy judge.

After a two-day hearing, Judge Christopher Lopez ruled that Infowars’ auction did not result in the best possible bids.

However, he rejected Jones’ claims that the auction was plagued with “collusion”.

The Onion said the bid was secured with the support of the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who won a $1.5 billion (£1.18 billion) defamation suit against Jones for spreading false rumors about the massacre.

Judge Lopez said the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee running the auction had made a “good faith mistake.”

Instead of immediately seeking final offers at the auction, he said, they should have encouraged higher bidding between The Onion and a company linked to Mr. Jones’ supplement-selling businesses.

“It should have been opened back up, and it should have been reopened to everyone,” Judge Lopez said.

Jones was a fringe figure broadcasting from Austin, Texas in the 1990s and later built an audience of millions with a mixture of opinion, speculation and outright fabrication.

The company makes most of its money through an online shop selling vitamins and other products.

The company’s – and Jones’s – financial difficulties stemmed from broadcasts following the December 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

20 small children and six school staff were killed in the attack.

Following the murders, Jones and guests on his broadcasts repeatedly questioned whether the massacre had actually occurred, with conspiracy theories floating around about whether the murders were staged or carried out by government agents.

At one point Jones called the attack “a big hoax” and in 2015 he said: “In my view, Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, manufactured… I knew they had a clear There were actors, but I thought they killed some real kids, and it shows how daring they are, that they obviously used actors.”

Believers in the web of conspiracy theories created by Jones harassed the families of Sandy Hook victims, in some cases sending them photos of their dead children or graves and posting their personal information online.

Some people went to Newtown to “investigate”, and several people have been arrested in connection with the harassment of the victims.

Jones later admitted that the killings were real and insisted that his statements were covered under American free speech protections.

But relatives of the victims won a defamation judgment against Jones and his company over his false statements.

He declared bankruptcy in 2022 when the Sandy Hook case reached court, and in June 2024 a judge ordered the liquidation of Jones’ personal assets. It included a multi-million dollar farm, other properties, cars, boats and guns, totaling about $8.6 million, according to the court filing.