A US bankruptcy judge stopped parody news site the Onion from buying conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars website, ruling that a bankruptcy auction did not result in the best possible bids.
However, the judge, Christopher Lopez, on Tuesday rejected Jones’s claims that the auction was plagued by “collusion”.
Lopez said the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who ran the auction made “a good-faith error” by quickly asking for final offers for Infowars instead of encouraging more back-and-forth bidding by the Onion and auction competitor First American United Companies, affiliated with Jones’s supplement-selling businesses, which was the runner-up.
“This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody,” Lopez said. “It’s clear the trustee left the potential for a lot of money on the table.”
The Onion was named the winning bidder for Infowars in a November auction. Jones declared bankruptcy in 2022 and was forced to liquidate his assets to pay $1.3bn in legal judgments to the families of 20 students and six staff members who were fatally shot in the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Courts in Connecticut and Texas have ruled Jones defamed the families by making repeated false claims that the mass shooting was staged.
The Connecticut-based Sandy Hook families, who are Jones’s largest creditors, augmented the Onion’s bid by agreeing to forgo some repayment from the Infowars sale so that other creditors could receive more money.
Lopez said neither of the two offers for Infowars was enough money given the scope of Jones’s debts, and told the trustee to work to resolve some of the disputes between the creditors before making a new attempt to sell Infowars.
Christopher Murray, a court-appointed trustee charged with selling Jones’s assets, testified on Tuesday that the auction was fair, and that First American United Companies complained about the process only after learning that its bid was not chosen.
The Onion has said it plans to relaunch Infowars in 2025 as a parody site filled with “noticeably less hateful disinformation” than before.
With Reuters
