Alex Jones is reportedly transferring money to family and friends in an effort to conceal the funds and avoid having to pay the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting approximately $1.5 billion.
The conspiracy theorist has transferred assets worth millions of dollars outside the reach of creditors, according to a New York Times investigation into Jones’s financial and legal documents. Jones was ordered in court to pay the nearly $1.5 billion last year after years of claiming the mass shooting was an elaborate hoax set up by the government to take guns away from Americans.
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Last month, Sandy Hook victim families raised concerns in court that Jones was echoing similar rhetoric that he did on InfoWars, just on a new platform, his subscription-based podcast, Alex Jones Live. They said he could use the show to spread disinformation and liquidate his bankrupt business.
Jones’s lawyer said her client had promised to stop creating new content and that the podcast was a “test” and not a scheme to get out of paying his court-ordered fines. InfoWars’s parent company, Free Speech Systems, which Jones also owns, filed for bankruptcy in July. Jones filed for personal bankruptcy in December, claiming he could only afford to pay less than 1% of the Sandy Hook judgments against him and his company.
“I’m officially out of money, personally,” Jones said on Infowars in December, per the Associated Press. “It’s all going to be filed. It’s all going to be public. And you will see that Alex Jones has almost no cash.”
However, the New York Times’s investigation has found irregularities in this narrative. In addition to Jones spending $80,000 on security, a private jet, and a villa during his time in Connecticut last year to testify at trial, he also appeared to have been sneaking away his money to various entities.
The report revealed that in October 2021, Jones made a business agreement with Auriam Services, a month-old company founded by Jones’s friend and lifestyle blogger Anthony Gucciardi, meant to function as a credit card processing intermediary.
Then, in February 2022, Jones transferred his $3 million estate in Austin, Texas, to his wife, Erika Wulff Jones. The estate stretches across 5,400 square feet and has four bedrooms and five bathrooms, along with a pool and a spa, per the Guardian.
The investigation also found that Jones signed a contract last July (the same month Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy) with Blue Ascension, a new company founded just a few months prior by Patrick Riley, Jones’s former personal trainer and assistant.
Earlier this month, Free Speech Systems proposed a bankruptcy plan that would pay an annual salary of $520,000 to Jones and leave $7 million to $10 million to annually pay creditors, including the victims’ families, according to the Associated Press.
Jones claimed for years that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary was a hoax and the victims were child actors. In October, a Connecticut jury awarded the victims’ families $965 million in compensatory damages while the judge added another $473 million in punitive damages. In 2022, a Texas jury also awarded the parents of a child killed in the shooting $49 million in damages.
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Jones got his start in broadcasting in the 1990s in Austin, Texas. His conspiracy theories about the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City got him booted off a local radio station. In 1999, he founded InfoWars, which started small but developed into a place for him and his guests to ramble on, often without any evidence, about conspiracy theories.
He has called himself a “truther” and claimed the Bush administration was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was staged by the FBI, and the 2011 shooting of former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords was a government mind control operation. Six people, including a 9-year-old girl, were killed in the 2011 attack, and 12 others were injured.
