Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has sued a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee and the families of some of the Sandy Hook victims in an attempt to stop the sale of his media empire Infowars to the satirical news outlet The Onion.
In a lawsuit filed Monday in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, Jones claimed trustee Christopher Murray and the families “colluded” for a “flagrantly non-compliant Frankenstein bid” and asked a judge to halt the sale.
The parent company of Infowars was auctioned off last week as part of bankruptcy proceedings to help pay some of the nearly $1.5 billion Jones owes the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre for defamation.
According to court documents, The Onion, via its parent company Global Tetrahedron, offered $1.75 million in cash along with a “credit” from the Connecticut families, who offered to forgo 100% of their portion of the winning bid to support the effort.
The one other competing bid, at $3.5 million, came from First United American Companies, which is affiliated with Jones and operates his lucrative online nutritional supplements store.
But The Onion, according to a copy of its bid filed as evidence by Jones, said their bid should be valued at closer to $7 million considering the families’ credit. Jones’ attorneys argued that The Onion’s math to reach such a figure is “nonsense.”
Jones’ suit also claimed his defamation verdict will be overturned on appeal.
A spokesperson for The Onion declined to comment. A spokesperson for the families did not respond to a request for comment.
Jones’ lawsuit comes after First United American Companies also filed an emergency motion to stop the sale. In response to those complaints, Murray, who had discretion to choose the winning bidder, wrote that First United American Companies was a “disappointed bidder.”
“The Trustee intends to respond in due course fully and in detail to the barrage of baseless allegations, selective quoting and half-truths in FUAC’s recent filings,” Murray wrote to the court Monday.
One of the issues, attorneys for First United American Companies said in court last week, was that the trustee changed the format of the auction to a best and final written offer instead of holding a live auction. First United American Companies said that it was not made aware of the winning bid amount and did not have the opportunity to increase its offer.
Federal bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez, who is overseeing the case, harshly questioned an attorney for the trustee about the auction rules.
“I am not comfortable with the process and the highest level of transparency that took place,” Lopez said during a hearing Thursday, adding the court will hold an evidentiary hearing to fully understand what took place.
Murray, the trustee, said during the hearing that the auction process involved a round “where people could submit sealed bids” for the specific Infowars assets they were interested in. Then, “under the auction procedures, when those come in, we evaluate that and then decide how to proceed to if we do it all the next auction, the order is very clear that there doesn’t even have to be another auction.”
An attorney for The Onion’s parent Global Tetrahedron said they were only privy to as much information about the auction process as the other bidders and were somewhat surprised that there was not a live auction.
While Lopez said that he expected to hold an evidentiary hearing on the auction process sometime early this week, a hearing has yet to be scheduled. The next hearing on the docket is scheduled for November 25.
