On Sunday April 17th, 2022, Alex Jones filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas in face of multiple defamation lawsuits.

A chapter 11 bankruptcy puts a hold on civil litigation matters and allows companies to gather and prepare turnaround plans while still being operational. Infowars is an American conservative conspiracy theory and fake news website owned by Alex Jones.

Jones was found liable in three lawsuits filed in the year 2021 after he claimed that the 2012 school shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary school was a hoax. In this massacre 20 children between six and seven years old and 6 school employees were shot and killed in Newton, Connecticut. Jones claimed that this was all a fabricated lie by gun control advocates and mainstream media outlets. After the 2012 massacre, he said that this shooting was a “hoax involving actors, aimed at increasing gun control.” Since then, he has acknowledged that the shooting was real.

Families of Sandy Hook victims rejected Jones’ offer to settle the defamation lawsuit and reopened the case. Jones had offered to pay each of the thirteen plaintiffs one hundred thousand dollars. All of the plaintiffs rejected the settlement in the court documents saying, “The so-called offer is a transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape a public reckoning under oath with his deceitful, profit-driven campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook.”

In the court filings on Sunday, Infowars listed its estimated assets between zero and fifty thousand and the liabilities were estimated from one to ten million dollars. Jones had also been subpoenaed by the House of Representatives committee because of the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. It had been reported that he had helped organize and raise money for “Stop The Steal” rally that started the riots on Capitol Hill.