The sale of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars website to spoof news platform The Onion has been rejected by a US bankruptcy judge.
After a two-day hearing, Judge Christopher Lopez ruled that an auction for Infowars did not result in the best possible bids.
However, he rejected Jones' claims that the auction was rife with “collusion.”
The Onion said the deal was secured through support from the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, who won a $1.5 billion (US$1.18 billion) defamation lawsuit. pounds sterling) against Jones for spreading false rumors about the massacre.
Judge Lopez said the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who conducted the auction made “an honest mistake.”
Instead of quickly asking for final bids at the auction, they should have encouraged more bidding between The Onion and a company affiliated with Mr. Jones' supplement sales business, he said.
“It should have been reopened, and it should have been reopened for everyone,” Judge Lopez said.
Jones was a fringe figure who broadcast in Austin, Texas, in the 1990s and went on to build an audience of millions with a mix of opinions, speculation and outright fabrications.
The company makes most of its money through an online store selling vitamins and other products.
The company's — and Jones' — financial woes stem from broadcasts following the December 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Twenty young children and six school staff were killed in the attack.
After the murders, Jones and his guests on his shows repeatedly questioned whether the massacre had actually occurred, circulating conspiracy theories about whether the killings had been faked or carried out by government agents.
At one point, Jones called the attack a “giant hoax” and in 2015 he said: “Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake movie with actors, in my opinion, fabricated…I clearly knew that they had actors there, but I thought they killed some. real kids, and it shows how daring they are, that they clearly used actors.”
Followers of Jones' web of conspiracy theories have harassed the families of Sandy Hook victims, in some cases sending them photos of their dead children or tombstones and posting their personal information online.
Some went to Newtown to “investigate” and several people were arrested in connection with the harassment of the victims.
Jones later acknowledged that the killings were real and insisted that his statements were covered by U.S. free speech protections.
But the victims' relatives won defamation judgments against Jones and his company over his false statements.
He declared bankruptcy in 2022 while the Sandy Hook case was going through the courts, and in June 2024 a judge ordered the liquidation of Jones' personal assets. This included a multimillion-dollar ranch, other properties, cars, boats and guns, totaling about $8.6 million, according to a court filing.
