Alex Jones has filed for bankruptcy after being forced to pay about $1.5 billion (£1.2 billion) for falsely claiming a 2012 school shooting was a fabrication.
Following a series of defamation proceedings held earlier this year, Jones was forced to pay damages to the relatives of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting.
The most prominent occurred in October when a Connecticut jury ordered him to pay over $1 billion.
Jones has been silent over the filing.
According to court filings filed in Houston, Texas on Friday, the Infowars host has between $1 million and $10 million in assets and between $1 billion and $10 billion in liabilities.
They estimate that the 48-year-old has between fifty and ninety-nine creditors, including the individually named family of the victims and a responding FBI agent.
Free Speech Systems, the parent business of his show, filed for bankruptcy in July.
The current filing temporarily halts all proceedings in the Connecticut case, including an examination of how the families would get the money and whose assets could be included in the settlement.
As the matter unfolds through bankruptcy courts, it might further delay payments. Uncertain is the amount of money the families will receive.
A lawyer for the families stated, following the filing, that “the bankruptcy system does not protect anyone who commits willful and outrageous attacks on others.”
Chris Mattei said in a statement, “As with every previous cowardly move Alex Jones has made, this bankruptcy will fail.”
Jones, the founder of the conspiracy-laden Infowars website and talk show, has contended for years that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “staged” government plot to disarm Americans and that “no one died.”
He referred to the parents of the 20 deceased children as “crisis actors” and claimed that some of them never existed.
He now admits that the attack was “100% real,” a statement he made in August during a separate Texas defamation trial.
Families who lost loved ones in the shooting claimed that Jones’ lies prompted years of death threats, intimidation, and other types of abuse from his followers.
Later this year, Jones will face a third defamation trial related to the Sandy Hook shooting in Texas.
