The sale of InfoWars, Alex Jones’ right-wing conspiracy site, to The Onion could be held up in court after a judge questioned the transparency of the auction process Thursday.
The satirical news site placed the winning bid for the site at a bankruptcy auction in an offer backed by families of the Sandy Hook shooting, who are owed more than $1 billion from Jones in defamation judgments.
But the judge in Jones’ bankruptcy case said he had misgivings about how the auction was held at an emergency hearing in Houston later in the day and ordered an evidentiary hearing to sort out whether the auction was fair sometime next week.
“We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,” Judge Christopher Lopez said. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.”
He did immediately not set a date for the hearing.
The only other bidder — First United American Companies which runs ShopAlexJones.com — complained that the bidding method was switched from an open process to a silent auction, in which rivals’ bids weren’t disclosed to other potential buyers, at the last minute.
The Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron has not disclosed what its winning offer was, but the trustee who ran the auction said the dollar figure it offered was less than First United American’s $3.5 million bid — but a better deal.
The trustee Christopher Murray — who is tasked with overseeing the liquidation of Jones’ assets after he declared bankruptcy — said the Sand Hook families’ offer to give up a portion of the sale process to pay Jones’ other creditors was not something he could put a monetary value on but was the best bid.
“I’ve never seen this before in any other case, and we did a lot of research, and we’ve never found it,” Murray said, according to Bloomberg.
“But I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors, and under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.”
Jones took to social media to lash out against the sale in a video rant, in which he said the auction was fake and “rigged” and claimed that his company has “been hijacked.”
“This was an auction that didn’t happen, with a bid that was lower, with money that wasn’t real,” he insisted.
The judge said he doesn’t have an opinion on who buys InfoWars, but his job was to make sure it was done fairly.
“I personally don’t care who wins the auction,” Lopez said, according to Bloomberg. “I care about process and transparency.”
If the sale is approved, The Onion indicated that it plans to shut down the current InfoWars, which has published baseless misinformation and conspiracies — including that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax created to take away America’s guns — which led to the families winning a defamation suit against Jones that caused him to file bankruptcy.
In its place, The Onion — well-known for its frequently repeated article following mass shootings titled “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” would publish satirical articles and studies on gun violence prevention in partnership with Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun safety group founded in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, in which 20 young children and six educators were massacred.
“We thought it would be a very funny joke if we bought this thing, probably one of the better jokes we’ve ever told,” The Onion CEO Ben Collins said.
“The (Sandy Hook) families decided they would effectively join our bid, back our bid, to try to get us over the finish line. Because by the end of the day, it was us or Alex Jones, who could either continue this website unabated, basically unpunished, for what he’s done to these families over the years, or we could make a dumb, stupid website, and we decided to do the second thing.”
For the families of Sandy Hook victims, squashing Jones’ megaphone for harmful conspiracies was enough to get them to sign on.
“The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter Emilie was killed in the mass shooting, said in a statement provided by his lawyers.
With Post wires
