“It gained’t work,” he added.
Within the bare-bones submitting, Mr. Jones estimated that he owed cash to 50 to 99 collectors, an inventory topped by the names of the Sandy Hook relations. His greatest creditor is Robert Parker, whose daughter Emilie died at Sandy Hook. Mr. Jones for years performed a videotape on Infowars of Mr. Parker’s tearful information convention the evening after his daughter’s homicide, calling the grieving father an “actor” and the information convention “disgusting.” Conspiracy theorists who believed Mr. Jones’s lies tormented, threatened and personally confronted Mr. Parker and his household.
In October, the jury in Connecticut ordered Mr. Jones to pay Mr. Parker $120 million, as a part of the $1.4 billion judgment.
Mr. Jones estimates his belongings to be price $1 million to $10 million within the submitting. That quantity will nearly definitely be challenged by the households, who mentioned of their submitting that Mr. Jones had siphoned almost $62 million from his enterprise into monetary automobiles benefiting himself and his household starting in 2018, once they first filed swimsuit. In court docket in Texas this summer time, a forensic economist, Bernard F. Pettingill Jr., estimated that Mr. Jones and his enterprise have been price $130 million to $270 million.
On the core of his chapter declare is Mr. Jones’s assertion that Free Speech Techniques, which he owns, owed $54 million to PQPR Holdings, an organization owned and operated straight and not directly by Mr. Jones and his mother and father. The debt is fictional, the households’ attorneys mentioned in Thursday’s submitting, and “a centerpiece of Jones’s plan to keep away from compensating the Sandy Hook households.”
Mr. Jones has grow to be more and more emblematic of how misinformation and false narratives have gained traction in American society. He has performed a job in spreading a few of current historical past’s most pernicious conspiracy theories, reminiscent of Pizzagate — during which an Infowars video helped encourage a gunman to assault a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. — in addition to coronavirus myths and “Cease the Steal” falsehoods about election fraud earlier than the Capitol assault on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Jones is beneath scrutiny by the Home Jan. 6 committee and the Justice Division for his function in planning occasions across the assault on the Capitol, which he broadcast dwell.
Emily Metal contributed reporting from New York.