Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.
The victims will almost certainly not see the full $1.1B, or even anything close to that. Not because Jones will hole up his money and refuse to pay, but because Jones doesn’t have the assets to cover it, and never will. With a judgement hanging over him, he will be unable to raise the capital necessary to ever pay it back–it takes money to make money, especially when you need to crack the billion dollar mark.
Jones himself is still fucked. Rich people get away with stuff because they hire good lawyers. Jones forgot that part of the plan.
Jones hired good lawyers, then fired them, then hired more, then fired them, then hired more, then fired them… etc.
During the sandyhook trials he went through something like 30 lawyers. Often the parents lawyers interacted with a different set of lawyers basically on every deposition.
I have to imagine Jones’s lawyers told him to STFU, which he never could do.