Alex Jones is deploying the curious tactic of going on the attack against the judge in his case as a jury in four lawsuits will decide how much Jones must give to the families of Sandy Hook victims.
Jones was sued for lying that the Sandy Hook massacre never happened and it was all fake. That prompted attacks from Jones' viewers, who would send threats, and other forms of attacking the families. In one case, the family of a victim was forced to move 12 times to escape the attacks.
In a special live broadcast, Jones said that the judge in his case sanctioned him over $1 million after he failed to meet deadlines to produce documents and information. Jones swears he delivered everything that was requested.
"Discovery isn't supposed to be a guessing game," Fairfield District Superior Court, Judge Barbara Bellis said. She explained that a default judgment is a kind of sanction of last resort. That doesn't fall under a jury's decisions. "The court held off on scheduling the sanctions hearing in the hopes that many of these problems would be corrected and that the Jones defendants would ultimately comply with their discovery obligations."
"I'm honored to be attacked by this system, but it's still scary, up close, to see the corruption goes all the way down to the local court systems," said Jones.
He's also complaining that there was no jury in the case, though it's unclear which case he's talking about as there was a jury verdict in the Sandy Hook case.
Last month, Jones changed the name of the parent company InfoWars LLC to InfoW LLC so anyone reporting InfoWars was filing for bankruptcy could technically be incorrect, Texas Monthly reported.
"Two judges, one in Austin and one in Newtown, issued default judgments against the defense—finding that because Jones and his rotating cast of attorneys had failed over the course of three years to participate in the legal process in good faith, his liability would be accepted by the courts as a matter of fact," the report characterized. "(Default judgments are highly uncommon, reserved for situations in which a judge has determined that one party's lack of participation amounts to a failure to respond to the lawsuit.)"
Those aren't jury decisions. If Jones had cooperated with the court his case would have appeared before a jury. The jury now will decide in four cases how much he owes to Sandy Hook victims.
Ahead of the verdict, Jones' attorneys rushed to declare bankruptcy for their client. The bankruptcy court will still require Jones to publish his financial document unless he files as a small Texas business.
"There's all sorts of protections that are supposed to be designed for a swift, quick bankruptcy with not a lot of oversight — the kind of oversight you'd see in a normal bankruptcy — because it's designed for small businesses," lawyer Avi Moshenberg told the Texas Tribune. He explained that Jones' company, Free Speech Systems is trying to take advantage of that lack of oversight in these cases.
