Newscasts - US judge stops the Onion's purchase of Alex Jones' Infowars
11/12/2024 09:16
Click the following link to watch video: https://share.newscasts.refinitiv.com/link?entryId=1_nem2febu&referenceId=tag:reuters.com,2024:newsml_RW633111122024RP1_930&pageId=Newscasts Source: 'Reuters - Business videos' Description: A U.S. bankruptcy judge on Tuesday stopped parody news site the Onion from buying conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars website, ruling that a bankruptcy auction did not result in the best possible bids. Gabe Singer reports. Short Link: https://refini.tv/3Benb5w Video Transcript: A US judge on Tuesday stopped the parody news site the Onion from buying conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars website. At the end of a two-day hearing in Houston, bankruptcy judge Christopher Lopez rejected Jones’ claims that the auction was plagued by ‘collusion.’ However, he ruled that a November bankruptcy auction did not result in the best possible bids, because the trustee running the auction failed to encourage back-and-forth bidding between the Onion and a Jones-affiliated company, which was the runner-up. Lopez told the trustee to work to resolve some of the disputes between the creditors before making a new attempt to sell Infowars. The Onion’s winning bid in the November auction was valued at $7 million overall. The Jones-affiliated company had argued the sale process was tainted because the Onion received too much credit for having the support of families of victims of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Jones declared bankruptcy in 2022 and was forced to liquidate his assets to pay over $1.3 billion in legal judgments to the families after several courts ruled that he defamed them by making repeated false claims that the mass shooting was staged as part of a government plot to take guns away from Americans. The Sandy Hook families, who are Jones' largest creditors, augmented the Onion's bid by agreeing to give up some of the money they would get from the Infowars' sale so that other creditors could receive more. Jones celebrated the new verdict on Infowars, while The Onion CEO said that the company was deeply disappointed in Lopez's decision but remains interested in purchasing Infowars