The sale of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s Infowars website to parody news platform The Onion has been rejected by a US bankruptcy judge.
After a two-day hearing, Judge Christopher Lopez ruled that an auction for Infowars did not result in the best bids possible.
However, he rejected Jones’ claims that the auction was plagued by “collusion.”
The Onion said the bid was secured with the backing of families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who won a $1.5bn (£1.18bn) defamation lawsuit against Jones for spreading false rumours about the massacre.
Judge Lopez said the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who ran the auction made “a good-faith error”.
Instead of quickly asking for final offers in the auction they should have encouraged more bidding between The Onion and a company affiliated with Jones’ supplement-selling businesses, he said.
“This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody,” Judge Lopez said.
Jones celebrated the judge’s ruling on Infowars, calling the auction process “ridiculous” and “fraudulent.”
“We are deeply disappointed in today’s decision“, Ben Collins, chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, posted on social media.
The firm will continue its efforts to buy Infowars, he added.
Jones was a fringe figure broadcasting in Austin, Texas in the 1990s and later built an audience of millions with a mix of opinion, speculation and outright fabrication.
The company makes most of its money through an online shop selling vitamins and other products.
The company’s – and Jones’s – financial difficulties stem from broadcasts made after the December 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Twenty young children and six school staff were killed in the attack.
After the killings, Jones and guests on his broadcasts repeatedly called into question whether the massacre actually occurred, floating conspiracy theories about whether the murders were faked or carried out by government agents.
At one point Jones called the attack “a giant hoax” and in 2015 he said: “Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured… I knew they had actors there clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids, and it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors.”
Believers in the web of conspiracy theories that Jones spun harassed the families of the Sandy Hook victims, in some cases sending them pictures of their dead children or of gravestones and posting their personal information online.
Some travelled to Newtown to “investigate”, and several people have been arrested in connection with harassment of the victims.
Jones later acknowledged that the killings were real and insisted his statements were covered by US free speech protections.
But relatives of the victims won defamation judgements against Jones and his company over his false statements.
He declared bankruptcy in 2022 as the Sandy Hook case made its way to court, and in June 2024, a judge ordered the liquidation of Jones’s personal assets. This included a multimillion-dollar ranch, other properties, cars, boats and guns, in all totalling around $8.6m according to a court filing.
