Infowars is jettisoning its bankruptcy case after families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims who are suing the conspiracy site’s founder, Alex Jones, withdrew from the chapter 11 process, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Properties holding the trademark and web-domain rights to Infowars agreed on Wednesday to dismiss their chapter 11 cases as part of a stipulation with the Justice Department’s bankruptcy watchdog, which has questioned the basis for the bankruptcy. W. Marc Shwartz, a certified public accountant who was retained as Infowars’s chief restructuring officer, determined it was in the best interest of the site and its creditors to end the bankruptcy in light of Sandy Hook families’ decision to effectively withdraw from the chapter 11 process, according to papers filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Victoria, Texas. The bankruptcy filing threatened the Sandy Hook families with a potentially lengthy delay to their defamation suits against Mr. Jones even though he didn’t file personal bankruptcy. To resume litigation against Mr. Jones, the families agreed last month to drop legal claims against the Infowars properties that were put into chapter 11. The families of the children murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre sued Mr. Jones in 2018 for repeatedly saying the school shooting, which killed 20 first-graders and six adults in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax and falsely claiming the families were actors and faked the deaths of their loved ones. Lawyers representing some families who have sued Mr. Jones have said that the bankruptcy was part of a last-ditch effort to avoid a Texas trial to establish damages against him. A separate damages trial in Connecticut state court is scheduled for September.
