A US bankruptcy judge has rejected the sale of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars website to satirical news platform The Onion.
After a two-day hearing, Judge Christopher Lopez ruled that the Infowars auction did not result in the best possible offers.
However, he rejected Jones' claims that the auction was suffering from “collusion”.
The Onion said the bid was secured with support from the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Primary School shooting, who won a $1.5bn (£1.18bn) defamation suit against Jones for spreading false rumors about the massacre.
Judge Lopez said the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who ran the auction made a “good faith error.”
Instead of quickly demanding final bids at the auction, he said, they should have encouraged more bidding between The Onion and a subsidiary of Mr. Jones' nutritional supplement sales companies.
“This matter should have been opened again, and it should have been opened again to everyone,” Judge Lopez said.
Jones was a fringe figure broadcasting in Austin, Texas, in the 1990s, then built an audience of millions with a mixture of opinions, speculation and outright fabrication.
The company makes most of its money through an online store 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 his guests on his radio shows repeatedly questioned whether the massacre had really occurred, and put forward 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 said: “Sandy Hook is artificial actors, completely fake, from my perspective, manufactured…I knew they had actors there obviously, but I thought they had killed some “people”. “Real children, and it shows how daring they are, and they obviously used actors.”
Believers in the web of conspiracy theories spun by Jones have harassed families of Sandy Hook victims, in some cases sending them photos of their dead children or gravestones and posting their personal information online.
Some traveled to Newtown to “investigate,” and several people were arrested for harassing the victims.
Jones later admitted that the killings were real and insisted that his statements were covered by American freedom of expression protections.
But relatives of the victims obtained defamation judgments against Jones and his company for his false statements.
He declared bankruptcy in 2022 when the Sandy Hook case went to court, and in June 2024, a judge ordered Jones' personal assets to be liquidated. This included a multi-million dollar farm, other property, cars, boats and guns, totaling about $8.6 million, according to the court filing.
