Sandy Hook Families’ Fight for Alex Jones’s Money Takes an Ugly Turn

Alex Jones does not, for now, have to turn over the Infowars bank accounts to the Sandy Hook families he owes millions, a bankruptcy judge ruled on Thursday.

The ruling by Judge Christopher Lopez is the latest turn in an increasingly acrimonious battle between two groups of Sandy Hook families fighting to be paid defamation damages from Mr. Jones.

“Let’s just do this with process and transparency,” Judge Lopez said in the hearing, held in Houston. “The last thing I want to do is start hashing out another dispute about two sets of families that have been through enough already.” He proposed to set another hearing in mid-July, when a court-appointed trustee newly in control of Mr. Jones’s personal and business accounts is expected to provide more information.

The families of eight victims who sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut had filed an emergency motion asking Judge Lopez to block a court’s ruling last week granting Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, who sued Mr. Jones in Texas, the right to seize Mr. Jones’s business bank accounts, which contain roughly $2 million. Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis are the parents of Jesse Lewis, 6, who died at Sandy Hook.

Their court fight comes nearly a dozen years after 20 children and six educators died in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and Mr. Jones’s years of lies that it was a hoax and the families were complicit in the plot. The families suffered such online abuse and death threats that in 2018 relatives of 10 victims sued Mr. Jones for defamation and were awarded more than $1.4 billion in damages in trials in Texas and Connecticut.

Mr. Jones has nowhere near that money: He and his business have $9 million in assets. His company had declared bankruptcy after the judgments, as Mr. Jones had previously for his personal assets. On June 14, Judge Lopez ordered those personal assets to be liquidated and sold, with the proceeds distributed among the Sandy Hook families.