The Onion’s bid to take over Infowars moves to the Texas Supreme Court : NPR
In this photo illustration, The Onion website is displayed on a computer screen, showing a satirical story titled Here’s Why I Decided to Buy ‘InfoWars’.
Mario Tama/Getty Images North America
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Mario Tama/Getty Images North America
The question of whether satirical site The Onion can take over Infowars, the media company run by conservative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, is now in the hands of the state’s highest court. But in the meantime, Jones says he is still being forced out of his Infowars studio and is considering moving to a new Thursday Nights and rebuilding it under new ownership.
The Onion had hoped a deal would be approved Thursday by a lower court judge, allowing it to license the Infowars brand and turn the show into a parody of itself. The proceeds reportedly went to the Sandy Hook families who won more than $1.3 billion in a defamation case against Jones after he spread lies that the 2012 elementary school shooting never happened and that the grieving parents were just actors. The families, who have been hounded and harassed by Jones supporters for years, support The Onion deal.
Jones won a stay from a Texas appeals court on Wednesday, and lawyers for the families filed their own appeal to the Texas Supreme Court on Thursday. Control of Infowars is now in limbo until the higher courts rule.
In In a video posted Wednesday, Jones said he had to leave his Infowars studio in Austin, Texas, because a court-appointed receiver was no longer paying the bills to keep it open. The receiver is responsible for taking control of Jones’ assets and selling them to pay the families what Jones owes them.
“It’s not paying the bills, like rent or internet, satellite, so we have to shut down,” Jones said, adding that Thursday “is the last official Infowars show.”
Nonetheless, Jones called the appeals court’s decision a “massive victory,” saying that The lawsuits against him “have failed to silence us and it has created a Streisand effect to only stimulate people’s interest in why we are under such attack.”
Lawyers for the families, who have yet to recover a single cent of their judgment against Jones, say they are moving on and “looking forward to Onion’s final takeover of Jones’ corrupt business.”
“The Sandy Hook families have endless patience and over a billion dollars in judgments against Alex Jones and Infowars,” said attorney Chris Mattei. “His desperate legal maneuvers can do nothing to prevent the inevitable closure of Infowars, and we call on the Texas courts to recognize that the families, whose final judgments have been approved by the United States Supreme Court, are entitled to a speedy and fair resolution.”
For his part, the CEO of The Onion, Ben Collins, denounced an “insane and unprecedented legal blockage”. He wrote in a social media post: “We now expect new pitfalls in Alex Jones’ amoral war to refuse to pay the Sandy Hook families, but we are freshly surprised by the appetite of the American justice system to accept it.”
The Onion first tried to buy Infowars in 2024, through a federal bankruptcy auction, but the bankruptcy judge overseeing the case rejected the deal, saying the auction process was flawed.
