• Alex Jones' InfoWars filed for bankruptcy amid lawsuits by Sandy Hook victims' families.
• Jones lost four defamation lawsuits against him by default in 2021 after failing to provide records.
• Jones was one of the most vocal exponents of the conspiracy theory that Sandy Hook was a hoax.

Alex Jones' far-right website InfoWars and two other sites affiliated with him filed for bankruptcy on Sunday as Jones faces lawsuits from parents of victims in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. 

A lawyer for the families told Insider that the Chapter 11 filing was intended as a stalling technique.

"Alex Jones is just attempting to delay the inevitable: a public trial in which he will be held accountable for his profit-driven campaign of lies against the Sandy Hook families who have brought this lawsuit," the plaintiffs' lawyer, Chris Mattei, told Insider.

The defamation lawsuits, launched in 2018 across Texas and Connecticut, asserted that Jones defamed the parents by promoting the conspiracy that the massacre was staged and the parents were part of the coverup. That baseless accusation became a rallying cry among some far-right conspiracy theorists, and Jones was one of the loudest voices in the movement. 

Jones previously lost four defamation lawsuits brought by Sandy Hook families by default in 2021 after failing to provide the necessary documents and other obligations requested by the court.

In March, Jones offered a settlement of $120,000 to each of the 13 plaintiffs, but they declined his offer. The court filing described Jones' offer as "a transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape a public reckoning under oath with his deceitful, profit-driven campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook."

Norm Pattis, a lawyer for Jones, previously told Insider that the "desire to settle is genuine and outstanding."

Despite filing for bankruptcy in the Texas Southern District Court on Sunday, a Manhattan-based bankruptcy lawyer previously told Insider that he will still probably have to pay the victims' families. Jones filed on behalf of Infowars, Infowars Health, and Prison Planet TV for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which suspends all pending civil litigation while allowing the company to continue conducting its business.

Jones has shifted his claims about the massacre over the years following litigation against him. Soon after the tragedy occurred, Jones began calling it a "false flag" event, according to The New York Times. In 2015, he said on his show that "Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured." But in 2019, during a sworn deposition for a defamation case, Jones acknowledged the shooting was real and claimed he spread the baseless accusations before because of "a form of psychosis."

The propagation of false claims led to real-world harms. An entire community of Sandy Hook conspiracists formed online and proliferated baseless accusations about the people involved in the shooting being "crisis actors." Leonard Pozner, the father of Noah Pozner—the youngest victim of the massacre, which left 26 dead, including 20 children—was harassed by conspiracy theorists after the shooting. One conspiracy theorist was sentenced to several months in prison in 2017 for allegedly sending him death threats.

Jones previously tried to dismiss the defamation suit by Pozner and Noah's mother, Veronique De La Rosa, accusing the plaintiffs of suing not to "recover damages from any legally actionable defamation" but instead trying to stymie free speech and "silence Mr. Jones and those like him."

He attacked Pozner and De La Rosa on his show before, and baselessly claimed that a CNN interview De La Rosa did soon after the shooting was staged with a "green screen." He also broadcasted phone numbers and addresses connected with Pozner to an audience of millions of views, according to the New York Times. 

Jones, a longtime conspiracy theorist known for spreading outlandish claims, has been embroiled in other legal controversies, including being sued by Marcel Fontaine, who Infowars mistakenly identified as the perpetrator of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida in 2018. 

A trial is set in August to determine how much money Jones will need to pay the Sandy Hook' victims families, according to the Associated Press.

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