As the potential for damages mounted, Alex Jones began moving millions of dollars out of his company and into companies controlled by himself, friends or relatives. The transfers potentially put those funds out of reach of the Sandy Hook plaintiffs.
Parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School had sued him and his media company for defamation after he repeatedly claimed the 2012 massacre in Connecticut was a hoax. Fans of the Infowars host had harassed and threatened grieving families. By the summer of 2020, two of the lawsuits weren't going his way.
This year, Jones started paying his personal trainer $100,000 a week to help ship supplements and other merchandise, a Free Speech Systems attorney said in court. A company managed by Jones's sister and listed as a "supplier or vendor" was paid $240,000, financial records show. "In the middle of this lawsuit, they started documenting debts that had no evidence of existing beforehand," Sandy Hook attorney Avi Berkowitz said in an interview.
Raymond Battaglia, a lawyer for Free Speech Systems, has said that as the Infowars brand ballooned, and millions of dollars poured in, the family-run business never adopted "appropriate management and accounting controls," and so it failed to note the debt that had built up to PQPR. The Post examined financial records, depositions and other documents from the court cases to trace the flows of money around Free Speech Systems and establish the ownership of the other companies that were involved. The analysis shows that the transfers echoed financial moves Jones made almost a decade earlier, when divorce proceedings jeopardized his fortune, according to sealed court records from the divorce case obtained by The Post.
"If he wants to agree to some sort of terms that hold him accountable for all he's done, we'll be open to listening," Berkowitz said. "Whether that means walking away from public life, to paying Sandy Hook families in full, the Sandy Hook families are not going to stop until Jones is held accountable.""They want us off air, that's their goal," he said during one show last month. "You've got my commitment. I'm not backing down.
In 1999, Jones registered the site infowars.com. As the internet era took off, he launched a subscription-only streaming video service and began selling videos, books and T-shirts, according to bankruptcy records. In 2007 he incorporated Free Speech Systems and created a series of other companies that held intellectual property and film rights, splitting ownership with his then-wife, Kelly, whom he had met at the public access station.
Jones's father said in a deposition filed in the divorce case that Jones recruited him to leave dentistry in order to help professionalize operations and protect the company from liability. "He wanted to be sure that the entities that had been created were up and running properly, that they were legally constituted, that they were doing business as they were supposed to do," he said, according to a court transcript.
Those companies all have a stake in Jones's biggest revenue source: The supplements that he promotes as a way for viewers to improve their health and keep his show running. The supplement sales dramatically boosted his business, according to bankruptcy filings and former employees. On Sept. 27, 2021, a trial court in Texas ruled that Jones had violated the rules of the discovery process by failing to turn records over to the plaintiffs. Four days later, Jones signed an agreement to send PQPR $11,000 per day to cover the alleged debt outlined in the promissory note. On Nov. 10, Jones signed a secondary promissory note saying, in effect, that he had discovered another unpaid debt to PQPR, this time for $25.3 million.
Riley did not respond to voice mails seeking comment. He testified that he is the sole owner of the company.
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