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(Photo by Sergio Flores/Getty Images)
Last week, Alex Jones’s lawyers stomped out of bankruptcy court in Texas practically wailing and rending their garments at the unfairness of it all. How very dare the US Trustee suggest that declaring three worthless shell companies bankrupt and removing the Sandy Hook tort cases to federal court on the eve of trial was a cynical ploy to evade justice?
Sure, the sole listed creditors were the 21 tort plaintiffs, and Jones was only offering to fund the proposed “Litigation Settlement Trust” if they’d agree to accept a $10 million pittance as payment in full. Nevertheless Jones’s counsel indignantly insisted that the bankruptcy was a legitimate business exercise, “not contemplating any third-party releases” and not designed to “deprive the plaintiffs of their jury trial rights.”
After the tort plaintiffs non-suited the LLCs, the Texas and Connecticut cases were remanded to state court. At which point Jones found himself back in front of the same pissed off trial judges who’d already issued default judgments against him for refusing to comply with discovery, and who were, presumably, not impressed to find their calendars thrown out of whack by Jones’s bankruptcy gambit.
Jones immediately made matters worse, if such a thing is possible, by moving to withdraw his attorneys and postpone the September trial date until such time as he could find new counsel.
“We have not had direct communication with our client in over a month,” attorney Cameron Atkinson told Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis, just three months after he’d attested in open court that his client was too ill to be deposed, only to have opposing counsel open up his laptop to reveal that Jones was at that very moment in-studio broadcasting his Infowars show.
In a motion filed yesterday, Jones’s counsel offered a new rationale for postponing the Connecticut trial, which is set for jury selection on August 2, with trial to commence on September 6.
“The defendants seek continuance of the Connecticut jury selection and trial deadlines so that Mr. Jones and Free Speech Systems, LLC, can appear in Texas to defend themselves without having simultaneously to appear in Connecticut to defend against the Connecticut action, a result which is, simply, physically impossible,” they wrote, pointing to the July 25 trial date for the Texas Sandy Hook plaintiffs and a September 19 date for a defamation suit by a plaintiff Jones falsely accused of being the Parkland school shooter. (He does get around.)
“The defendants request that jury selection begin no earlier than October 17, 2022, and that evidence in this case begin no earlier than November 1, 2022,” they went on, adding an additional request that next week’s show cause hearing on the attorneys’ motion to withdraw be postponed to accommodate Jones’s vacation plans.
The status conference will go forward as scheduled on June 15, 2022. The motion to withdraw appearance will be heard on June 22, 2022 as requested. With respect to the trial continuance, the current dates for jury selection and evidence has been firmly set since August 5, 2021, and the court has made it clear that the trial will go forward as scheduled. Since the Texas courts have recently assigned new trial dates which conflict with this long-standing date, nothing prevents the movants from filing motions for continuance in the Texas cases, and attaching a copy of this order.
But wait, there’s more! There always is with this guy.
On Tuesday, the Connecticut plaintiffs dropped an absolutely furious motion for sanctions for bad faith removal demanding compensation for the fees and costs associated with having to show up in bankruptcy courtrooms in both Texas and Connecticut and get the cases remanded to state court.
Alex Jones’s abuse of the judicial process literally knows no bounds – not content to waste this Court’s time and ignore this Court’s rulings, Jones expanded his bad faith abuse of process to bankruptcy, in both the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Connecticut and the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. Due to the plaintiffs’ extreme efforts, that abuse has ended. It falls to this Court to levy sanctions on Mr. Jones for this continued misconduct.
The motion relies heavily on the US Trustee’s filings in Texas calling the bankruptcies a bad faith sham, as well as deposition testimony that the three supposedly bankrupt companies do little or no business, are virtually worthless, and are owned entirely by Jones himself.
“The removal of this action based on these rotten bankruptcy filings was equally in bad faith,” they argue, demanding to be made whole for their efforts to get their case back on track.
Could things get crazier?
Well, this is Alex Jones we’re talking about. So the answer is undoubtedly “yes.”
Lafferty v. Jones [Docket]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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