Key Points
- Alex Jones has filed for protection from creditors with the US bankruptcy court in Houston, a court filing showed.
- Mr Jones claimed for years that the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting was staged. He has since acknowledged it occurred.
- A jury ordered he and the parent company of his Infowars website pay $A1.5 billion in damages to relatives of victims.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has filed for bankruptcy, less than two months after a jury ordered him and the parent company of his Infowars website to pay nearly $US1 billion ($A1.5 billion) in compensatory damages to relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting.
Mr Jones filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors with the US bankruptcy court in Houston, a court filing showed.
The filing said Jones has between $US1 million and $US10 million of assets and between $US1 billion and $US10 billion of liabilities.
In October, a Connecticut jury in a case brought by relatives of more than a dozen Sandy Hook victims ordered Mr Jones and Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Infowars, to pay nearly $US1 billion in damages.
Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy in July.
In a separate case in Texas, a jury in August decided Mr Jones must pay the parents of a six-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook massacre $US45.2 million in punitive damages, on top of $US4.1 million in compensatory damages.
Mr Jones claimed for years that the 2012 killing of 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged with actors as part of a US government plot to seize citizens' guns.
He has since acknowledged the shooting occurred.
The court filing lists the plaintiffs who won verdicts against Mr Jones as his largest unsecured creditors .
Among them are Robert Parker, father of six-year-old Emilie Parker, who was awarded $US120 million by a Connecticut jury, and FBI agent William Aldenberg, who was among the first law enforcement officers on the scene of the 2012 shooting.
In addition to the $1 billion compensatory damages, Jones was ordered to pay $473 million in punitive damages in the Connecticut case.
Connecticut judge Barbara Bellis had temporarily blocked Mr Jones from moving any personal assets out of the country at the request of the plaintiffs, who claimed Mr Jones was trying to hide assets to avoid paying.
