Conspiracy and misinformation-spreading broadcaster Alex Jones reached a whole new audience last week, when The Truth vs. Alex Jones made its debut on HBO and Max.
The documentary about the lawsuits against the InfoWars host featured heartbreaking interviews with those who’d experienced threats and harm over his false claims that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School had been staged, and that the families of the 26 people—mostly children—who’d been killed were all actors. But as opposed to capitalizing on the increased attention, Jones apparently left his Austin, Texas base for Hawaii this week, where TMZ says he was spotted at an upscale hotel on the island of Kauai.
Jones filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2022 after judges in Connecticut and Texas courtrooms ordered him to pay over $1.1 billion in damages to the families he’d repeatedly defamed on his website and in audio and video broadcasts. As is seen in the recently released documentary, Jones claimed in both courtrooms that he had no money, and that his media and supplement sales businesses were also insolvent. Jones’s company, Free Speech Systems LLC, filed for bankruptcy five months before Jones declared personal bankruptcy; the two cases were combined by officials in an effort to expedite payment to creditors including the grieving families. Thus far, none of the families have received a single payment.
In late 2023, the New York Times reported that the bankruptcy case had entered its final stretch, with representatives for Jones and for the families trading settlement proposals. In late February, the families approved a plan to liquidate all of Jones’s assets. According to Bloomberg, the proposal would “methodically liquidate and redistribute his property and cash, while preserving potential legal actions against parties affiliated with Jones and his Infowars program.”
For his part, Jones is asking that the families instead “allow him to reorganize by preserving parts of his media empire and paying the group at least $5.5 million a year over 10 years.” According to the Associated Press, the host is hoping to collect an annual salary of $520,000 as part of his proposed plan, claiming the company “the company expects to sell more than $30 million a year in dietary supplements.”
As part of Jones’s proposal, a new chief operating officer at his company would be paid $520,000 per year, with “$560,000 to nearly $1.3 million per year in executive incentives and another $352,000 to $677,000 in employee bonuses annually.” Other salaries for Free Speech employees would total as much as $940,000, with another $1 million per year allotted to contract workers.
“I’m officially out of money, personally,” the AP quotes Jones as saying on Infowars. “It’s all going to be filed. It’s all going to be public. And you will see that Alex Jones has almost no cash.”
It all sounds very stressful, especially since—with the release of The Truth vs. Alex Jones—more people than ever before are seeing the media mogul in action. Perhaps that’s why Jones headed to Hawaii, where he was, as a source reportedly told TMZ, “chillin’ by the pool and downing drinks.”
According to the website, he was at the resort with his wife, Austin yoga instructor Erika Wulff Jones. “They didn’t appear to have any other family or friends hanging with them,” TMZ reports, saying that the host mainly “hung around the hotel pool and bar area.”
But while Jones was vacationing, his bankruptcy case moved ever so slightly forward. According to Bloomberg, the trustee in the bankruptcy case has requested a judicial mediator to finalize the bankruptcy this month.
“These cases have been on file for more than a year,” trustee Melissa Haselden said. “For a variety of reasons, a resolution of these cases needs to be reached in short order.”