Satirical news publication The Onion has been named the winning bidder for Alex Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction.
The bid was backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than one billion dollars in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax.
The purchase would turn over Jones’ company, which for decades has peddled in conspiracy and misinformation, to a humour website that plans to relaunch the Infowars platform in January as a parody.
Within hours of the sale’s announcement on Thursday, Infowars’ website was down and Jones was broadcasting from what he said was a new studio location.
“The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the 2012 shooting in Connecticut, said in a statement provided by his lawyers.
The Onion’s bid was for the conspiracy theory platform’s website; social media accounts; studio in Austin, Texas; trademarks; and video archive for an undisclosed sales price.
Lawyers for Jones and a company affiliated with Infowars that submitted a 3.5 million dollar offer said they had expected a round of bidding to be held on Wednesday where prospective buyers could outbid each other.
They alleged that the trustee overseeing the auction changed the process only days before and instead opened only sealed bids that were submitted.
Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston said he had concerns.
The exact day and time for the hearing have not yet been determined.
The satirical outlet – which carries the banner of “America’s Finest News Source” on its masthead – was founded in the 1980s and for decades has skewered politics and pop culture, including making Jones a frequent target of mocking articles.
Mass shootings in the US, such as the Sandy Hook attack, are often followed by The Onion publishing slightly updated versions of one of its most well-known recurring pieces: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
“No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds,” The Onion said in a satirical post about the sale.
“And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.”
On his live broadcast, Jones was angry and defiant, vowing to challenge the sale in court and calling it “a total attack on free speech”.
He later announced his show was being shut down.
The Onion, based in Chicago, consulted on the bidding with some of the Sandy Hook families that sued Jones for defamation and emotional distress in lawsuits in Connecticut and Texas, lawyers for the families said.
“Our clients knew that true accountability meant an end to Infowars and an end to Jones’ ability to spread lies, pain and fear at scale,” said Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the families.
Ben Collins, chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, told The Associated Press (AP) in a video interview that it will relaunch the Infowars website in January with satire aimed at conspiracy theorists and right-wing personalities, as well as educational information about gun violence prevention from the group Everytown for Gun Safety.
Mr Collins would not disclose the sale price.
“We thought it would be a very funny joke if we bought this thing, probably one of the better jokes we’ve ever told,” Mr Collins said.
“The (Sandy Hook) families decided they would effectively join our bid, back our bid, to try to get us over the finish line.
“Because by the end of the day, it was us or Alex Jones, who could either continue this website unabated, basically unpunished, for what he’s done to these families over the years, or we could make a dumb, stupid website, and we decided to do the second thing.”
John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said the organisation will be the exclusive advertiser on the new Infowars website.
“When you think about the unmitigated harm that Alex Jones and Infowars brought to Sandy Hook families, it’s just poetic justice that now Everytown and The Onion together will open a new chapter on Infowars and a chapter that is devoted to the issue of gun safety,” he told the AP.
Jones did not lose his personal X account, which has more than three million followers, in the auction.
But the bankruptcy judge is deciding whether his personal accounts can be sold off at the trustee’s request.
Sandy Hook families sued Jones and his company for repeatedly saying on his show that the shooting that killed 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax staged by crisis actors to spur more gun control.
Parents and children of many of the victims gave evidence that they were traumatised by Jones’ conspiracies and threats by his followers.
Jones has since acknowledged the shooting was “100% real”.
The Onion bills itself as “the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events” and says it has 4.3 trillion daily readers.
Sealed bids for the private auction were opened on Wednesday.
The bankruptcy trustee named First United American Companies, which is affiliated with one of Jones’ product-selling sites, as the back-up bid should the sale to The Onion fall through.
