Satirical outlet the Onion’s acquisition of Alex Jones’s InfoWars has been paused by a federal bankruptcy judge after lawyers for Jones and his company complained about how the auction proceeded.
On Thursday, the Onion was named the winner of the bankruptcy auction reportedly bidding $3.5 million for the site. Jones was ordered to sell the site, among other business entities, after he was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in damages for his wide range of conspiracies that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, in which over a dozen schoolchildren and six adults were killed, was a hoax.
A group of affected Sandy Hook families who filed the defamation lawsuit against Jones agreed to accept a smaller payout to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, the families’ lawyers said.
At the bankruptcy hearing Thursday, the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy auction said that while Onion did not have the highest bid, the Sandy Hook families’ agreement to forgo some of their defamation award to pay off Jones’s other creditors made the Onion’s bid the best overall deal, according to the Associated Press.
Judge Christopher Lopez said that he had concerns about how the bidding process played out. He ordered a hearing for next week to review how the auction was conducted.
“We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing, and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,” he said. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.”
An exact date for next week’s hearing was not immediately set.
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Jones called the Onion’s acquisition of his website rigged. He said, “This was a auction that didn’t happen, with a bid that was lower, with money that wasn’t real.
In their acquisition, the Onion said it plans to turn InfoWars, which for decades highlighted conspiracy theories and misinformation, into a parody website. The Onion said it would relaunch the site in January.