A judge has intervened and ordered a hearing to review the purchase of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars site by the satirical news site the Onion.
On Thursday morning, it was announced that the Onion had bought InfoWars at Jones’s bankruptcy auction.
But later that day, the judge overseeing Jones’s bankruptcy case held an emergency hearing, during which lawyers representing Jones and a company affiliated with him expressed concerns about the auction process. The judge has ordered an evidentiary hearing for next week to determine if the auction was conducted fairly, which could delay the process.
“We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,” the judge, Christopher Lopez, said in an emergency hearing on Thursday afternoon. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.”
The only other bidder was First United American Companies, a company that is affiliated with one of Jones’s product-selling websites.
At the emergency hearing on Thursday, a lawyer for First United American Companies took issue with the auction process, noting that no bidding round was held on Wednesday for rival parties, and that only sealed bids submitted the previous week were considered.
But the trustee who oversaw the auction said he followed the judge’s rules laid out in a September order, which made the overbidding round optional.
The exact bid amount offered by the Onion for InfoWars remains unknown, but it has been reported it was lower than First United American’s bid of $3.5m. The Onion’s offer was seen as a better deal because some of the related Sandy Hook families agreed to forgo a portion of the sale proceeds to help pay off Jones’s other creditors.
It was reported on Thursday that the Onion’s purchase of Infowars received support from families of Sandy Hook shooting victims, to whom Jones owes $1.4bn in defamation judgments after he falsely claimed the 2012 school massacre was a hoax.
If the sale goes through, the Onion has said that it plans to rebuild the Infowars website to feature internet humor writers and content creators.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
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