There was a merry triumphalism to the announcement last week that The Onion, a satirical outlet based in Chicago, won an auction to acquire the conspiracy site Infowars out of bankruptcy.
The deal seemed done: Infowars went offline; memes of an apoplectic Alex Jones, its founder, sped across social media; and Ben Collins, chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, pronounced the coup “hilarious.”
No one is laughing now.
That sale process has been drawn out by an unexpected twist in the bankruptcy proceedings, when a bidder affiliated with Mr. Jones raised an 11th-hour objection to the deal. Since then, a flurry of court filings have put a spotlight on the final act of the bankruptcy proceedings, which have proved to be just as chaotic as those that preceded them.
The auction’s only other bidder, First United American Companies, which is associated with one of Mr. Jones’s online stores, is contesting the sale to The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron. The outcome of that effort will become clear after a hearing on Monday, set by Judge Christopher Lopez in a federal bankruptcy court in Houston, to review the bidding process.
The Infowars auction is part of an effort to liquidate Mr. Jones’s business and personal assets to satisfy nearly $1.5 billion in damages awarded in 2022 to families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Mr. Jones lied about the 2012 shooting for years, saying that the government staged it as a pretext for draconian gun control and that the families were complicit in the plot.
The families of 10 Sandy Hook victims sued Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, in Texas and Connecticut. The Connecticut families and their lawyers are leading the effort to sell Infowars’ key assets to The Onion.
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