Losing bidder seeks to disqualify bid by The Onion in Alex Jones bankruptcy

HOUSTON (CN) — The losing bidder in last week’s bankruptcy auction for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ assets, including his infamous Infowars website, filed an emergency motion on Monday morning to disqualify The Onion’s winning bid.

First United American Companies argued it should have been declared the winner of the auction — not The Onion. It argued that, given the unclear value of the proceeds waiver in The Onion’s joint bid, First United should have been declared the winning bidder.

However, in a pair of documents filed shortly after, Christopher Murray, the court-appointed trustee of the Jones estate, showed in his analysis that The Onion’s bid won because creditors other than the Connecticut families would ultimately recover more than double what they would under First United’s bid.

The Onion, through its parent company Global Tetrahedron, filed its joint bid alongside families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Jones faces more than $1.5 billion in defamation judgments for his false claims about the victims and parents of that deadly shooting. Although he appealed both judgments, the financial pressure led Jones to file for bankruptcy in late 2022.

Walter Cicack, lawyer for First United, said in the company’s emergency motion that First United submitted a cash bid of $3.5 million dollars. By contrast, Cicack said, The Onion’s bid contained only $1.75 million in cash, alongside a waiver from the Connecticut families setting aside any of their earnings from the auctioned assets.

But Cicack challenged the use of this waiver, arguing it was “conditional and contingent” and “the equivalent of ‘monopoly’ money” and “simply has no value.”

“This is a text book example of collusion,” Cicack wrote, “and demonstrates in [sic] an attempt to rig the bid process so that the Onion could acquire the Assets.”

In a terse but blistering response, Murray, the trustee, argued the emergency motion was simply “a disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open auction process.”

“Having failed in its prior efforts to bully the Trustee and his advisors into accepting its inferior bid, [First United American Companies] now alleges, without evidence, collusion and bad faith in an attempt to mislead the Court and disqualify its only competition in the auction," Murray added.

A few hours later, Murray submitted his proposal for a sale order confirming the results of last week’s auction. In that order, he clarified the process he and financial advisors used to determine that The Onion’s bid was the winner despite less up-front cash.

Murray’s latest order also contradicted Cicack, who had claimed that the waiver’s value was linked to First United’s bid. Instead, Murray said that the value of the waiver depended on two factors: the administrative costs of the auction sale and the share of the money that would go to all creditors other than the Connecticut families.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez, who has overseen the case for more than two years, scheduled a hearing in the case for Nov. 25.