The Onion’s new bid to take control of Alex Jones’ InfoWars website with the backing of Sandy Hook families would see the satirical newspaper pay a monthly fee to license the InfoWars’ brand, according to terms of the deal laid out in court papers.
The proposal was laid out in a court filing in Travis County, Texas. InfoWars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, was placed under a court-appointed receiver in October.
In 2022, families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings were awarded $1.4 billion from Jones for defamation in separate verdicts in Texas and Connecticut. Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy that same year.
Jones at one point had claimed the shootings, which left 20 children and six adults dead, was a hoax and that the families were “crisis actors.”
The Onion’s latest proposal to take over InfoWars would grant it exclusive license to Free Speech Systems’ trademarks, including InfoWars, for $81,000 per month. The deal would include Free Speech Systems’ “domain names, and associated intellectual property rights, including copyrights in website content, for media, entertainment, news, and related businesses.”
The initial term of the licensing deal laid out in the court filing is for 6 months, with the option to renew for another six months if the receiver and The Onion agree to it.
“This is about accountability, and what comes next,” the Onion’s CEO, Ben Collins, said in a statement provided by a spokesperson Tuesday. “We’re taking something that caused real harm and turning it into something that, at minimum, is much funnier, and ideally, more useful.”
The Connecticut and Texas Sandy Hook families support the plan, the filing in Texas court noted.
The Onion said in a news release that it plans to turn the InfoWars site into a “new digital platform and comedy network,” with comedian Tim Heidecker serving as creative director. Heidecker told the New York Times he initially planned to parody Jones, but that he eventually wants to turn it into a destination for independent and experimental comedy.
In a video posted to Instagram, Heidecker adopted an impression of Jones’ signature fast-paced throaty growl.
“It’s looking very likely that Global Tetrahedron will seize control of InfoWars in the coming days,” Heidecker said, referring to The Onion’s parent company.
The Onion also posted a satirical message from Bryce Tetraeder, the fake CEO of Global Tetrahedron, on its website earlier this week.
“With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us,” the statement said. “It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website.”
Jones, who responded to the Onion’s plans in two videos posted on X, seized on the notion that The Onion planned to turn his website into a parody of itself, calling it “identity theft.”
“They say ‘we’re gonna lie like Alex Jones does for money’,” Jones said in a video posted Monday. “So they’re gonna put out this information and say I’m doing it to confuse the brand and try to ruin what we’ve done.”
But Jones appeared to acknowledge that he could lose control of the site, telling viewers that if they saw a rainbow version of the InfoWars logo with an onion in it, “that’s not me, folks.”
The Onion previously sought to purchase InfoWars at auction in November 2024. It was named the winning bidder, but the sale was blocked by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez, who took issue with the auction process.
This article originally published at The Onion plans to turn Alex Jones’ InfoWars into a comedy network with Sandy Hook families’ backing.
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