A corporate representative for Infowars testified on Wednesday morning that cryptocurrency donations solicited on-air go directly to Alex Jones personally. Brittany Paz, an attorney who was designated as a corporate representative for Infowars in January, testified in a Connecticut civil defamation trial, the second of three that will determine how much he owes to Sandy Hook families. The lawsuits are over Jones and Infowars repeatedly calling Sandy Hook “a hoax,” though Jones has said he no longer believes that is the case—a change of position that coincided roughly with him getting extremely sued.
Since Jones has already lost the Sandy Hook cases by default, these trials are meant to determine damages, not liability. They’re also providing an ongoing window into the business workings of Infowars and Free Speech Systems, its parent company. (Both entities are controlled by Jones and for all functional purposes, they are the same thing; Free Speech Systems filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July.)
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Paz is speaking as Infowars’ corporate representative in the Connecticut bankruptcy case, although she’s never worked for Infowars and couldn’t answer several basic questions about the company, including how many studios it has. (She testified that she previously worked for Norm Pattis, Jones and Infowars’ lead counsel in this case.) The plaintiffs’ attorneys asked several pointed questions about Infowars’ revenue and traffic today, to try to make the point that Jones and Infowars kept focusing on Sandy Hook over the course of several years because it made them money.
In response to questions from plaintiffs’ attorney Chris Mattei, Paz acknowledged that cryptocurrency donations solicited on-air go “directly to Alex Jones personally,” in Mattei’s words—something that he does not share with his audience.
“He doesn’t tell anybody where it goes or what he does with it,” Paz testified.
Mattei responded, “He tells his audience the donations are going to Free Speech Systems, correct?” (Paz responded that she didn’t know if he has said that or not; he absolutely has, though.)
Jones has made increasingly impassioned pleas on-air for donations, saying they’re needed to keep Infowars on air, and has repeatedly cast the lawsuits against him as a globalist plot to silence him and drive him out of business. Hatewatch, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, reported in May that an anonymous donor gave Jones $8 million in Bitcoin in a little less than a month. That donor still has not been identified.
