Live data from Hacker News

Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

nytimes.com

611–620 of 1001 posts

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jones repeatedly violated court orders, withheld subpoenaed documents, ignored depositions, and disrupted the trial every chance he got, and so received a default judgement. I don't know where you heard the line about YouTube ad revenue but that's got nothing to do with nothing. Everything that happened was his own fault. He was extended plenty of leeway and he blew every last bit of it. If he thought the amount of m…

[flagged]

It wasn't his trial though, he lost that by default judgement for failing to produce documents including financial records, he can't say he's not guilty because he isn't it would be a lie. We know a lot of those documents exist because Jones's lawyers accidentally sent a copy of his entire phone with records that should have been produced.

You're right is almost never done, not many cases are lost by default because most defendants and their lawyers aren't incompetent enough to get to that point. They had years to comply with discovery or demonstrate that they did not have access to the documents

> testify that you're not guilty during your own trial.

> Not allowed to make any sort of free speech / free press argument

He didn't get to raise those because they're not relevant at a damages hearing. If he'd complied with discovery instead of blocking it every chance he got he would have had the ability to raise those at trial. He was warned, he persisted and was punished for it. We know his lawyers had the documents because they accidentally turned them over later then failed to raise an objection that would have stopped them from being shared and used during the damages hearing.

> Reporting on it

He didn't just report on things he made statements as facts that it was staged, the kids are still alive/were never alive, doxxed Pozner's home address and was one of the first to do so in the days after the shooting. It's not just reporting that got Jones in trouble.

He did it and he did it to himself because the optics of fighting a "show trial" were better for him and his supplement business than the slim chance he could win if he fought the trial legitimately.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the default judgement doesn't go into any specifics about what he failed to produce in discovery. The Jones lawyers argued that the discovery requests were for documents that don't exist, and that's why they were not produced.

> The Jones lawyers argued that the discovery requests were for documents that don't exist, and that's why they were not produced. And then they accidentally sent all of the non-existent documents to the plaintiffs, showing Jones had committed perjury. And then they forgot to claim it as privileged in a timely fashion. And then Jones got confronted with the lie in court. And then they got sanctioned for the fuckup. O…

>And then they accidentally sent all of the non-existent documents to the plaintiffs

That's not what these two linked articles say. The AP articles about this state that the improper conduct was about disclosure of information the plaintiffs had sent the Jones legal team. Nothing to do with discovery that was requested from Jones.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#613
post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, it was the court's job. and they did it. if you disagree with the decision, then you need to come up with specifics of where they got it wrong.

The court gave a default judgement and nothing went to trial, so the court certainly did NOT prove what you're claiming.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#614
All: if you're going to comment here, please review the site guidelines and make sure to stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

There's way too much nasty dross in this thread. No, the topic does not make that ok. As you'll see when you review the guidelines, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#615
post #188

Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd. I'm not being hyperbolic saying people would be less mad at him if he had done the shooting himself. And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories abo…

> And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference? Can you cite any data on that at all? I’m aware of the genre of podcast you’re referring to but I’ve never been aware of it even remotely being the most popula…

it's #3 after comedy and news

https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's out of line with other defamation judgements. This point made me curious so I quickly looked around. Fox News paid a $787.5 million settlement [1] for making false claims about Dominion. Given that this happened as the trial was about to start, it's reasonable to assume that Fox News expected to lose even more if the issue went to trial. And that's for a party that arguably would have followed court orders, so…

All these cited claims seem political and extreme to me. I can't find a non-political example where the judgement this extreme. Depp v Herd defamation was around $10m.

There was a single victim in Depp vs Herd.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#617
post #188

Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd. I'm not being hyperbolic saying people would be less mad at him if he had done the shooting himself. And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories abo…

Popping open Podcast Addict, the top 10 podcasts right now are: 1. No Such Thing As A Fish; 2. My Brother, My Brother And Me; 3. Planet Money; 4. Revolutions; 5. 99% Invisible; 6. Stuff You Should Know; 7. The Adventure Zone; 8. This American Life; 9. Freakinomics Radio; 10. The Rest Is History I had to scroll to #32 to find Casefile which sorta fits your criteria, except it's hosted by a dude and I think he generall…

#3 after comedy and news, ahead of sports.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#618
post #188

Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd. I'm not being hyperbolic saying people would be less mad at him if he had done the shooting himself. And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories abo…

His wealth is primarily the proceeds of slander and fraud. He should not have any of it.

Unfortunately, slander and fraud are really hard to enforce. In a just system he'd have never earned that money in the first place.

Fortunately, his legal defense was comedically incompetent.

So I'll take "all his money goes to his most-harmed victims" as a compromise.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>given several chances to comply with discovery requests The Jones side claims that these discovery requests were for documents that don't exist. The linked judgement provides no detail on what the specific discovery requests were that went unanswered. Do you know what the discovery requests were for specifically?

No, I do not know. But I know that "that document doesn't exist" is a valid response to a discovery request. Silence is not a valid response, even if the document doesn't exist. (If one side falsely claims the document doesn't exist, the other side then can present evidence to the judge that the document does in fact exist, and that the first side is withholding evidence. If you play that game and get caught, various…

The judgement document does not go into any detail therefore we don't know whether the Jones team responded with "these documents don't exist" or not. If that was their position, why wouldn't they have responded to that effect? There would be no motivation to do otherwise.

The rest of your post is speculation.

Post reply on HN