Dear listeners,

It’s time for another episode of Serious Trouble!

On this week’s show:

• We answer a listener question about what’s likely to happen to InfoWars, now that Alex Jones and his companies are subject to a $965 million defamation judgment.

• We talk about legal difficulties at Fox News — including one that’s overblown.

• We discuss the prospects of chess prodigy Hans Niemann’s lawsuit, in which he says world chess champion Magnus Carlsen and others defamed him by accusing him of cheating.

• And we congratulate Jacob Wohl on his guilty plea to a big-boy state felony — while keeping our eyes on the federal prize.

Episode links and references

Click here for a transcript of this episode.

On the theme of whether the Sandy Hook plaintiffs may end up owning InfoWars, we talked about other unlikely ownership outcomes from civil court. Here are a few:

• Here’s a story from the New York Times from 1990, when the IRS put the Mustang Ranch brothel up for sale — it has a lot of colorful detail about what was for sale, in addition to the property itself.

• The Church of Scientology owned the Cult Awareness Network, one of its most vocal critics.

Here’s Semafor’s article on the delayed California bar registration of Fox Corp. chief legal officer Viet Dinh. Ken doesn’t think this creates a problem for asserting privilege over legal communications with Dinh — Dinh was a member of the DC bar, which is good enough to create attorney-client privilege — but since Dinh has a dual legal/business role, Fox may not be able to assert privilege over some of his communications anyway, if he wasn’t actually providing legal advice in them.

Here’s the thread from Akiva Cohen we referenced on Niemann’s defamation lawsuit.

This article about some of the anti-cheating measures at a chess tournament taking place this week is interesting. It seems like they should have been doing this all along?