Hasan Piker hits CNN's Scott Jennings with $72 million defamation suit

As summarized in TheWrap, Jennings’ posted Piker’s clip without the context that he was portraying a fictional conservative Black commentator making statements such as, “I want to go back to lynching,” thus presenting them as Piker’s own opinions. In the filing, Piker’s reps write, “Mr. Jennings did not merely mischaracterize something Mr. Piker said. He took a false, fabricated, and manipulated video of Mr. Piker, added a made-up quotation that Mr. Piker never uttered, and then made accusations that went beyond even what the manipulated footage purported to show,” adding, “Mr. Jennings presented those accusations as fact, telling his viewers to ‘[l]isten for yourself’ about Mr. Piker, knowing that he was playing a falsified video of Mr. Piker for those viewers, and completely disregarding the truth of Mr. Piker’s actual words.”

The video, intended to link the controversial Piker to surging Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Jennings’ introduction, went up on the CNN talking head’s Twitter/X account on August 12. Piker is seeking $27.5 million in compensatory damages and $45 million in punitive damages. Piker has retained the law firm of Meier Watkins Phillips Pusch for his suit, which was founded by attorneys who’d previously represented Dominion Voting Systems in its whopping $787.5 million settlement against Fox News for lying about election fraud, which no doubt has the eternally smug Jennings a little anxious.