Hasan Piker has filed a defamation lawsuit against political commentator Scott Jennings, accusing him of falsely claiming that Piker supported violence against Black voters through a misleadingly edited video clip.
“Mr. Jennings did not merely mischaracterize something Mr. 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,” the lawsuit read.
Piker is seeking at least $27.5 million in compensatory damages and $45 million in punitive damages, according to Bloomberg Law.
The lawsuit, filed after an August 11 podcast episode, alleged that Jennings falsely told a national audience that Piker was “calling for Black voters to be lynched” and presented manipulated footage from one of Piker’s livestreams as evidence. “If Democratic campaigns are adopting the Piker plan of returning our country to lynchings, that just might happen,” Jennings said. The original livestream showed Piker mocking a conservative Black commentator who argued that policies supported by “woke DAs” were harming Black Americans, according to the lawsuit. Piker’s attorneys said he was using sarcasm to imitate that commentator’s argument and was not expressing support for historical racial violence. Piker said.
The complaint states that Piker was ridiculing the idea that society was better before the civil rights movement.
