The prominent socialist political commentator and influencer Hasan Piker is suing his conservative counterpart Scott Jennings for $72.5m over comments on a podcast that he said portrayed him as “a violent racist” who advocated the lynching of Black people.
Piker’s defamation lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in US district court for the District of Columbia, states that Jennings misrepresented his comments in a podcast and subsequent social media post in August.
“He falsely told his listeners that Mr Piker had a ‘plan of returning our country to lynchings’. And then he falsely told his social media followers that Mr Piker ‘says the USA should resume lynchings against black people’,” the document said.
Piker, a California-based popular streamer on the Twitch platform, said Jennings, a political commentator for CNN who hosts his own independent podcast, the Scott Jennings Show, deliberately twisted the remarks to make it appear they were his real opinions.
In truth, the lawsuit said, Piker “was plainly ridiculing” the extremist position of a commentator on an earlier Twitch broadcast who said “woke” district attorneys deserved blame for policies supposedly harming Black Americans.
The episode played out in August 2024, the lawsuit said, and centered on a “cropped, shortened, and rearranged” 42-second video that originally circulated on conservative social media accounts consisting of a mash-up of Piker’s comments on various subjects.
It included a clip of what the lawsuit said was a “sarcastic mocking” by Piker during his own broadcast of the position of one of the two Black commentators, but which it said was edited to remove crucial context and make it appear they were his own opinions.
According to the lawsuit, Piker, on his show, summarized what the commentator had said. “He said, ‘We need more Klansmen, okay? Can we go back to a better time when lynchings were happening? This is what I like as a Black man,’” the court document said.
But the “manipulated” video, which Jennings played on his podcast on 11 August, omitted the words “he said”, and other contextual clues, such as Piker’s clear ridicule of the commentator’s position, it said.
Jennings, the filing said, “added his own caption to the video, presented as a direct quotation from Mr Piker: ‘Let’s go back to a better time when lynchings were happening’.
“Mr Piker never said those words. The original broadcast does not contain that statement. Neither does the manipulated video that Mr Jennings chose to air.
“Mr Jennings converted a sarcastic question, expressly attributed to and directed toward someone else, into a patently false first-person statement of Mr Piker’s own supposed beliefs, and then relayed that false statement to his viewers.”
The lawsuit also said that Jennings was publicly known to be in the running to become Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary at the time, providing “an additional reason to attack a prominent left-wing commentator whom the President himself had criticized”.
Piker is demanding a jury trial, and seeking $27.5m in compensatory damages, and another $45m in punitive damages.
Jennings has not commented publicly on the lawsuit. In an 11 August post on X with a link to the video online on Wednesday, Jennings wrote, referring to Piker’s support for Michigan’s Democratic candidate for a US Senate seat:
“Abdul El-Sayed’s best pal and campaign partner says the USA should resume lynchings against black people.
“Listen for yourself and understand what the socialists have in store for the black community.”
The Guardian has contacted Jennings for comment.
