Last week, influential left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker sued MAGA-aligned conservative radio host and CNN contributor Scott Jennings for a whopping $72.5 million in damages. 

The lawsuit centers on a manipulated video stitched together from multiple different clips, a quotation falsely attributed to Piker, and Jennings’s own claims that Piker is “calling for Black voters to be lynched.” The video first appeared in an August 6 social media post by the National Republican Senatorial Committee calling Piker a “campaign surrogate” for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, who leads Republican Mike Rogers in the polls heading into tomorrow’s election. 

In the original live stream, Piker is reacting to a YouTube debate between two political commentators when one of them blames “woke DAs” for harming Black Americans. Laughing, an incredulous Piker mocks the argument as essentially a call to return to the days of lynching, then adds, “My man said, ‘woke DAs,’ dude. What are you saying?” 

According to Piker, the August 6 video spliced together clips from three separate live streams, out of order, and stripped of this context. In the edited version, Piker appears to say, “…go back to a better time when lynchings were happening.” 

Airing the edited video on his show, Jennings went a step further, adding his own onscreen caption: PIKER: “LET’S GO BACK TO A BETTER TIME WHEN LYNCHINGS WERE HAPPENING.” 

Piker never said those words; in fact, they don’t appear even in the manipulated clip. 

As a public figure, Piker has to prove that Jennings made false statements either knowingly or with reckless disregard for the truth. The deliberate alteration of a quotation may be enough to satisfy the actual malice standard, provided the alteration materially changes the meaning of the statement actually made by the speaker. It is hard to imagine how Jennings could argue that a first-person call to bring back lynching is not materially different in meaning from Piker’s sarcastic jab at another commentator’s views. 

Piker’s suit flips a familiar script. Defamation suits have become a favorite weapon of President Trump, who since the 2024 election, has sued The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and The Des Moines Register and its pollster Ann Selzer, with little success. In fact, on Saturday, a federal judge dismissed Trump’s $10 billion suit against the Journal, finding that Trump cannot plead actual malice in connection with the Journal’s reporting on a sexually suggestive 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein bearing Trump’s name, which Trump denies writing. Weeks earlier, an Iowa judge tossed his suit against the Register and Selzer.

At a time when AI makes it easier than ever to put words in someone’s mouth, this case could be an important test of how far defamation law protects public figures from fabricated quotes and doctored clips. 

I, for one, will be watching the full, unedited version. Stay tuned. I promise not to splice it.