Scott Jennings once had blunt legal advice for a network targeted by a leftist streamer, and it’s now aging poorly for him.
When Hasan Piker unloaded on Fox News earlier this year, the pro-Trump pundit told the network it was “time to sue,” Status reported Friday. Now Jennings is the one facing a defamation suit, and one legal expert told the outlet it will most likely end in a settlement.
Piker filed the suit this week in federal court in Washington, D.C., accusing Jennings of airing a manipulated clip on his radio show and then posting it to X with a claim that Piker had encouraged the lynching of Black Americans.
Snopes reporter Jordan Liles traced the 41-second clip, which the National Republican Senatorial Committee first shared online, to three separate Piker streams that had been spliced together out of order, according to Status. Piker’s comments about lynching were sarcastic and aimed at mocking a different right-wing commentator.
Howard Wasserman, a Florida International University law professor, told Status the suit “might have some legs.” He said passing off a doctored video as proof of what someone said amounts to a factual claim rather than opinion, and that it’s “pretty hard to do that not intentionally.”
He expects Jennings to argue the attack was just heated political rhetoric, calling the distinction “a fine line.”
Harvard Law School professor Rebecca Tushnet told Status the complaint “certainly reads like a potentially valid defamation claim” and called it “not obvious junk,” though she noted courts have long accepted that online speech is packed with exaggeration. Status also noted that Jennings’ choice to leave the post up and ignore Piker’s retraction demands could make it harder for him to claim he didn’t act with actual malice.
Jennings said after the 2024 election that he had no problem with Trump suing news organizations.
He has not publicly addressed Piker’s suit and did not respond to Status’ requests for comment, but he has kept hosting his Salem Media radio show and appearing on CNN.
That hasn’t sat well with everyone. A former CNN executive told Status that Jennings had veered into “deceitful dirty political tricks” and that the network shouldn’t be paying him, arguing it undermines the network’s credibility.
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