Streamer Hasan Piker Sues Scott Jennings for $72.5m Over Lynching Remarks

Hasan Piker, a prominent socialist commentator and online influencer, has filed a defamation lawsuit seeking $72.5m from conservative commentator Scott Jennings. Piker says Jennings portrayed him as a violent racist who supported the lynching of Black people.

The complaint was filed on Tuesday in the US district court for the District of Columbia. It argues that Jennings misrepresented Piker's words in a podcast episode and in a later social media post in August.

According to the filing, Jennings falsely told listeners that Piker had a "plan of returning our country to lynchings." He then told followers on social media that Piker "says the USA should resume lynchings against black people."

Piker is a California-based streamer who is popular on Twitch. Jennings is a political commentator for CNN and hosts his own independent podcast, the Scott Jennings Show. Piker contends that Jennings deliberately twisted his remarks to make them look like his sincere views.

The lawsuit says Piker was in fact "plainly ridiculing" the extreme position of a commentator who had appeared on an earlier Twitch broadcast. That commentator had argued that "woke" district attorneys were to blame for policies said to harm Black Americans. The episode took place in August 2024, the filing says, and centers on a 42-second video that was "cropped, shortened, and rearranged." It first spread on conservative social media accounts and stitched together Piker's comments on a range of subjects.

One clip in the video showed what the complaint describes as Piker's "sarcastic mocking" of one of two Black commentators. The lawsuit says it was edited to strip out key context. On his show, Piker had summarized the commentator's stance, according to the court document: "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 lawsuit says the "manipulated" version that Jennings played on his podcast on 11 August left out the words "he said" and other cues showing Piker's ridicule. Jennings also added his own caption, presented as a direct quote from Piker: "Let's go back to a better time when lynchings were happening." The filing states that Piker never said those words and that neither the original broadcast nor the edited video contains them. It accuses Jennings of turning a sarcastic question directed at someone else into a false first-person statement of belief.

The complaint adds that Jennings was publicly known at the time to be in the running to become Donald Trump's new White House press secretary. It says this gave him "an additional reason to attack a prominent left-wing commentator whom the President himself had criticized."

Piker is asking for a jury trial. He seeks $27.5m in compensatory damages and a further $45m in punitive damages.

Jennings has not commented publicly on the lawsuit. In an 11 August post on X linking to the video, he referred to Piker's support for Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for a US Senate seat in Michigan. He wrote that El-Sayed's "best pal and campaign partner says the USA should resume lynchings against black people." The Guardian has contacted Jennings for comment.