I guess this could be in P & E, but it seems better suited for this forum. Here is the complaint, and like most complaints it seems pretty persuasive before you read the response. He is represented by the same team of lawyers who successfully won Dominion Voting Systems a $750 million judgment against Fox News.
For background, Piker is a “progressive podcaster”, while Jennings is a MAGA loudmouth employed by CNN. Both men are assholes.
The claim is that Jennings defamed Piker by claiming that he advocated the lynching of black people. Which seems weird in and of itself…aren’t the Evil Wokesters supposed to want to lynch white people? Jennings seems to be getting off message here.
Jennings played a recording on his show of Piker advocating lynching, allegedly having edited out context which made clear he was satirizing someone else’s view, not expressing his own. They also allegedly edited out the audience’s laughter and supplied a caption which quoted Piker as saying something not even their edited tape had him actually saying.
So if all those allegations are true, the case seems pretty strong. OTOH, I question whether Hasan Piker’s “good name” is actually worth anywhere close to $72 million.
Is it only possible to sue for supposed value lost, or can one add in punitive damages? That is, egregiously misquoting a public figure in that (alleged) way seems bad in and of itself, without regard to whether it was successful in crashing the commercial value of said public figure.
IANAL but I have to imagine that nobody who actually likes Hasan Piker is going to believe this for a second. His audience is not going to shrink because of this. So it might be hard to argue he has been substantially damaged. OTOH it’s clearly not in the public interest for people to be able to just blatantly lie about others. Apparently about one-third of the demand is for punitive damages and the other half for compensatory damages, so I guess he could be awarded one without the other.
Tucker Carlson tried the “who would believe the stupid shit I say” defense and it didn’t work for him either. It might have been against the same lawyers too.
I’m conflicted over the fact that, while Hasan Piker is clearly in the right here, he’s also a total dickhead who I never want to see win anything. The court should award him a dollar or something.
Piker is one of a long list of people I had never heard of until the Right decided to make him their latest version of Emmanuel Goldstein. I have no idea whether he’s a dickhead or not, but I’m pretty sure he’s not anywhere near worth the attention the Right have brought upon him. And that’s not even getting into the thirst trap pictures the GOP put up at the midterm convention.
That said, I’m all for suing the hell out of the more egregious bullshitters. I’d be surprised if he’s awarded anything remotely like $72m but he could still win enough money to hurt Jennings.
Hasan Piker’s getting back into the news is not good news for Abdul El-Sayed, who probably wishes Piker would just STFU, at least until after the election.
I don’t know much about Piker, but I do know twitch. There are two ways to get that popular on twitch: either be god’s gift to video games or be a raging asshole.
Piker isn’t woke. He’s the flavor of Leftist that despises identity politics as a distraction from class warfare. For example:
Chatter: Like it or not, Black people care about the border man.
Hasan responding: Shut the fuck up. ‘Black people care about the border.’ I don’t give a fuck what Black people care about—the Democratic Party literally is going to fucking lose… Oh, ‘Black people care about this, Black people care about that.’ Like, shut the fuck up, that’s not how politics works. I hate that fucking idiotic shield.
Another example; after watching a video of a Vietnamese lady who apparently supported Trump, he ranted:
Fuck you, dude. I mean, seriously. Fuck you old lady. Shut the fuck up you stupid fuckinh idiotic old lady with your stupid fucking gamer headset. Who has fuckeded you harder, America or fucking Ho Chi Minh? Suck my dick old lady. Goddamn dude. Fuck this refugee. Fuck this South Vietnamese motherfucker, whatever, like Christian supremacist psychotic fucking refugee living in America now and able to talk that shit. Why don’t you go back and live in fucking South Vietnam in the same conditions if that’s your perspective?
I looked up the original Scott Jennings video - found it here -
The first part of the video is actually from the rant I quoted above, and yeah, the lynching bit is clearly from a totally separate clip.
He’s being sarcastic when he says that we should go back to lynchings and that he’s racist. He’s not being sarcastic when he says that he doesn’t give a shit about what black people think when it comes to politics. If Jennings was not nearly as stupid as Piker himself, he could have made a perfectly damning video about how dismissive Hasan is of Black concerns without resorting to outright lying about lynching.
So he’ll probably lose the lawsuit, Hasan won’t get a fraction of what he’s asking for, and some juicy shit will come out in discovery. Win-win as far as I’m concerned.
And who knows, maybe Hasan will get sued for some of his own defamatory statements, of which there are thousands.
But I will say: I’ve seen him make appearances on the BBC, MS Now, NPR etc, and I think often the presenters are surprised; Hasan just calmly explains his positions, which are popular and defensible positions to take, and the “crazy radical” that they had anticipated turns out to have been propaganda.
Regardless of whether you agree with him – and I am guessing that since he’s very critical of Israel’s genocide, that you don’t – the answer to your rhetorical question is trivially yes.
In fact Abdul asked him to please stop talking about him, and Hasan responded by going on stream and reassuring his views that Abdul still likes him, he’s only pretending to distance himself to pacify Fox News. Which, you know, is exactly what you want to do to help a candidate you support: go on stream and tell everyone that he’s lying.
If Piker was a serious political actor who cared about supporting candidates he was aligned with, he’d make himself scarce until after the election. But he’s a slimy political opportunist, so he’s putting himself in the news a week before the midterms.