The clash between left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker and his media detractors is moving from the chatroom to the courtroom. One week after Piker filed a $72.5 million defamation suit against conservative commentator and CNN personality Scott Jennings, his attorney, defamation lawyer Daniel Watkins, tells Vanity Fair Piker is “just getting started.”
“There are other people and other entities that will likely receive outreach from my law firm in the coming days,” says Watkins. “They know they have a reckoning coming.”
The Jennings lawsuit, which accuses the former Republican strategist of falsely telling listeners of his Salem Media podcast that Piker advocated for lynchings, comes at the end of a busy, and tumultuous election cycle for Piker, who—after years of online politicking—became a popular surrogate for far-left insurgents, and a popular boogeyman for virtually everyone else. It’s an apparent payback for the mainstream media, whose obsession with villainizing Piker has meant guilt-by-association for everyone Piker champions (and has far outpaced Piker’s actual name-recognition and influence).