By Oyintari Ben
According to a lawsuit filed on Monday, former US President Donald Trump is suing CNN for defamation and seeking $475 million in punitive damages in addition to compensatory damages exceeding $75,000.
He asserts that CNN’s actions “are intended to interfere with [his] political career” and that the cable news juggernaut has damaged his reputation with “false, libellous, and inflammatory mischaracterizations of him.”
In particular, Trump claims that he is entitled to hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages since CNN referred to his “stated worries about the integrity of the election process for the 2020 presidential election” as the “Big Lie.” “The “Big Lie,” according to Trump’s attorneys, “is an obvious reference to a strategy used by Adolf Hitler and described in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
Trump’s lawyers cited the adage used by Hitler to incite hatred toward Jews and legitimize their extermination, saying, “If you tell a falsehood large enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
According to the lawsuit, CNN “has only increased its campaign of intimidation against the [Trump] in recent months since CNN thinks [he] will run for president in 2024.”
Despite numerous challenges and recounts that concluded the election was not rigged, the former president has been alleging since November 2020 that it was. Two years later, he continues to assert that he won the 2020 election despite being under investigation by Congress and the administration for attempting to invalidate the election results.
CNN did not respond.
Raaj Singhal, a judge in Florida’s Southern District appointed by Trump, has been assigned the case.
