Former United States President, Donald Trump, has sued the
Cable News Network on Monday, accusing the television news network of
defamation and seeking $475 million in punitive damages.
Trump, in the lawsuit filed in a US District Court in
Florida, accused the CNN of waging a campaign of “libel and slander” against
him because it “fears” he will run for president again in 2024.
“(The) CNN has sought to use its massive influence –
purportedly as a ‘trusted’ news source – to defame the plaintiff in the minds of
its viewers and readers for the purpose of defeating him politically,” Trump’s
lawyers said in the 29-page complaint.
In a follow-up statement laced with outrage, Trump said on
Monday that “in the coming weeks and months, we will also be filing lawsuits
against a large number of other Fake News Media Companies for their lies,
defamation, and wrongdoing,” notably regarding coverage of the 2020 election.
The 76-year-old Republican also said his team “may bring
appropriate action against” the congressional committee currently investigating
the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters, saying the
panel refused to probe “the massive Presidential Election Fraud” which he
insists occurred.
Trump, who requested a jury trial, had a caustic
relationship with the CNN and other major news outlets like The New York Times
during his term, branding them “fake news” and repeatedly raging against them
on social media.
The former president, who has hinted repeatedly at another
White House run, accused the CNN in the lawsuit of involvement in a “concerted
effort to tilt the political balance to the Left.”
He said the CNN has tried to “taint” him with a “series of
ever-more scandalous, false, and defamatory labels of ‘racist,’ ‘Russian
lackey,’ ‘insurrectionist,’ and ultimately ‘Hitler.'”
In a July statement, Trump had threatened to sue the CNN if
the network refused to retract allegedly defamatory statements made about him.
The lawsuit contained excerpts from CNN’s response to Trump
in which it stood by its reporting and declined to make any retractions.
In Monday’s filing, Trump took particular issue with the CNN
describing his claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Democrat Joe Biden
as the “Big Lie.”
“The ‘Big Lie’ is a direct reference to a tactic employed by
Adolf Hitler and appearing in Hitler’s Mein Kampf,” the complaint said. “The
phrase is not taken lightly and is not bandied about blithely.”
The repeated use of the ‘Big Lie,’ it added, is a
“deliberate effort by CNN to propagate to its audience an association between
the plaintiff and one of the most repugnant figures in modern history.”
It said the term the ‘Big Lie’ has been used in reference to
Trump more than 7,700 times on the CNN since January 2021.
Trump said he filed the suit to “vindicate his reputation as
a dedicated public servant and to establish CNN’s liability for the harm it has
caused to his reputation by the false, defamatory, and inflammatory
mischaracterizations of him.”
AFP
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