According to a lawsuit filed on Monday, former 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 meant to interfere with [his] political future” and that the cable news juggernaut has damaged his image with “false, libelous, and inflammatory mischaracterizations of him.”
Trump specifically claims that CNN’s use of the phrase the “Big Lie” to represent his “stated worries about the integrity of the voting process for the 2020 presidential election” qualifies him for hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages.
According to Trump’s attorneys, the “Big Lie” is an obvious allusion to a strategy used by Adolf Hitler and mentioned in his “Mein Kampf.”
“If you tell a large enough lie and repeat it enough times, ultimately people will believe it,” According to Trump’s attorneys, Hitler used it to incite hate against Jews and to support the extermination of those people.
According to the complaint, CNN “has only increased its campaign of intimidation against the [Trump] in recent months since CNN thinks [he] may run for president in 2024.”
Despite several 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 the fact that he is under investigation by Congress and the administration for attempting to invalidate the election results.
A request for comment from CNN has not yet received a response.
Judge Raaj Singhal, who was chosen by Trump and is based in the Southern District of Florida, has been given the case.