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.”