RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan has said that a profile of her by British state broadcaster the BBC merits a defamation lawsuit in Russian court.
The BBC had one of their Ukrainian employees put together a ‘Who is Margarita Simonyan?’ feature on Thursday, after the US accused RT of “meddling” in American elections.
“Simonyan is not just at the head of Russia’s external propaganda operation – she is also heavily involved in internal messaging and regularly appears on Russian political TV talk shows,” Katerina Khinkulova wrote.
“Her public views are now indistinguishable from Kremlin policy,” Khinkulova added, claiming that Simonyan “has been described as the Kremlin’s top propagandist and ideologue, almost more Putinist than the Russian president himself,” without saying by whom.
Commenting on her Telegram channel, Simonyan called Khinkulova’s article “British propaganda in all its glory and originality.”
“Of course, I never said anything like this,” Simonyan added, referring to some of the quotes attributed to her in the article. “But I think I’ll sue the BBC. They have a bureau in Moscow, let them eat a little dust.”
That last phrase is a reference to a well-known remark by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who used it to warn Russian businessmen not to trust banks and governments in the West.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed on Wednesday that RT has acted as an agent of the Kremlin to “undermine our democratic process,” as well as spreading anti-Ukraine content online.
According to Washington, RT spent millions of dollars to produce content for American audiences via a media company in Tennessee run by several conservative commentators. The US authorities acknowledged that the content did not seem politically charged, but claimed it somehow advanced what they claimed to be Russian government interests.
Simonyan has laughed off the allegations about RT and herself, saying the US establishment would be reduced to “scaring penguins” if they didn’t have RT as a bogeyman.
“Stop feeding my vanity with your fast food, bourgeois comrades,” she wrote on Telegram on Friday. “It will get as fat as a hog, and I’ll have to put it on a diet!”