Photo courtesy Washington City Paper.

Last night, the threat turned into a reality: Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder is actually suing the parent company of the Washington City Paper because he didn’t like something that they printed about him. Who needs the truth when you’ve got lawyers, right?

The full text of the lawsuit can be found here, or you can read it after the jump. The basics? Snyder, named as the plaintiff in the complaint, accuses the City Paper of “employ[ing] lies, half-truths, innuendo and anti-Semetic imagery to smear, malign, defame, and slander a prominent member of the community in order to generate reader interest and maintain its circulation.” Yup, you read that correctly, anti-Semitism. Nothing says “quick PR fix” like making those kind of allegations!

To their credit, City Paper is not backing down from Snyder’s bullying. Managing editor Mike Madden, who is Jewish, did a nice job of summarily shooting down Snyder’s claims of anti-Semitism. Snyder’s PR team reportedly asked a dean from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles to claim that the illustration accompanying the piece — which featured a photo of Snyder with horns and a mustache drawn on it — was “associated with virulent anti-Semitism going back to the Middle Ages, deployed by the genocidal Nazi regime, by Soviet propagandists and even in 2011 by those who still seek to demonize Jews.” Madden retorted: “The image of Snyder doesn’t look like an “anti-Semitic caricature”—it looks like a devil.”