The conflict between Disney’s ABC and Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission has been intensifying for months, leading to questions about whether the network might take the matter to court.

Those questions now have an answer: On Tuesday morning, ABC filed a case in federal court in Washington, D.C., accusing the FCC of trying to interfere with the network’s First Amendment rights. From the court filing:

Again and again, the Administration has attacked ABC’s speech — the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints its network programs air. Over time, those attacks have escalated into express demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast licenses because of its speech.

“Government censorship,” the suit added, “is deeply un-American.”

The commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the litigation.

The path leading to this point is long and circuitous. After Donald Trump targeted ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, for example, Brendan Carr, the president’s FCC chairman, appeared on a far-right podcast last September and discussed his agency’s role in granting broadcast licenses. Referring specifically to a Kimmel monologue that Republicans didn’t like, Carr said, “When we see stuff like this — look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

Roughly seven months later, the public got a better sense of what “the hard way” looks like. In April, the FCC launched a highly unusual early review of ABC’s broadcast station licenses. Although the commission claimed the review was related to the network’s efforts to hire a diverse workforce (which the Republican administration apparently finds offensive), the developments came immediately after the White House condemned a joke Kimmel told about the age difference between the president and the first lady.

In an online statement, Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, wrote, “This is unprecedented, unlawful, and going nowhere. This political stunt won’t stick.”

ABC nevertheless felt compelled to follow through on the review process, albeit grudgingly, alongside accusations that the FCC was engaged in a campaign of “unconstitutional retaliation and coercion.” The same filing made the inescapable observation that the timing of the FCC’s demand “makes the retaliatory purpose unmistakable.”

As The New York Times reported in the spring, ABC also noted “that the F.C.C. had not called for an early station renewal in more than 50 years and had never done so for an entire group of network-owned stations at once.”

What’s more, it’s worth noting for context that Carr’s FCC also recently launched an investigation into “The View,” a popular ABC talk show, sparking related accusations of government censorship.

Time will tell what becomes of the litigation, but one of the key lessons of the Republican’s second term is that news organizations that fight back against the administration’s abuses have had far more success than those that have tried to appease the White House. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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