Trump sues BBC for $5 billion over alleged misleading January 6 edit

The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Miami, centres on how his remarks ahead of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol were presented

US President Donald Trump on Monday (local time) filed a $5 billion defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), alleging the broadcaster used a misleading edit in a documentary aired last year that wrongly suggested he explicitly urged violence, Bloomberg reported.

 

Speaking at the White House, Trump said: “I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth. Literally, they put words in my mouth. They had me saying things that I never said coming out.”

 

The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Miami, centres on how Trump’s remarks ahead of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol were presented. Trump has argued that the edit created a false impression of his role in the events.

 

 

According to the report, Trump had warned of legal action after BBC chairman Samir Shah acknowledged on November 10 that an edited video of Trump’s speech, aired on the Panorama programme in 2024, wrongly gave “the impression of a direct call for violent action”.

 

Days after the acknowledgement, the BBC issued a second apology but rejected Trump’s demand for compensation. The documentary, according to the report, made it appear that Trump told supporters to “walk down to the Capitol” and “fight like hell” before the riot, and asked them to “cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women”. Trump’s “fight like hell” remark, however, was taken from a different part of the speech.

Trump’s lawsuit

 

The lawsuit alleges that the BBC edit was a “brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment”.

 

According to his lawyer, “This instance of doctoring — in the form of distortion of meaning and splicing of entirely unrelated word sequences — is part of the BBC’s longstanding pattern of manipulating President Trump’s speeches and presenting content in a misleading manner in order to defame him, including fabricating calls for violence that he never made.”

BBC response and compensation dispute

 

While the BBC met some of Trump’s demands in November by issuing an apology and retracting the episode titled Trump: A Second Chance, which aired a week before the 2024 presidential election, Trump deemed the response inadequate. He subsequently raised his compensation demand from $1 million to $5 million.

Trump’s actions against media outlets

 

According to the report, Trump has repeatedly resorted to litigation against media organisations whose coverage he considers unfair or biased. He has also used, or threatened to use, legal and regulatory pressure, prompting some major US outlets to make concessions.

 

CBS agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit in which Trump accused the network of election interference related to how its programme 60 Minutes edited a clip from an interview with then presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump claimed the edit made Harris appear more coherent than she was.

 

ABC also agreed to a settlement of a similar size after anchor George Stephanopoulos said on air that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in E Jean Carroll’s civil case. A jury, however, found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape, and did not uphold Carroll’s rape claim.

 

Trump also has defamation suits seeking multi-billion-dollar damages pending in Florida against The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, both of which deny wrongdoing. The Times lawsuit cites what Trump describes as a sustained pattern of coverage that damaged his brand and reputation. The Journal case stems from a report alleging Trump sent a crude birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.

 

The dispute with the BBC differs in key ways from Trump’s earlier legal battles with US media. The Panorama documentary was not broadcast in the United States and was geo-blocked on the BBC’s streaming service.

 

In addition, Trump would need to meet the “actual malice” standard applicable to public figures under US defamation law — a demanding threshold established by the US Supreme Court in 1964 to safeguard freedom of speech.