New Delhi: US President Donald Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC, Britain’s public-service broadcaster, over edited clips of his speech in a documentary that made it appear he directed his supporters to storm the US Capitol in January 2021.
The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Florida, has sought $10 billion for alleged defamation of the US President and violation of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
Here is a timeline of the Trump vs BBC feud.
It all started a week before the US election in November 2024, when the BBC released an episode titled ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’ as part of the Panorama series on contemporary political events. The episode portrayed Trump as encouraging the Capitol riots of 6 January 2021, after his electoral defeat in 2020.
The BBC had edited Trump’s hour-long speech and spliced two sequences that originally occurred after a long gap in the actual speech.
The edit became a bone of contention when The Telegraph UK published an expose on 5 November this year, stating how the BBC “doctored” Trump’s speech, making it seem like the address was meant to incite sentiments of rioting.
A clip from the episode reportedly shows Trump saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
However, transcripts of Trump’s speech revealed that the phrase “We fight like hell” was made in a different context 50 minutes later and was unrelated to his remark about marching towards the Capitol, media reports said.
After The Telegraph‘s story, BBC director general Tim Davie and news head Deborah Turness resigned, while chairman Samir Shah apologised for the edit, calling it an “error of judgement”.
Following the exit of BBC’s top brass, Trump posted on Truth Social. “The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught “doctoring” my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th,” Trump wrote. The Republican president also added that the “dishonest people” of BBC “tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election”.
According to the BBC, Trump’s lawyers wrote to the media house in November, demanding an immediate retraction of the documentary, a formal apology, and compensation, setting a response deadline of 14 November.
The letter also warned that failure to comply could trigger legal action. Ahead of the deadline, the BBC apologised to Trump and said that the programme would not be rebroadcast in its current form on any BBC platform, but it refused to pay compensation.
Trump sues, BBC responds
On 15 December, Trump’s legal team sued the corporation, claiming that the BBC deliberately defamed the US president by maliciously editing his speech, and breached Florida trade practices law.
The suit alleged that the edit was a “brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the BBC a “100% fake news” outlet that is “purposefully dishonest”.
The BBC has decided to fight the lawsuit, arguing innocence on multiple grounds. The outlet neither held the rights to, nor distributed, the Panorama episode in the US, saying the programmer was restricted geographically to UK viewers on iPlayer. Furthermore, it said that Trump suffered no harm as he was re-elected. The corporation also argued that the clip was edited solely to shorten a lengthy speech and not to mislead or act with “malice”.
Trump’s crusade against media houses is not a novelty. Earlier in October, Trump had filed and then refiled a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times in a court in Florida over articles covering him and his work on the 2004 TV show, The Apprentice.
In March 2024, Trump also sued ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos for defamation over on-air remarks “wrongly” stating that he was “liable for rape”. The case was settled in Trump’s favour, with ABC agreeing to pay $15 million and issuing an editor’s note expressing regret for the statement.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)