President Donald Trump has taken legal action against the BBC, filing a lawsuit on Monday that seeks $10 billion in damages and accuses the British broadcaster of defamation and unfair business practices.
The 33-page complaint, lodged in a Florida court, alleges that the BBC aired a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump.” The filing characterizes the broadcast as “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
This comes after a BBC documentary that included edited footage of Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech. According to the lawsuit, the broadcaster “splic[ed] together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021” and did so to “intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said.”
Trump is seeking $5 billion in damages for defamation and another $5 billion for alleged deceptive and unfair trade practices.
The BBC said it would contest the claims.
“We are not going to make further comment on ongoing legal proceedings,” the broadcaster said in a statement.
Last month, the publicly funded network issued an apology to Trump over the editing of the January 6 speech. However, it rejected accusations that the edit amounted to defamation, even as Trump signaled his intent to pursue legal action. BBC chairman Samir Shah previously described the edit as an “error of judgment,” a controversy that led to the resignations of the corporation’s director-general and its head of news.
The speech in question was delivered shortly before some of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, where Congress was preparing to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, an outcome Trump falsely claimed was stolen from him.
The disputed video appeared in an hour-long documentary titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” which the BBC aired days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The program combined three excerpts from two different sections of Trump’s 2021 speech, delivered nearly an hour apart, and presented them as a single continuous quote in which Trump appeared to urge supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.” The edit omitted a portion of the speech in which Trump called for supporters to protest peacefully.
Earlier on Monday, Trump said he was suing the BBC “for putting words in my mouth.”
“They actually put terrible words in my mouth having to do with Jan. 6 that I didn’t say, and they’re beautiful words, that I said, right?” Trump said during an unscheduled remark in the Oval Office. “They’re beautiful words, talking about patriotism and all of the good things that I said. They didn’t say that, but they put terrible words.”
While the lawsuit was filed in Florida, the window to pursue legal action in British courts closed more than a year ago. Legal analysts have also pointed to possible hurdles in U.S. courts, noting that the documentary was not broadcast domestically, AP reported.
The complaint argues that U.S. audiences can still access BBC content, including the “Panorama” series that aired the documentary, through the BritBox subscription streaming service or by using a virtual private network.
Founded more than a century ago, the BBC operates as a national institution funded by an annual license fee of 174.50 pounds, or about $230, paid by households that watch live television or BBC programming. Its charter requires strict impartiality, a mandate that often places the broadcaster under intense scrutiny from across the political spectrum.
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