The president of the United States, Donald Trump, has filed a defamation lawsuit against the British public broadcaster BBC, demanding compensation of up to 10 billion dollars (8.5 billion euros) for the misleading editing of a speech by the president in January 2021. The network extracted an intervention by the president in which he addressed his followers who, immediately afterwards, stormed the Capitol, the seat of the US Congress. The edition of the speech made it appear that the president, who was resisting to recognize the electoral defeat against Joe Biden two months earlier, he harangued the radical Republicans to assault the seat of American popular sovereignty.
Last month Trump announced that he would sue the British network, although the waters seemed to have calmed down after the BBC apologized for the documentary in which that edition was included, included in the program Panorama and issued at the end of 2024, although it ruled out compensating the president. The case, furthermore,
Finally, Trump filed the lawsuit this morning in a Miami court and the amount he demands as compensation was announced, $5 billion for each of the two crimes of which he accuses the British entity, one for defamation and the other for violating the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices law of the State of Florida. One more milestone in his fight against freedom of expression and against media that are not related to him, both in his country and abroad.
In the montage that aired in the BBC documentary, titled Trump: A Second Chance?, Trump appeared to tell his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight to the death.” There are two excerpts of what he said on January 6, 2021, but in between he encouraged them to march peacefully and that was not included in the montage, which the BBC admitted as an error, since it gave the impression that he was directly calling for violent action that, in fact, later occurred and caused the death of several Congressional police officers.
The BBC’s lawyers, in any case, understood that there was no basis for a defamation claim. The BBC is financed through a fee paid by all viewers in the United Kingdom, so they understand that any payment to Trump would be politically fraudulent. For their part, Trump’s lawyers maintain that the BBC documentary, which was not broadcast in the US, caused him enormous reputational and financial damage.
To win the case, Trump’s legal team must prove not only that the editing of the documentary was false and defamatory, but that the management of the British entity knowingly misinformed its viewers and acted negligently.
Trump has sued and achieved million-dollar compensation agreements against other American news networks, including two of the big ones, CBS and ABC, after his return to the US presidency in January 2025. He has also filed lawsuits against newspapers such as The New York Times o The Wall Street Journal.
