The President of the United States, Donald Trump, filed a lawsuit this Monday against the British network BBC in a federal court in Miami, requesting compensation of 10 billion dollars (more than 8.5 billion euros) for two crimes related to the broadcast, shortly before the 2024 elections, of a speech of his in which he seemed to incite violence before a mob of his followers stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The civil complaint, to which ‘The New York Times’ has had access, accuses the BBC of producing a “false, defamatory, misleading, derogatory and malicious representation” of the tenant of the White House in a documentary broadcast on the Panorama program, and of “blatantly” trying with this audiovisual product to “interfere and influence the outcome of the elections to (their) detriment.”
Likewise, the 46-page document points to the British chain for allegedly violating the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act of the state of Florida, requesting compensation of 5,000 million dollars (4,255 million euros) for each crime.
The president’s defense has stated in a statement that the objective of the lawsuit is to hold the “once respected and now discredited” BBC, which so far has not commented on the matter, responsible for what it has described as an irregularity.
“I’m going to sue the BBC for putting words in my mouth,” Trump declared this Monday before the press gathered in the Oval Office. “They literally put words in my mouth. They made me say things that I never said publicly, I guess they used artificial intelligence or something like that,” he added.
The president had previously threatened to sue the network after its president, Samir Shah, acknowledged in early November that edited footage of Trump’s speech broadcast on the aforementioned program wrongly gave “the impression of a call for violence.” Days later, the BBC issued a second apology, although it rejected the compensation requested by the Republican.
