Bonnie Cash / EPA
US President Donald Trump.
“They made me say things I never said. It seems like they used AI or something.” However, its own €9.2 billion lawsuit against the British broadcaster makes no mention of any of this.
US President Donald Trump presented a legal action against the BBCclaiming 10 billion dollars (about 9.2 billion euros) for alleged defamation related to an episode of Panorama, broadcast in the week before the 2024 presidential elections.
According to the complaint, the documentary created a “false, defamatory, misleading, derogatory, inflammatory and malicious representation” of Trump by editing his January 6, 2021 speech, given before the .
The lawsuit claims that the BBC edited excerpts from the speech to imply that the president had explicitly incited, in his first term, supporters to march to the Capitol, a point that, at the time, fueled a national debate about whether his words constituted encouragement of violence.
The action specifies that the documentary will have presented as a continuous sequence the phrase “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell…” (“We’re going to walk to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we’ll fight. We’ll fight like there’s no tomorrow…”), arguing that Trump “never uttered this sequence of words” as it was shown. It also claims that the expression “and we will fight” was said 55 minutes after “I will be there with you”, but that the edition combined the excerpts to create a message calling for action.
“Words in my mouth, literally”
Despite the process pointing to manipulation through editing and editing, Trump raised the tone in a statement from the Oval Office on the same night, stating that he was “sue the BBC for literally putting words in your mouth”.
The President added that “it looks like they used AI or something like that”suggesting a falsification of his speech. However, the 33-page court document does not mention artificial intelligence or accuse the BBC of using deepfakes, focusing instead on the alleged collage of speech segments.
The case comes after, last month, the BBC received a letter from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, who accused the station of “splicing” the January 6 speech. According to the report, the BBC publicly apologized but refused to pay financial compensationa demand that Trump’s team would have made.
A White House spokeswoman said the BBC had “a pattern” of misleading the public about Trump “in the service of a left-wing political agenda,” arguing that the lawsuit seeks to hold the station liable for defamation and election interference.
