10 billion dollars –8.6 billion euros–. This is what US President Donald Trump is demanding in the 33-page damages lawsuit filed this Monday against the BBC. In this lawsuit, the American president accuses the British public channel of defamation and misleading and unfair commercial practices.
The suit was filed by Trump’s lawyers in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami, alleging defamation and violation of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. Trump is seeking $5 billion in damages for each of the two charges, for a total of $10 billion.
In the 33-page lawsuit, he accuses the BBC of broadcasting a “false, defamatory, misleading, derogatory, inflammatory and malicious portrayal of President Trump.” And he calls it a “blatant attempt to interfere and influence” in the 2024 US presidential elections.
In the letter, the BBC is accused of “joining together two completely unrelated parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021” in order to “intentionally distort the meaning of what President Trump said.”
The BBC apologized to Trump last month for editing the January 6 speech. However, the public broadcaster rejected the defamation allegations after Trump threatened legal action.
BBC chairman Samir Shah called it an “error of judgment”, leading to the resignation of the BBC’s director general and its director of news.
The speech came before some Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, as Congress prepared to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, which Trump claimed was stolen from him without any evidence.
The BBC broadcast the hour-long documentary, titled Trump: A second chance? a few days before the 2024 US presidential election.
The documentary stitched together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech, delivered nearly an hour apart, into what appeared to be a single quote in which Trump urged his supporters to march with him and “fight tooth and nail.”
Among the deleted portions was one in which Trump said he wanted his supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
The reported episode of the program Panorama It is no longer available on any platform, not even in the United Kingdom, the only place it was released in October 2024.
The BBC also published a clarifying note on the program’s website explaining that the nearly hour-long documentary included extracts from Trump’s speech and had been revised again following criticism from the US president. “We accept that our editing unintentionally gave the impression that we were showing a single continuous portion of the speech rather than snippets of different points in the speech, which falsely created the impression that President Trump was directly calling for violent action,” said the memo, which also includes a further apology to Trump for this “error in judgment.”
In its final 2022 report, the Congressional Commission of Inquiry blamed Trump, among other things for his speech, for storming the Capitol as part of an attempt to overturn the result of the presidential election won by Joe Biden.
This is not the first time Trump has filed a lawsuit against the media. CBS and its parent company, Paramount, paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the US president over the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes.
Last year, just after Trump’s election victory over Harris, ABC paid $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit related to on-air comments by host George Stephanopoulos, who accused Trump of being a rapist when the conviction involved sexual assault.
The US president also filed a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, in which he accuses the newspaper of trying to undermine his 2024 candidacy and discredit his reputation. In a preliminary ruling, Judge Steven D. Merryday harshly criticized the 85-page lawsuit, calling it untenable.
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