United States President Donald Trump has filed a defamation suit against the British public broadcaster BBC, demanding compensation of up to $10 billion (€8.5 billion) for the “misleading” edition of a speech by the president in January 2021. The channel extracted an intervention by the president in which he addressed his supporters who, immediately afterwards, stormed the Capitol, seat of the US Congress. The edition of the speech suggests that the president, who refused to acknowledge the electoral defeat to Joe Biden two months earlier, harangued radical Republicans to storm the seat of American popular sovereignty.
The complaint, as reported by Trump’s defense in a statement, contends that “the once-respected and now discredited BBC defamed President Trump by intentionally, maliciously, and deceptively altering his speech with the blatant intent to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.”
Last month, Trump announced he would sue the British channel, although the waters appeared to have calmed after the BBC apologized for the documentary in which this edition was included, included in the program Panorama and released at the end of 2024, although it excludes any compensation from the president. The affair also cost the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and head of the news division, Deborah Turness, their jobs.
Finally, Trump filed a lawsuit this morning in a Miami court and announced the amount he is seeking in compensation, $5 billion for each of the two crimes he accuses the British entity of, one for defamation and the other for violation of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. One more step in his fight against freedom of expression and against media that are not linked to him, both in his country and abroad.
In the montage shown in the BBC documentary, titled Trump: A Second Chance?, Trump appears 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 the meantime he encouraged them to march peacefully and this was not included in the edit, which the BBC admitted was an error because it made it seem like he was directly calling for violent action which, in fact, happened later and caused the deaths of several Congress police officers.
In any case, the BBC’s lawyers understood that there was no basis for a defamation claim. The BBC is funded by a license fee paid by all viewers in the UK, so they understand that any payment to Trump would be politically fraudulent. For their part, Trump’s lawyers say the BBC documentary, which was not broadcast in the United States, caused enormous damage to his reputation and finances.
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 British entity’s management knowingly misinformed its viewers and acted negligently.
Trump filed lawsuits and won $1 million compensation settlements against other U.S. news networks, including two of the largest, CBS and ABC, after he returned to the U.S. presidency in January 2025. He also filed lawsuits against newspapers such as The New York Times either The Wall Street Journal.
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