President Donald Trump sued the BBC for $10 billion over its editing of his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021.
The BBC has been wracked by controversy since it admitted and apologized for selectively editing Trump’s Jan. 6 speech, with the president now seeking a hefty fine in return in a lawsuit in which the edited clip is described as a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump.”
The lawsuit is seeking $5 billion in damages from one count of defamation and another $5 billion on one count of violating a Florida trade practices law, totaling $10 billion.
“The formerly respected and now disgraced BBC defamed President Trump by intentionally, maliciously, and deceptively doctoring his speech in a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 Presidential Election,” a Trump spokesperson told Fox News, arguing it was just the latest of a “long pattern of deceiving” its viewers regarding Trump in service of a “leftist political agenda.”
“President Trump’s powerhouse lawsuit is holding the BBC accountable for its defamation and reckless election interference just as he has held other fake news mainstream media responsible for their wrongdoing,” they added.
The lawsuit concerns a BBC Panorama documentary titled Trump: A Second Chance, one part of which focused on his role in the Jan. 6 riot. In the targeted clip, the BBC spliced together two parts of Trump’s speech to convey a different message than the one he was expressing in context.
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like
hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” the clip had Trump saying.
As outlined in the lawsuit, the first sentence occurred nearly an hour into his speech before the rest of the quote. In the first quote, beginning at 14 minutes and 52 seconds into the speech, Trump instructed his supporters to march to the Capitol to “cheer on” his “patriotic” supporters in Congress.
His second quote, beginning 69 minutes and 30 seconds into the speech, was the president relaying sentiment he expressed previously, during which he said one had to “fight like hell” or risk losing the country. The edited remarks made it seem as though he was instructing his supporters to “fight like hell” at the Capitol when the wider context showed otherwise.
BBC EXISTS TO SUSTAIN ITS MONOPOLY
The lawsuit noted that the documentary was aired one week before the 2024 presidential election, deriding the timing as a “brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment.”
The deceptive editing first came to light earlier this year after a whistleblower publicly revealed the deception as part of a wider complaint exposing editorial bias within the BBC.
