Washington — President Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against the BBC on Monday over a documentary that spliced parts of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech on the Ellipse.
The suit, filed in the Southern District of Florida, includes one count of defamation and one count of violating a Florida trade practices law. Mr. Trump’s legal team asked for $5 billion in damages for each count, for a total of $10 billion.
In a 33-page complaint, attorneys for Mr. Trump accused the BBC of publishing a false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction” of him in a BBC “Panorama“ documentary that aired in the U.K. a week before the 2024 election. One portion of the documentary focused on Mr. Trump’s words and actions leading up to the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
The lawsuit claims that the BBC “intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers” by “splicing together” two clips of the same speech that Mr. Trump gave to supporters in Washington, D.C., before the riots began.
Mr. Trump’s legal team claims that the two clips were 55 minutes apart, and the BBC’s edit omitted “his statement calling for peace” in his speech. The president had directed his supporters to go to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers were soon to vote to confirm election results in favor of former President Joe Biden.
The lawsuit also alleges that “concerns” about the documentary were raised internally at the network ahead of air “but the BBC ignored those concerns and did not take corrective action,” citing a report by the Telegraph newspaper.
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team said in part that the BBC has a “long pattern of deceiving its audience in coverage of President Trump, all in service of its own leftist political agenda.”
CBS News has reached out to the BBC and its legal team for comment.
Critics of the “Panorama” documentary say it makes the president look like he was urging people to attack the Capitol. Mr. Trump’s critics have long argued that his words on Jan. 6 — and his false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election — fueled the riot. The president has defended his conduct, saying he used only “beautiful words” on Jan. 6, but the BBC used “terrible words.”
“I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth, literally,” the president said Monday. “They put words in my mouth. They had me saying things that I never said, coming out. I guess they used AI or something.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has threatened to sue the BBC unless it retracted the documentary and offered financial compensation.
In November, the BBC apologized to Mr. Trump for the episode, but declined to compensate him for it. In a statement at the time, the BBC said it “strongly disagree[s]” that there’s a basis for a defamation claim. BBC Director-General Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness resigned amid the editing controversy.
A lawyer for the BBC wrote in a letter to Mr. Trump’s legal team that the broadcaster had “no intention of misleading anyone. He argued the president can’t show that the BBC acted with “actual malice,” meaning it intentionally or recklessly published false information — a prerequisite for most defamation suits against public figures in the U.S.
The attorney also argued the president cannot sue the BBC in Florida because the documentary was not aired in the U.S. or made available on the BBC’s website for American viewers.
Despite the apology, the president’s legal filing says, the network has “made no showing of actual remorse for its wrongdoing nor meaningful institutional changes to prevent future journalistic abuses.” Mr. Trump’s lawyers also argued that the BBC can be sued in Florida because the “Panorama” documentary was available on its BritBox streaming service.
Last month, U.K.-based attorney Mark Stephens told CBS News that Mr. Trump was “clearly owed a fulsome apology,” but any lawsuit would face “a number of legal impediments and tripwires.”
First, Stephens said, was that the program which included the clip was not shown on television in the U.S.
“You can’t be lowered in the estimation of right-thinking people by a program that wasn’t seen by an American audience. So you can’t sue, there’s no jurisdiction to sue, in America,” he said.
He also said that because Mr. Trump is “the president, the ultimate public figure,” criticism of him would likely be protected under the First Amendment.
Even if the case got past those hurdles, which he doubted, Stephens said, “lawyers would be looking at whether or not the sting of this was true. And they can point to all sorts of previous judicial findings which have said that there was some measure of incitement in which the president was involved.”
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