Donald Trump swore he was going to sue the BBC over its self-admitted “error of judgement” the UK public broadcaster displayed in edits for a 2024 documentary on the January 6 insurrection, and on Monday he really did.
For more than $5 billion.
“This action concerns a false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump, which was published in a BBC Panorama documentary, that was fabricated and aired by the Defendants one week before the 2024 Presidential Election in a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment,” proclaims the defamation suit filed in federal court today in Florida.
Read Donald Trump’s BBC lawsuit.
If you wondered what, besides Trump having his official residence there and sympathetic judges, POTUS’ lawyers’ logic for filing in the Sunshine State, it is because the thrust of the action is claiming, in addition to defamation, violations of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
The lawsuit tries to establish jurisdiction by citing a BBC office in the state. “Additionally, the BBC offers subscriptions to individuals in Florida and as a result has thousands of subscribers in Florida,” the filing also states. “Any individual in the United States, including Florida, can pay for a subscription to the BBC’s content and services.” It claims that U.S. subscribers have access to Panorama via BritBox.
Whether the lawsuit passes the trans-Atlantic test is a whole other matter, but, as all his other media legal moves have made clear, Trump cares about the move itself almost as much as the money.
Earlier today, Trump said that the litigation as imminent. “I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth — literally to put words in my mouth,” he said in the Oval Office during a press appearance. “They had me saying things that I never said coming out.”
The BBC has not commented on the lawsuit.
In the documentary, Trump: A Second Chance?, a clip is shown from his January 6 speech, in which he says, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol … and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.” In fact, the remark was an edit of different portions of the speech.
In the fallout from the focus on the edited speech, BBC director general Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, who led the news division, stepped down.
Last month, after the president’s legal threat, the BBC apologized to Trump, calling it an “error of judgement.”
But the BBC did not offer to pay Trump any damages. “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim,” a spokesperson said.
The lawsuit claims that the BBC “maliciously, falsely, and defamatorily make it appear that President Trump explicitly called for violent action and rioting, and that he ‘said something he did not,’ by splicing together footage from the start of the Speech with a separate quote that he said nearly 55 minutes later, while omitting his statement calling for peace, made less than one minute after his first statement urging supports to cheer their senators and congressmen at the Capitol.”
Despite the BBC apology, the lawsuit claims that the network “has made no showing of actual remorse for its wrongdoing nor meaningful institutional changes to prevent future journalistic abuse.”
