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The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) said early Tuesday it plans to fight back against President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit.
The BBC has come under intense scrutiny over a 2024 “Panorama” documentary about Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech delivered before the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Critics claim the documentary was misleading because it omitted Trump’s call for supporters to protest peacefully.
Trump sued the BBC on Monday for both defamation and for a violation of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act for $5 billion apiece, seeking $10 billion total. The suit, filed in the Southern District of Florida Federal Court, was filed in a personal capacity and names BBC and BBC Studios Productions as defendants. While ABC and CBS have both settled with Trump in recent memory, the BBC plans to fight the case.
“As we have made clear previously, we will be defending this case. We are not going to make further comment on ongoing legal proceedings,” a BBC spokesperson told Digital.
TRUMP FILES ‘POWERHOUSE’ $10 BILLION LAWSUIT AGAINST BBC OVER DOCUMENTARY EDITING HIS JAN 6 REMARKS
President DonaldTrump has filed a lawsuit against the BBC after the network apologized for altering footage of his January 6 speech in a documentary. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Trump’s legal team, made up of attorneys Alejandro Brito, Edward Paltzik and Daniel Epstein, believes the British outlet serves a liberal political agenda.
“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. The BBC has a long pattern of deceiving its audience in coverage of President Trump, all in service of its own 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,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told Digital.
The BBC previously issued an apology for the erroneous edit and said it had pulled the program from its platforms, but a spokesperson for the broadcaster added, “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.”
The controversy began with a bombshell report from The Telegraph that featured excerpts from a whistleblower dossier compiled by Michael Prescott, a communications advisor hired by the BBC to review its editorial standards.
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President Donald Trump has pursued litigation against numerous media companies. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
The whistleblower revealed that a BBC Panorama documentary released last year had a misleading edit of comments Trump made at the rally that preceded the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The documentary omitted Trump urging his supporters to protest “peacefully” and instead spliced two separate comments made nearly an hour apart, making him appear he was calling for violence.
We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And I’ll be there with you. And we fight — we fight like hell,” the documentary showed Trump saying, with no indication they came far apart.
In reality, Trump said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” It wasn’t until 54 minutes later that Trump called on his supporters to “fight like hell” for election integrity.
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The New York Times referred to the ordeal as “one of the worst crises in its 103-year history” of the BBC. The blunder led to the resignations of BBC News CEO Deborah Turness and BBC director-general Tim Davie.
The 46-page court filing states that the documentary “has gained substantial traction and republication across various media in the United States and elsewhere globally” and the BBC “used their false and defamatory publications to maliciously disparage and damage President Trump and impugn his reputation.”
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Trump’s legal team suggested the defendants “timed the publication of the Panorama Documentary to be close in time to the 2024 Presidential Election” and the value of the president’s “personal brand alone is reasonably estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars.”
Trump is seeking a jury trial.
Digital’s Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
