Donald Trump sues BBC for £7,500,000,000 over edited speech

Donald Trump has declared war on the BBC.

The US president filed a £7.5 billion lawsuit against the public broadcaster over an edit of his January 6, 2021, speech, in which he urged supporters to march on the US Capitol to challenge president Joe Biden’s victory. 

He alleges that the company – ‘intentionally, maliciously, and deceptively’ -edited his words in a Panorama documentary aired more than a year ago.

Documents filed at a court in Florida asked for £3.7 billion in damages for defamation, as well as the same amount for violating trade practices.

The Panorama edit, taken from sections of the Republican’s speech almost an hour apart, suggested he told the crowd: ‘We are going to walk down to the Capitol and I will be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.’

Now, the 33-page lawsuit accuses the BBC of airing a ‘false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of Trump’.

It called the documentary ‘a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence’ the 2024 US presidential election.

It also accused the broadcaster of ‘splicing together two entirely separate parts’ of the speech to ‘intentionally misrepresent’ the meaning of what he said.

The Panorama programme was not shown in the US – but the lawsuit says it can be watched on the BritBox subscription streaming platform.

The scandal unfolded earlier this year after a leaked memo highlighted the concerns about the edit.

Both Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, and Deborah Turness, the head of BBC News, resigned over it.

Trump said the lawsuit was imminent as he spoke at a press conference on Monday afternoon in Washington.

‘In a little while, you’ll be seeing I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth literally. They had me saying things that I never said,’ he said.

‘We will be filing that suit probably this afternoon or tomorrow morning.’

The BBC said it has not yet responded to the filing.

This is not Trump’s first legal foray with the media. He has battled the New York Times, CBS, ABC, Dow Jones and most recently, CNN.

He previously filed a £360 million defamation suit against CNN, alleging it had compared him to Adolf Hitler.

It came after the network referred to Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him as the ‘Big Lie’ – an expression also used by Hitler in Mein Kampf.

But the case was thrown out after US district judge Raag Singhal ruled that the term ‘does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews’.

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