Trump Sues the BBC for $10 Billion Over Deceptively Edited Documentary That Distorted His January 6 Speech

President Trump has gone through with his promise to sue the British Broadcasting Corporation, filing a $10 billion lawsuit against the television network over its deceptive editing of his January 6, 2021, speech to make it sound as though he was explicitly calling for violence. The BBC came under fire last month after a dossier compiled by a former journalist, Michael Prescott, highlighted the deceptive editing of the speech, which aired in a 2024 “Panorama” episode. The dossier led to the extraordinary resignation of the BBC’s director general and its head of news. The BBC also apologized to Mr. Trump, but said it would not pay him.Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that he was finally filing the suit.“I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth … They put words in my mouth. They had me saying things that I never said,” Mr. Trump said. “I guess they used AI or something … They actually put terrible words in my mouth, having to do with January 6, that I didn’t say. And they’re beautiful words that I said … talking about patriotism and all of the good things that I said, they didn’t say that. But they put terrible words [in]. They actually have me speaking with words that I never said.”Mr. Trump’s complaint about the edit is partially accurate – producers at an outside production company that produced the Trump documentary deceptively edited together strands of his January 2021 speech on the White House ellipse, making it sound like he was directly exhorting his supporters to violence. It does not appear, however, that AI was involved. The internal BBC report found that the editors spliced together two sections of Mr. Trump’s speech, which were actually roughly 50 minutes apart, to make it appear as though he stated, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.” The edited version also removed his call for his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”His comment about his supporters behaving “peacefully and patriotically” was an important part of his defense against the accusation that he was encouraging violence. Mr. Trump had previously threatened to sue the BBC for as much as $5 billion for the editing of his speech. Now that amount has quintipled.The BBC has apologized to the president for the editing and has promised that it will not rebroadcast the “Panorama” episode. But it insists that there is “no basis for a defamation case,” and has said it is “determined to fight” the lawsuit. Mr. Trump is expected to file his lawsuit in Florida, a state where left-wing journalists and legal observers have predicted jurors may be less sympathetic to large media companies.In January, a Florida-based jury found CNN liable for defaming a Navy veteran, Zachary Young, when it accused him of charging Afghans desperate to flee Afghanistan “exorbitant” fees. Mr. Young said the allegations were false and that he was working for corporate clients to evacuate their personnel from a conflict zone.For Mr. Trump to win his defamation lawsuit, he would have to show that the BBC acted with “actual malice” — or that it knew what it was broadcasting was untrue and proceeded anyway — when it spliced together the portions of his January 6 speech.A media editor for the BBC, Katie Razzall, noted in an article last month that the network believes that it will be hard for Mr. Trump to show that it acted with malice when it edited the “Panorama” episode because it did not air in America. The BBC is also likely to push back on the allegations that the editing caused Mr. Trump harm by noting that he was elected in 2024.

Trump Sues the BBC for $10 Billion Over Deceptively Edited Documentary That Distorted His January 6 Speech

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