Trump’s pending BBC lawsuit on heels of huge wins over media companies

President Donald Trump’s 10-figure legal threat against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is more than just bluster, if his recent legal victories against the media and big tech are any indication.

Trump said Friday that he plans to sue the BBC for up to $5 billion over misleading editing of statements he made on Jan. 6, 2021, on a documentary channel. A similar arrangement was found in the channel’s “Newsnight” program in 2022.

While the amount is eye-popping, Trump has managed to receive huge payouts from CBS, ABC, and Meta over the past 12 months. For Trump’s allies, this is well-deserved behavior for their malicious behavior towards Trump, while for his critics, this is no better than paying ransom money or bribes to the most powerful person on the planet.

Trump’s settlements with Paramount-owned CBS and Disney-owned ABC over their own lawsuits have led to liberal criticism that the parent companies are unwilling to handle the pressure and are selling out their own journalists.

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Paramount Global and CBS agreed in July to pay $16 million up front to settle the president’s lawsuit against the network over how “60 Minutes” edited and aired a 2024 interview with then-Democratic rival Kamala Harris. Trump’s team, which initially sought $10 billion, argued that the network’s use of edited clips from a single response about Israel constituted “election interference.”

The same month as the deal, the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved an $8 billion merger between Paramount and Skydance Media; Prominent figures such as CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert harshly criticized Trump and said the deal was essentially a “massive bribe.”

Trump’s legal team defended the deal as a win for media accountability and the American people.

“With this record settlement, President Donald J. Trump delivers another victory to the American people by once again holding the Fake News media accountable for their inaccuracies and deceptions,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told Fox News Digital at the time.

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The victory comes on the heels of ABC apologizing and settling last December for $16 million after Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos over his on-air claims that the president was “responsible for rape.” The jury in the E. Jean Carroll case he was referring to actually found that she was responsible for “sexual abuse.”

In addition, Trump’s team won a total of $60 million in settlements this year from X, Meta, and Alphabet-owned YouTube due to previous suspensions of their accounts by the respective tech giants following the January 6 Capitol riot.

Shortly after Trump took office again in January, Meta He reached an agreement with Trump for 25 million dollars Due to the suspension of his account on their platform in 2021.

X, owned by sometime ally Elon Musk, agreed in February to pay nearly $10 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump after he was banned from Twitter in 2021. Musk reinstated Trump’s account when he purchased Twitter, now known as X, in November 2022.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk attend a press conference in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC on May 30, 2025. (/Nathan Howard/Reuters/File Photo)

Trump earned $24.5 million in September Payment from YouTube after the platform suspended his account. According to a court filing obtained by Fox News Digital, $22 million of the settlement would be donated to the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that supported construction of the new mall in Trump’s name. White House State Ballroom.

OPINION: BBC WAS CAUGHT TRANSLATING TRUMP’S WORDS AND US MEDIA MOVED TO DEFEND THEM

Trump told reporters on Friday in the Panorama documentary, which compiled statements he made on January 6, 2021, that he would file a lawsuit against the BBC for damages between $1 billion and $5 billion this week. The network later apologized and acknowledged that it “gave the false impression that President Trump was directly calling for violence,” although it disputed the idea that it had denigrated Trump.

The edit showed Trump expressing a single thought about supporters heading to the Capitol: “Cheer on our brave senators, congressmen and women, and we fight, we fight like hell.”

In fact, those words came almost an hour into his long speech that day.

His exact words were: “We will support our brave senators, congressmen, and women, and probably some of them we won’t support so much. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You must show strength, and you must be strong. We come to demand that Congress do the right thing, and count only the legally designated electors. I know everyone here will soon march to the Capitol. We are building to make your voices heard, peacefully and patriotically.”

TRUMP FILED A 15 BILLION DOLLAR LAWSUIT AGAINST THE NEW YORK TIMES FOR Slander AND Slander.

“And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore,” he said near the end of his speech, which lasted more than an hour.

The discussion is already led to resignations BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness and BBC director general Tim Davie.

And this isn’t Trump’s only legal action against a major media outlet. Trump last month reopened a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, alleging defamation over the Times’ coverage of Trump’s tenure as the star of “The Apprentice” and his alleged involvement in dubious tax maneuvers. The lawsuit involved individual Times reporters and Penguin Random House, publisher of the book “Lucky Loser” by reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.

President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times is another major legal action against a news organization. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

“As we said when this lawsuit was first filed and after the judge’s decision to dismiss the case: there is no merit to this case. Nothing has changed today,” a Times spokesperson told Fox News Digital last month. “This is merely an attempt to stifle independent reporting and garner PR attention, but the New York Times will not be deterred by scare tactics.”

A Penguin Random House spokesperson told Fox News Digital: “A second attempt would render this case worthless. Penguin Random House will continue to stand by the book and its authors, just as we will continue to defend the important foundational principles of the First Amendment.”

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