Donald Trump’s $5B legal hand grenade just dropped onto BBC | US | News
US President Donald Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against the BBC in the Miami division of Florida District Court on Monday.
Donald Trump‘s dispute with the BBC sharpened after Panorama published investigations into the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots.
The program, which aired in 2021 and was revisited in follow-up reports in 2022, examined Trump’s claims of election fraud after the November 2020 US presidential election and how his rhetoric fueled the storm against Congress.
Panorama used “misleading” court documents, social media posts and video evidence to trace events leading up to January 6; He was therefore forced to apologize and the Company’s chief executive, Tim Davies, tendered his resignation shortly afterwards.
While Trump and his supporters rejected the findings, saying the reporting was biased, the BBC initially argued that the reporting was a fact-based examination of a defining moment in modern US history.
Earlier on Monday he said: “I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth… I think they used artificial intelligence or something. They really put terrible words in my mouth.” The BBC changed the Republican’s speech in an episode of Panorama so that the Republican could come after them for “$1 billion to $5 billion”.
The file states:
“This action relates to a false, defamatory, deceptive, insulting, inflammatory and malicious portrayal of President Trump in the BBC Panorama documentary, which was fabricated and published by the Defendants a week before the 2024 Presidential Election in a brazen attempt to intervene and influence the results of the Election to the detriment of President Trump.”
“Panorama Documentary shows President Trump telling his supporters: “We’re going to march to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you won’t have a country anymore.”
“President Trump has never uttered such words.”
The broadcaster had publicly admitted that he had “shown extracts from different parts of the speech” in which the BBC’s flagship news programme, Panorama, reported him saying: “We will march on the Capitol and I will be there with you and we will fight.”
But it later turned out that what he actually said was: “We will march to the Capitol and support our brave senators, congressmen, and women.”
Now the courts will decide.
