US President Donald Trump has on Monday filed a libel suit against the BBC with the District Court of Florida Miami division.
Donald Trump’s dispute with the BBC sharpened after Panorama broadcast investigations into the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots.
The programme, aired in 2021 and revisited in follow-up reporting in 2022, examined Trump’s claims of election fraud after the November 2020 US presidential election and how his rhetoric fed into the storming of Congress.
Panorama used "misleading" court documents, social media posts and video evidence to trace events leading up to January 6, for which it was forced to apologise and the Corporation's director general, Tim Davies handed in his resignation soon afterwards.
Trump and his supporters rejected the findings, calling the coverage biased with the President demanding $5 billion on each count of defamation and violating Floida's unfair trade practices act to a total of $10 billion (£7.5 billion), while the BBC initially defended the reporting as fact-based scrutiny of a defining moment in modern US history.
He said earlier on Monday: "I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth… I guess they used AI or something. They actually put terrible words in my mouth." The BBC changed a speech the Republican made in an episode of Panorama, prompting him to come after them for a sum "from $1billion to $5billion."
The file states:
"This action concerns a false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, andmalicious depiction of President Trump, which was published in a BBC Panorama documentary,that was fabricated and aired by the Defendants one week before the 2024 Presidential Election ina brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’sdetriment."
"The Panorama Documentary falsely depicted President Trump telling supporters:“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight likehell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
"President Trump never uttered this sequence of words."
The broadcaster has already admitted in public to "showing excerpts taken from different parts of the speech", where the BBC's flagship news show Panorama reported him as saying: "We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you and we fight.”
However, it later came to light that what he in fact said was: "We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women."
Now the courts will decide.
