US President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against the BBC and is also seeking $10 billion in damages. He claims the British broadcaster defamed him and engaged in deceptive and unfair business practices.
The 33-page complaint, submitted on Monday, alleges that the BBC aired content that misrepresented Trump in a false, damaging, and harmful way. The lawsuit also claims that the coverage was intended to interfere with and influence the 2024 US presidential election, reported Associated Press.
Why has Trump filed the lawsuit against BBC? And what does it say?
The lawsuit claims that the BBC “spliced together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021” in a way that “intentionally misrepresented the meaning of what Trump said.”
The BBC had in November apologised to Trump over the edited footage of the January 6 speech. However, the publicly funded network denied that it had defamed him after Trump threatened legal action. BBC chairman Samir Shah described it as an “error of judgment,” which led to the resignations of the BBC’s top executive and head of news.
The alleged misrepresentation of Trump’s Jan 6 speech
The speech was given shortly before some of Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol, as Congress was set to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, which Trump falsely claimed had been stolen.
The BBC aired an hourlong documentary titled ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’ just days before the 2024 US presidential election. The program combined three quotes from two separate sections of Trump’s 2021 speech, delivered nearly an hour apart, to allegedly making it seem as if Trump told his supporters to march with him and fight. The edited version left out a part where Trump had urged supporters to protest peacefully.
Earlier on Monday, Trump said he was suing the BBC for putting words in his mouth.
“They actually put terrible words in my mouth having to do with Jan 6 that I didn’t say, and they’re beautiful words, that I said, right?” he added during an Oval Office appearance.
Trump said that he spoke “beautiful words” about patriotism but BBC used “terrible words” instead.
Trump filed the lawsuit in Florida, noting that the deadlines to bring a case in British courts had expired more than a year ago.
