US President Donald Trump has filed a defamation lawsuit against the BBC in a federal court in Miami, Florida, US.
SNPNEWS.IN News (Gurmail Kamboj): US President Donald Trump has filed a defamation lawsuit against the BBC in a federal court in Miami, Florida, US, alleging that the BBC’s 2024 Panorama documentary ‘Trump: A Second Chance?’, which aired in October 2024 (a week before the US election), edited Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech with the intent to defame the president.
According to the lawsuit, President is seeking a total of $10 billion ($5 billion for defamation + $5 billion under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act) from the BBC. According to the president, the BBC had maliciously attempted to interfere in the 2024 elections and damage his reputation.
❓What is the whole issue? ❓
In the 46th presidential election held on November 3, 2020, Democratic Party’s Joe Biden defeated Republican Party’s Trump by 306-232 and Biden was scheduled to be sworn in on January 20, 2021, according to centuries-old tradition. Even after the defeat, Trump was not ready to accept this defeat. Trump and his supporters believed that he had been “pushed” and claimed that they would not let Biden take the oath.
In this context, on January 6, 2021, two weeks before Biden took office, Donald Trump gave a speech titled ‘Save America’ at ‘The Ellipse’ in Washington, DC (a circular park called the Ellipse, located about 2 km south of the White House) for about 1.5 hours from 12 noon to 1:11 pm.
In the 12th minute of this speech, Trump said, “First, we will go to the Capitol and encourage our senators and congressmen.” “(We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.”
(i.e. Trump gave the message of a peaceful march)
About 53 minutes into this speech, Trump said, “And if you don’t fight like hell, you are not going to have a country anymore.”
In the BBC’s Panorama documentary released in October 2024 (‘Trump: A Second Chance’), a few days before Trump ran for a second term (against Kamala Harris), these two sentences were combined without a gap and the ‘peacefully’ part was completely cut out.
Which made it seem as if Trump had directly ordered violence on the Capitol, when in fact these were two different contexts and Trump had also said “peacefully” twice.
This The scandal of misleading editing erupted in an internal BBC memo leaked by the British newspaper ‘The Telegraph’ on 6 November 2025, after which Trump called it election interference and British MPs demanded an investigation.
Seeing the controversy intensifying and on 9 November 2025, BBC Director-General Tim Davey and News CEO Deborah Terness resigned, taking responsibility, while the entire episode has been removed from iPlayer and the BBC has also gone so far as to apologize.
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Davey said in his resignation, “Overall the BBC is doing well, but there have been some mistakes and as Director-General I must take ultimate responsibility.”
Terness also said, emotionally, “The controversy over the Panorama documentary about President Trump has reached a stage where it is damaging the BBC – an institution that I Love. As CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the responsibility ends with me.”
Trump, meanwhile, triumphantly declared, “Bosses like Tim Davey at the top of the BBC are resigning/being fired because they were caught tampering with my perfect (perfect!) January 6th speech.”
“Thank you to The Telegraph for exposing these corrupt journalists. These are very dishonest people who tried to sway the presidential election. On top of that, they are foreigners, who many (UK) consider to be our number one ally. What a terrible thing for democracy!”