A week prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the U.K.’s public service broadcaster, British Broadcasting Company (BBC), ran a video doctored to make then-presidential candidate Donald Trump appear to have been calling for an assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2020. On the night of Dec. 15, Judicial Hub opened a post: “BREAKING: President Trump is suing the BBC over a documentary’s editing of his Jan. 6 speech. Trump (and his legal team) claim that the editing was ‘false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious’ and that it was an ‘brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment.’”
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. federal court in Miami, Florida on Dec. 15. It claims that, in the BBC’s 2024 Panorama documentary, two separate comments by Trump were spliced together to inflame audiences over what appears to be his incitement to violence. His legal team called BBC’s operation “malicious,” given that the selective editing “could never have occurred by accident.”
The lawsuit seeks $5 billion in damages for defamation and another $5 billion under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. The BBC had both issued a formal apology admitting that their editing gave “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action” and then reported that the Trump team never responded to BBC’s apology. However, their “apology” pretended that the impression they created of Trump’s incitement to violence had been unintentional on their part. Clearly, that did not go over well with the Trump team. Otherwise, BBC issued a statement on Dec. 15: “We are not going to make further comment on ongoing legal proceedings.”
BBC were not the only ones, in 2016, 2020, and 2024, to carry out brazen and/or illegal acts, in the expectation that Trump would not be in office to exact retribution; but they are one of the most appropriate ones to be called out.
