President Donald Trump on Monday sued the BBC over a documentary in which it edited the president’s January 6, 2021, Washington address to create a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction” of the president.
Trump sued the British broadcaster for $5 billion for what the lawsuit said was a defamatory documentary about the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Miami.
“This instance of doctoring–in the form of distortion of meaning and splicing of entirely unrelated word sequences–is part of the BBC’s longstanding pattern of manipulating President Trump’s speeches and presenting content in a misleading manner in order to defame him, including fabricating calls for violence that he never made,” the lawsuit states.
“The BBC, faced with overwhelming and justifiable outrage on both sides of the Atlantic, has publicly admitted its staggering breach of journalistic ethics, and apologized, but has made no showing of actual remorse for its wrongdoing nor meaningful institutional changes to prevent future journalistic abuses,” it continues.
The documentary spliced together two small parts of a lengthy speech to “make it appear that President Trump explicitly called for violent action and rioting,” the lawsuit states. The two clips are separated by 55 minutes in Trump’s original speech, and the documentary also left out Trump’s explicit calls for supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically.”
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Last month, two BBC executives announced their resignations after controversy erupted around the broadcaster over an internal memo that said the documentary characterized the president of the United States dishonestly. The memo was written by a former outside editorial standards adviser, Michael Prescott, and leaked to the media, throwing the BBC into turmoil as members and allies of the Trump administration blasted the U.K.-backed media outlet with accusations of bias.
The BBC later apologized to Trump for his portrayal in the documentary.
“[W]e accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the statement said.
“The BBC would like to apologize to President Trump for that error of judgement. This programme was not scheduled to be re-broadcast and will not be broadcast again in this form on any BBC platforms,” it added.
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