President Donald Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against the BBC in Miami federal court on Monday night, seeking at least $5 billion in damages.
The civil complaint accuses the British Broadcasting Corporation of producing a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump” in a Panorama documentary aired one week before the 2024 election.
Trump’s suit alleges the documentary was produced as part of “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment.”
The suit notes that the documentary, titled “Trump: A Second Chance,” was edited to make it appear that during his Jan. 6, 2021, speech outside the White House, Trump had explicitly urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol.
“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 like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,’ ” the suit says. “President Trump never uttered this sequence of words.”
