President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the BBC on Monday night, seeking a whopping $10 billion in damages.
The suit alleges that the British broadcaster had produced a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump” in its Panorama documentary, which aired in the week leading up to the 2024 presidential election.
More specifically, it accused the BBC of editing his infamous January 6, 2021, speech to make it seem like he had explicitly urged his supporters to storm the US Capitol building prior to the insurrection. At the time, his speech sparked a debate over whether he’d incited violence or not.
“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 lawsuit reads. “President Trump never uttered this sequence of words.”
The lawsuit alleges that Trump said the words, “and we fight,” 55 minutes after saying, “I’ll be there with you,” even though the documentary allegedly made it sound like he said it in a single sequence.
Trump himself, however, made a much stronger claim. During an announcement from the Oval Office on Monday night, Trump said he’s “suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth, literally.”
“They actually had me saying things that I never said coming out of my mouth,” Trump said. “I guess they used AI or something. They actually put terrible words in my mouth having to do with January 6th that I didn’t say.”
The remarks are baffling, since the 33-page suit makes no mention of artificial intelligence and accuses the BBC of editing his speech together to construct a call to action — not some AI deepfake version of the president, as Trump suggests.
To be sure, there are plenty of AI-generated clips of Trump already out there. The president himself likes to post AI slop on his Truth Social account, for that matter. But this lawsuit is about something else entirely, implying that Trump wasn’t successfully briefed on the details prior to his Monday announcement.
Last month, the BBC received a letter from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chief, Brendan Carr, who has long garnered a reputation for trying to chill speech by abusing his powers. In the letter, Carr accused the broadcaster of splicing Trump’s January 6 speech.
At the time, the BBC buckled to the pressure almost immediately, publicly apologizing. Yet it refused Trump’s demand for financial compensation.
This clearly angered Trump and Carr, given the $10 billion lawsuit that was filed this week.
“The BBC has a long pattern of deceiving its audience in coverage of President Trump, all in service of its own leftist political agenda,” a White House spokesperson told CNBC. “President Trump’s powerhouse lawsuit is holding the BBC accountable for its defamation and reckless election interference just as he has held other fake news mainstream media responsible for their wrongdoing.”
It’s a mystifying situation that’ll be red meat to critics who say Trump may be losing his grip on reality.
Just this week, Trump posted a deranged takedown of famed Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who was killed in a suspected homicide over the weekend. The president said that the death was linked to “Trump derangement syndrome” in an apparent attempt to take a dig at his critics — remarks that sparked outrage across the political spectrum.
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