President Trump on Monday dropped a jaw-dropping $10 billion lawsuit on the BBC, accusing the British state broadcaster of deliberately doctoring his Jan. 6, 2021, speech to falsely pin the Capitol riot on him.
The suit zeroes in on a 2024 BBC documentary that Trump says deceptively spliced together separate parts of his remarks at the White House Ellipse to make it look like he explicitly incited violence.
“I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth, literally,” Trump told reporters Monday. “They actually put terrible words in my mouth having to do with January 6th that I didn’t say.”
Trump’s legal team filed the 33-page complaint in federal court in Miami, calling the documentary “Trump: A Second Chance” a “brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the 2024 election by misleading viewers about what Trump actually said.
The lawsuit seeks $5 billion in defamation damages and another $5 billion under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
At the center of the case is a clip aired by the BBC in which Trump appears to tell supporters: “We’re gonna 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 gonna have a country anymore.”
According to the lawsuit, that line was stitched together from three separate parts of Trump’s speech, collapsing nearly an hour of remarks into what appeared to be a single statement. Trump’s team says the edit conveniently cut out his call for supporters to fight “peacefully.”
The complaint also alleges the BBC misrepresented footage of Proud Boys members heading toward the Capitol before Trump spoke, presenting it as if they were reacting to his remarks at the Ellipse.
The BBC issued a formal apology last month but insisted it did not defame Donald Trump. The network’s director-general and news CEO both stepped down, and BBC chairman Samir Shah later labeled the edit an “error of judgment.”
Trump is demanding a jury trial.
The BBC has argued the documentary did not air in the U.S. and is not available on its American streaming platforms. Trump’s lawyers counter that U.S. viewers could still access it through BritBox subscriptions or by using virtual private networks.
The lawsuit is the latest salvo in Trump’s pushback against what he calls media manipulation. In recent months, he has sued The Wall Street Journal over its reporting on an alleged Jeffrey Epstein birthday card, filed a $15 billion suit against The New York Times over its 2024 campaign coverage, and secured a $16 million settlement from CBS News over an allegedly misleading edit on “60 Minutes.”
Trump also won a $15 million settlement from ABC News after anchor George Stephanopoulos wrongly claimed Trump had been found liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll case.
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