WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump has made it official: he is now actively suing the BBC for defamation, and seeking a total of $10bn in damages from the UK’s public broadcaster.
In an audacious move, Trump claims the BBC’s October 2024 Panorama documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?” constituted “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the outcome of last year’s presidential election “to President Trump’s detriment”.
The 33-page complaint filed on Monday night with the Southern Division of the US District Court in Miami claims the film offered viewers a “false, defamatory, deceptive, inflammatory and malicious depiction of President Trump”.
As expected, the lawsuit – first threatened more than a month ago – zeroes in on what the BBC has already conceded was unfortunate and clumsy editing of Trump’s speech to his supporters in Washington on 6 January 2021.
The BBC does not contest that the production team working on the documentary committed an “error of judgment” in jamming together two parts of President Trump’s speech in a manner that suggested he directly instructed the crowd to march to Capitol Hill and “fight like hell”. In a letter to Trump last month, the BBC’s chairman Samir Shah offered an apology, but argued there were no grounds for any defamation claim to be lodged against the broadcaster.
In his lawsuit, Trump vigorously disagrees.
Citing what he calls a “staggering breach of journalistic ethics”, his legal complaint claims the BBC has “made no showing of actual remorse for its wrongdoing nor meaningful institutional changes to prevent future journalistic abuses”.
In an effort to demonstrate that the Panorama film may have led some US voters to change their minds about how to cast their ballots in last year’s election, Trump characterises the BBC as a broadcasting powerhouse in the sunshine state of Florida.
It argues that simply by dint of making the BBC News website available to users in Florida, the courts in Miami have jurisdiction to adjudicate the merits of his lawsuit.
The lawsuit accuses BBC journalists of engaging in a pattern of malicious activity (Photo: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu via Getty)“The BBC offers subscriptions to individuals in Florida and as a result, has thousands of subscribers in Florida”, the complaint continues.
It dismisses as “inaccurate” the BBC’s claim that Panorama could not be viewed in Florida due to geo-blocking, claiming the documentary was made available via the BritBox streaming service and was available to “millions of Florida citizens” who use a virtual private network (VPN) to “view content such as the Panorama programme”.
The lawsuit notably fails to identify a single viewer of the documentary in Florida who might have been misled or aggrieved by its content. Instead, it simply relies on a massive presumption that someone, somewhere in the state must have seen it, speaking of “the immense likelihood that citizens of Florida accessed the Documentary before the BBC had it removed”.
The complaint even argues that because original footage for the documentary was gathered by Panorama journalists operating entirely legally in Florida itself, “venue is proper” for any trial to occur there.
After claiming in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon that Panorama may have used AI to put “words in my mouth literally”, his lawsuit falls short of advancing that claim legally.
Instead, he accuses BBC journalists of engaging in a pattern of malicious activity to be “anything but fair and impartial when it comes to reporting on President Trump…Substantial evidence demonstrates that before the publication of the Panorama Documentary, the BBC and its leadership bore President Trump ill will, wanted him to lose the 2024 Presidential election and were dishonest in their coverage of him”.
The flaying of the Corporation continues with claims that the BBC has “no regard for the truth about President Trump” and has routinely failed “to publish content even remotely resembling objective journalism”.
The lawsuit takes issue with the editorial comments made in the documentary by interviewees including former Labour Secretary Robert Reich, Boston College Professor Heather Cox Richardson, and even a BBC reporter whose voice can be heard narrating contemporaneous footage of former Vice President Kamala Harris taking to the stage at the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago and describing the mood in the hall as “electric”.
The lawsuit’s star witness is “no less an authority than…former Prime Minister Liz Truss” who, according to Trump’s lawyers, “discussed this bias, the need to hold the BBC accountable, and the BBC’s pattern of actual malice”.
The suit demands $5bn in damages for defamation, and a further $5bn for violation of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, and also requests the court to agree to a jury trial.
Trump’s legal team will be aware that Grand National-style hurdles lie ahead for the President before any trial gets underway. The lawsuit’s failure to identify a single Florida viewer who either complained about the documentary in the immediate aftermath of its transmission, or changed their vote as a result of seeing the film, could prove to be the complaint’s Achilles heel.
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Further, the US Constitution’s First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech applies to all the speakers interviewed in the documentary, and past evidence suggests that Florida judges may not be impressed by the lawsuit’s grandiose claims that “direct harm” was done to the president’s “brand, properties and businesses, and…reputation as a politician, leader and businessman in the eyes of the American public and around the world”.
A similar $15bn claim lodged against the New York Times was thrown out by a Republican-appointed judge in Florida in October, who called the lawsuit ““tedious and burdensome” as well as “vituperation and invective”.
But win or lose, Trump has put international reporters covering his administration on notice: his animus to the free press does not end at America’s borders, and he is more than willing to force global news organisations to spend time and precious resources defending lawsuits lodged against them.
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