Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against the BBC over its editing of a speech. (Photo: AP) US President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against the BBC, accusing the broadcaster of wrongly editing a speech he made to supporters in Washington shortly before the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. He is seeking at least $5 billion in damages, The Guardian reported.
Trump confirmed the lawsuit earlier on Monday while speaking to reporters at the Oval Office.
“In a little while, you’ll be seeing I’m suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth,” Trump said. “Literally, they put words in my mouth. They had me saying things that I never said coming out.”
What Donald Trump is alleging
The lawsuit focuses on an episode of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama, broadcast about a week before the 2024 US presidential election.
The programme edited together parts of Trump’s January 6 speech, suggesting he told the crowd:
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
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Trump says the words were taken from different parts of his speech delivered almost an hour apart and combined in a way that misrepresented what he said.
He denies that his speech was intended to encourage violence or the storming of the Capitol, which was aimed at stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
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