A security guard stands guard outside BBC Broadcasting House after BBC Director General Tim Davie and BBC News Director General Deborah Turness resigned following accusations of bias against the British broadcaster, including in the way it edited a speech by US President Donald Trump, in London, Britain, November 11, 2025.
Hannah McKay | Reuters
President Donald Trump filed a defamation suit against the BBC in Miami federal court Monday evening, seeking at least $5 billion in damages.
The civil complaint accuses the British Broadcasting Corporation of producing a “false, defamatory, misleading, derogatory, inflammatory and malicious portrayal of President Trump” in a Panorama documentary broadcast a week before the 2024 election.
Trump’s suit alleges the documentary was produced as part of a “brazen attempt to interfere and influence the outcome of the election to the detriment of President Trump.”
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 explicitly urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol.
“The Panorama documentary falsely depicted President Trump telling his supporters, ‘We’re going to go down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we’re fighting. We’re fighting like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore,'” the suit says. “President Trump never uttered this sequence of words.”
In fact, according to the complaint, the phrase containing the words “And we fight” was uttered by Trump nearly 55 minutes after he uttered the words “I’ll be there with you.”
BBC chairman Samir Shah recently apologized for an “error of judgement” over editing, and the channel’s director general and head of news both resigned.
The BBC apologized to Trump on November 13 and promised to no longer broadcast the documentary or show it on any of its platforms.
“While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the music video was edited, we strongly disagree that there is a basis for a defamation claim,” the channel said in a statement on November 13.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that the suit would be filed soon.
“It won’t be long before you see me suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth,” Trump said. “Literally, they put words in my mouth. They made me say things I had never said in public.”
The suit alleges that “concerns about the Panorama documentary were raised internally before its broadcast, but that the BBC ignored these concerns and took no corrective action.”
The complaint also states that the documentary “is part of a long-standing strategy by the BBC to manipulate President Trump’s speeches and misrepresent the content in order to defame him, including by fabricating calls for violence that he never made.”
The suit is the latest in a series of defamation claims that the notoriously litigious president has filed against the media.
Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times in September, accusing the paper of being the “mouthpiece” of the Democratic Party.
In July, Trump filed a lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from media baron Rupert Murdoch and the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, following a report in that newspaper that Trump sent his then-friend Jeffrey Epstein a “bawdy” letter on Epstein’s 50th birthday.
Trump denies sending or writing the letter, which was among documents that the estate of notorious sex offender Epstein has since turned over to a congressional committee.
Trump sued CBS for $20 billion in October 2024 for what he claimed was a misleading edit of an interview his then-election opponent, Kamala Harris, gave to “60 Minutes.”
The parent of CBS, Paramount Skydanceagreed in July to pay $16 million to settle the lawsuit, with the money going toward Trump’s future presidential library. The payment came weeks before the Federal Communications Commission, led by a Trump appointee, approved Paramount’s plan for an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media.
ABC agreed in December 2024 to pay Trump Library $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit related to anchor George Stephanopoulos inaccurately describing the civil jury verdict in a lawsuit against Trump by writer E. Jean Carroll.
