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BBC Vows to Fight Trump's $10 Billion Lawsuit Over Documentary Editing
"This is about the BBC’s independence," said one former BBC official. "So they should definitely fight it."
Dec 16, 2025
The British Broadcasting Corporation vowed to fight back against President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit filed on Monday—the latest legal challenge brought by the president against a media organization over its coverage of him.
A spokesperson for the BBC said in a brief statement on Tuesday, "We will be defending this case" after Trump filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Florida, alleging that the network defamed him and violated the state's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act when it aired edited comments he made in a speech on January 6, 2021, just before thousands of his supporters attacked the US Capitol.
Before last year's presidential election, the BBC series Panorama aired a documentary titled "Trump: A Second Chance?" The film includes a section featuring Trump's speech to a crowd in Washington, DC on January 6, with two clips of him speaking about 50 minutes apart spliced together, making it appear as though he directly urged people to march to the Capitol.
With his lawsuit, Trump has suggested the edited clip created the impression that he incited violence—though several journalists have noted that those allegations predate the documentary. The edited clip received little attention until recent months when the right-wing Daily Telegraph published details from a memo by Michael Prescott, a former BBC standards adviser with links to the Conservative Party.
In the memo, Prescott took aim at the documentary's editing and alleged a "pro-transgender bias" and "anti-Israel bias"in the BBC's news coverage.
Trump's lawsuit cites the internal review mentioned in Prescott's memo, alleging “a string of incidents that demonstrate serious bias in the corporation’s reporting.”
The BBC has publicly apologized for the editing of the documentary, but has denied that Trump has a legitimate basis for a defamation claim.
The lawsuit is Trump's latest against a media company over coverage of him. At least two cases—against ABC and CBS and its parent company, Paramount, have ended in settlements, with the companies agreeing to pay the president $16 million each. He also has a defamation case pending against the New York Times.
On Monday, Trump gave a muddled explanation of his latest lawsuit while speaking to the press at the White House, falsely claiming the BBC was accused of using AI to make him say "things [he] never said" in the documentary.
"Trump is suing the BBC. He doesn’t know why. But he’s suing anyway," said BBC presenter Sangita Myska.
Trump: "I'm suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth ... I guess they used AI or something" pic.twitter.com/VxYMDp6oZ2
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 15, 2025
Richard Tice, deputy leader of the right-wing Reform Party, expressed support for Trump's lawsuit on Tuesday and agreed with the push for "wholesale change" at the BBC. Christopher Ruddy of the Trump-aligned network Newsmax also told The Guardian that the BBC should "figure out a quick and easy settlement."
But on the network's "Today" program, former BBC Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer said that "it would be extremely damaging to the BBC’s reputation not to fight the case."
"This is about the BBC’s independence," said Damazer. "And, unlike American media organizations which have coughed up the money, the BBC doesn’t have commercial business interests that depend on President Trump’s beneficence in the White House. So they should definitely fight it."
"The BBC has likely an extremely strong case," he added. "The 1960s established a very wide margin of press freedom in a case called Sullivan v. The New York Times, from which the BBC would undoubtedly benefit... President Trump was not harmed by what the BBC mistakenly did in its Panorama edit. The program wasn’t shown in the United States. He was neither financially nor politically hurt, and the BBC should definitely fight this case."
Zoe Gardner, a researcher and commentator on migration policy in the UK, denounced "far-right politicians and pundits" for "cheering" Trump's lawsuit.
"Given the BBC is publicly funded, this is Donald Trump suing you and me," Gardner said. "It’s a pathetic cry-bully attack on journalism by a wannabe dictator and an attack on every British person."
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BBC Rebuked for Censoring Historian Who Called Trump ‘Most Openly Corrupt President in American History’
The Dutch historian said the BBC's edit of his lecture shows what happens "when institutions start censoring themselves out of fear of those in power."
Nov 25, 2025
The BBC is being accused of bending to pressure from the White House once again after it removed a historian's claim that President Donald Trump was “the most openly corrupt president in American history” from one of its broadcasts.
Rutger Bregman, a Dutch author and historian, said Tuesday that Britain's flagship news broadcaster cut the "key line" out of a speech he gave as part of its prestigious Reith Lecture series.
The broadcast had included Bregman's descriptions of Trump as "a convicted reality star" and a "modern-day Caligula." It also included his criticism of the "establishment propping up" former President Joe Biden, whom he called "an elderly man in obvious mental decline."
But the BBC admits it cut out the line referring to Trump's corruption.
“The BBC has decided to censor my first Reith lecture,” Bregman said. “This sentence was taken out of a lecture they commissioned, reviewed through the full editorial process, and recorded four weeks ago in front of 500 people in the BBC Radio Theatre."
In a subsequent BBC radio broadcast discussing the controversy, the host said Bregman's assessment of Trump's corruption was removed "on legal advice."
"That same BBC legal advice means I can't tell you what was removed," he continued.
Bregman said he "was told the decision came from the highest levels within the BBC.”
The decision to pull Bregman's quote came as the network faces threats of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from Trump over its edit of one of his speeches leading up to the January 6, 2021 US Capitol riot, which was fueled by the president's false assertions that his defeat in the 2020 election was the result of widespread voter fraud.
A documentary for the network's Panorama series, released days before the 2024 US election, had spliced together three clips of the president's speech to those assembled at the Capitol, which had occurred about 50 minutes apart. The statements made it appear as if Trump had urged supporters to march with him and called for violence.
Trump has since pardoned everyone who committed acts of violence on January 6, referring to them as “patriots,” and has purged investigators within the Justice Department who pursued cases against them.
The BBC issued an apology for its edit of Trump's comments, and its director general, Tim Davie, and the BBC News chief, Deborah Turness, have both resigned. However, it has insisted it did not defame Trump and that it would not settle any lawsuit with him.
In comments to the Guardian, a BBC spokesperson said it removed Bregman's comments because "all of our programs are required to comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines, and we made the decision to remove one sentence from the lecture on legal advice.”
On social media, Bregman said the network's explanation did not make sense.
"The edit was made at the last minute, after editorial approval and four weeks after the live recording," he said. "A standard editorial edit doesn’t require days of high-level legal review or the involvement of many people at the top level."
He said the real reason was the network's fear of drawing Trump's ire.
"The truth is that the sentence wasn’t inaccurate—it was removed because of legal fears," he said. "And that’s exactly the concern my lecture raises: when institutions start censoring themselves out of fear of those in power."
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Trump Threatens to Sue BBC Over Jan. 6 Video Clip in Latest Attack on Press
In a letter to the British public broadcaster, Trump cited a memo from a Conservative Party-linked former BBC adviser who claimed the network displayed an "anti-Israel" bias, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Nov 10, 2025
The BBC in the United Kingdom is the latest target of US President Donald Trump's attempts to root out all unflattering portrayals of him from media coverage, with the president citing a memo penned by a former BBC adviser reported to have ties to the British Conservative Party.
Trump wrote to the BBC Monday, warning that he would file a lawsuit demanding $1 billion in damages unless the publicly funded broadcaster retracts a documentary film about him from last year, issues a formal apology, and pays him an amount that would “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused.”
The president gave the network until Friday to act in regard to Trump's complaint about a section of the film Trump: A Second Chance? by the long-running current affairs series Panorama.
The film was broadcast days before the 2024 US election, and included excerpts from the speech Trump gave to his supporters on January 6, 2021 just before thousands of them proceeded to the US Capitol to try to stop the election results from being certified.
It spliced together three quotes from two sections of the speech that were made about 50 minutes apart, making it appear that Trump urged supporters to march with him to the Capitol and called for violence.
"We’re going to walk down to the Capitol... and I’ll be there with you... and we fight. We fight like hell," Trump is shown saying in the edited footage.
In the unedited quote, Trump said, "We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.”
BBC chairman Samir Shah said the network's standards committee had discussed the editing of the clips earlier this year and had expressed concerns to the Panorama team. The film is no longer available online at the BBC's website.
"The furor over the Trump documentary is not about journalistic integrity. It’s a power play... It’s a war over words, where the vocabulary of journalism itself is weaponized."
“We accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action," said Shah. "The BBC would like to apologize for that error of judgment.”
Two top executives, director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness, also resigned on Sunday under pressure over the documentary.
The uproar comes days after the right-wing Daily Telegraph published details from a memo by former BBC standards committee adviser Michael Prescott, "managing director at PR agency Hanover Communications, whose staff have gone on to work for the Conservative Party," according to Novara Media.
Prescott's memo took aim at the documentary as well as what he claimed was a pro-transgender bias in BBC news coverage and an anti-Israel bias in stories by the BBC's Arabic service.
According to the Guardian, Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC board who previously worked as a communications official for former Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, "amplified" the criticisms in Prescott's memo in key board meetings ahead of Davie's and Turness' resignations.
Deadline reported Monday that "insiders" at the BBC have alleged that Prescott's memo, the resignations, and Trump's threat of legal action all stem from a right-wing "coup" attempt at the broadcaster.
Journalists including Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo News and Mikey Smith of The Mirror noted that while Panorama's editing of Trump's speech could be seen as misleading, the documentary wasn't responsible for accusations that the president incited violence on January 6, which pre-dated the film.
"To understand how insane it is that the BBC is being accused of ‘making it look like’ Trump was inciting violence with their bad edit, as opposed to Trump actually having incited violence, we know even his own kids that day were desperately trying to get him to call off the mob," said Hasan.
Others suggested the memo cited in Trump's letter to the broadcaster should be discredited entirely for its claim that the BBC has exhibited an anti-Israel bias—an allegation, said author and international relations professor Norrie MacQueen, that amounted to "an entirely new level" of George Orwell's "newspeak."
While the BBC "has been shaken by one of the smallest of its sins," wrote media analyst Faisal Hanif at Middle East Eye, "the greater one—its distortion of Palestinian reality—goes unpunished."
Hanif pointed to a report published in June by the Center for Media Monitoring, which showed that despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel since October 2023, the BBC "gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage per fatality and ran almost equal numbers of humanizing victim profiles (279 Palestinians vs. 201 Israelis)."
The network also used "emotive terms four times more for Israeli victims" and shut down allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, as well as "making zero mention of Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements," even as Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice.
"The furor over the Trump documentary is not about journalistic integrity," wrote Hanif. "It’s a power play: the disciplining of a public broadcaster that still, nominally, answers to the public rather than the billionaire-owned media. It’s a war over words, where the vocabulary of journalism itself is weaponized."
"The BBC is punished for the wrong things. It loses its leaders over an editing error, while escaping accountability for its editorial failures on Gaza," Hanif continued. "The Trump documentary might have been misedited, but the story of Gaza has been mistold for far longer. If the BBC still believes in its own motto—'Nation shall speak peace unto nation'—then peace must begin with honesty."
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