BBC to fight US president's $10B lawsuit for Panorama speech edit

LONDON

The BBC said Tuesday that it will fight a $10 billion lawsuit that US President Donald Trump filed against the company for an edit of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech in a Panorama documentary.

In a complaint filed Monday, Trump sought $5 billion in damages each on two counts, accusing the broadcaster of defamation and violating a trade practices law, according to court documents filed in the US state of Florida.

"As we have made clear previously, we will be defending this case," a BBC spokesperson said in a statement. "We are not going to make further comment on ongoing legal proceedings."

The controversy started after The Telegraph published a leaked internal BBC memo in November, which suggested the Panorama program, which was shown a week before the 2024 presidential election, edited two parts of Trump's speech together so he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021.

In his speech, Trump actually said, "We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women."

But in the BBC documentary edit, he was shown saying: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell."

The two sections of the speech that were edited together were more than 50 minutes apart, the BBC reported.

Last month, the BBC apologized to Trump, but rejected his demands for compensation and disagreed that there was a "basis for a defamation claim."

Meanwhile, the broadcaster's Director-General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness resigned last month over the controversy.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt labeled the BBC a "leftist propaganda machine" and "100% fake news.”