The American President denounced the British broadcaster for the publication of a 2021 video (which turned out to be modified) in which Trump incited his supporters to storm the Capitol.
That the American President Donald Trump and the press liberal Anglo-Saxons didn’t like each other was a well-known fact. The complaint filed by tycoon against the BBC it only confirms this certainty for the umpteenth time.
The reason is posting a fake clipdating back to January 2021, published in a documentary by the British broadcaster a week before the 2024 presidential electionin which Trump appears incite his supporters to storm the Capitol.
The complaint
During the night between Monday and Tuesday, the American President’s lawyers filed a defamation lawsuit with the federal court in Miami.
The civil complaint accuses the British Broadcasting Corporation of producing a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious portrayal of President Trump”.
While the timing with which the documentary was published, according to what was written in the complaint by the President’s lawyers, would represent “a brazen attempt to interfere and influence the outcome of the election to the detriment of President Trump”.
Trump’s lawsuit calls for a astronomical compensation of the damage to British radio and television, equal to 5 billion dollars for each of the two counts (10 billion in total): the first is “defamation”, while the second is the violation of the Florida law on “deceptive and unfair commercial practices”.
The offending documentary
The lawsuit brought by tycoon is directly linked to the events of January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump-supporting protesters stormed the Capitol during the joint session of Congress which would have certified the victory of Joe Biden in the November 2020 elections.
In the BBC documentary, entitled “Trump: A Second Chance” and published just a week before last year’s elections, we see some clips in which the President states in front of his supporters: “We will go to the Capitol and I will be there with you. And we will fight. We will fight with all our strength and if you don’t fight with all your strength, you will no longer have a country.”
The problem is that Trump never said these words in the precise order mentioned abovewhich, it is the accusation, would have been instead artificially mounted to fall on the tycoon the blame of the attack on the Capitol, presenting him as the instigator.
In fact, in the case presented yesterday we read that the sentence containing the words “And we will fight” was uttered by Trump almost 55 minutes after saying “I will be there with you”. Furthermore, the BBC had already admitted its guilt, recognizing that the assembly had given the “erroneous impression” that Trump had “directly incited the violence.”
Last month, an internal BBC memo, leaked to the public, criticized the way the speech had been edited, leading to resignation of the director general of the BBCTim Davie, e of the news managerDeborah Turness.
However, it was not enough to dissuade the American President from taking legal action, an intention already made clear last month: “I think I have to do it,” Trump told journalists. “They cheated. They changed the words that came out of my mouth”.
Promise kept, with British radio and television now having to defend itself to avoid billions in compensation to the American President.
