The BBC has moved to have a $10 billion defamation lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump dismissed, arguing in court filings that the broadcaster’s editing of a January 6, 2021, speech in a documentary did not cause the reputational harm Trump alleges.
According to court documents filed and reported on Monday, Trump accused the publicly funded British broadcaster of defaming him by editing together segments of his January 6 remarks so that they appeared to show him directing supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol. The contested documentary, which first aired in 2024 shortly before a presidential election that Trump went on to win, included one excerpt in which he told supporters to "march on the Capitol" and a separate segment recorded nearly an hour later in which he urged people to "fight like hell."
The BBC has issued an apology to Trump over the edit. Despite that apology, the broadcaster maintains in its motion to dismiss that the lawsuit should be thrown out. A central point in the BBC’s argument is that Trump’s subsequent re-election after the documentary’s broadcast indicates the program did not harm his reputation.
In the filings, the BBC also asserts that the documentary was not made available to viewers in Florida, the state where Trump filed his lawsuit. The broadcaster’s lawyers state that because Trump won the election following the documentary’s release, he "cannot plausibly claim that the documentary harmed his reputation."
The BBC’s motion asks the court to reject the $10 billion suit on the basis that the alleged reputational injury is not supported by the outcome of the election and by the contention that the program was not accessible to audiences in the jurisdiction where the legal action was initiated. Those arguments are set out in the broadcaster’s written submissions to the court.
The case centers on competing claims: Trump says the edit transformed the context of his remarks and amounted to defamation, while the BBC has framed its defense around the absence of demonstrable harm, pointing to electoral success and disputed geographic availability as key reasons the lawsuit should not proceed.
At this stage, the matter is before a U.S. judge who will consider the BBC’s motion to dismiss alongside the assertions in Trump’s complaint and the supporting court documents.