President Donald Trump says he plans to take the BBC to court over how they edited one of his speeches in a documentary. He wants $1 billion in damages and is asking the network to say sorry, take back what they did, and pay him for the harm caused.
The problem is about a Panorama show that came out before the November 2024 election. The documentary had a clip from Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech that people say was cut and put together in a way that twisted what he actually said. Some believe the edit made it look like he told people to attack the Capitol building.
Trump shared why he wants to go ahead with the case. When they asked if he would really sue, he said “well I think I have an obligation to do it, because you can’t get people, you can’t allow people to do that.” He said the BBC lied to viewers and that they have admitted they were wrong.
The edit changed everything
People found out about the problem after someone leaked a private BBC memo that ended up in the media. In his real speech, 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.”
But the Panorama team took different parts of his speech from more than 50 minutes apart and stuck them together. What viewers saw was Trump saying “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
Trump said that his January 6 speech was “a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech” but the BBC “made it sound radical.” He said “what they did was rather incredible” because they actually changed what he said. He also told them “they defrauded the public, and they’ve admitted it.”
Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to the BBC on Sunday asking them to fix the problem by Friday. A BBC rep said they are looking at the letter and will answer when they can. The BBC’s chair, Samir Shah, has already said sorry for what he called an “error of judgement” when they made the edit.
The whole situation has caused big problems at the BBC. Both the network’s top boss Tim Davie and the head of news Deborah Turness have quit their jobs. Other BBC shows are feeling the effects too, with Reform UK backing out of a documentary the network was making about them. The case against the BBC is just one more issue in Trump’s recent run of controversies around his business activities.
If Trump does file the case in Florida, lawyers say he will need to show that people in that state could actually watch the Panorama show. Right now, nobody has found proof that it was shown anywhere in America. This fight is another example of Trump’s troubled history with how the media covers him since he came back to the White House.
Published: Nov 12, 2025 01:45 pm