Trump v. British Broadcasting Corporation

Case Overview

President Trump sued the BBC in his personal capacity over the Panorama documentary "Trump: A Second Chance," first broadcast October 28, 2024, one week before the 2024 election. The complaint alleges the BBC spliced together two separate passages of his January 6, 2021 speech so that he appeared to say "We're going to walk down to the Capitol and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore", a sequence he says he never uttered. Two counts: defamation per se and violation of Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. The complaint demanded not less than $5 billion; in a supplemental interrogatory response Trump raised the estimate to roughly $10 billion. The two BBC subsidiaries were dismissed with prejudice by stipulation on July 16, 2026, leaving the BBC itself as the sole defendant. The case is in contested discovery. On July 14, 2026 the United States filed a statement of interest under 28 U.S.C. 517 opposing the scope of the BBC's subpoenas to roughly a dozen federal entities, and on July 27, 2026 Magistrate Judge Lett granted in part a motion to compel the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust to produce financial records, narrowed to January 1, 2023 forward.