A federal judge ruled that the BBC cannot re-litigate the January 6 U.S. Capitol protest surrounding President Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the broadcaster. The BBC can only argue how its edit of Trump’s speech that day was perceived by the public.
“It’s important because this case is about a very limited splicing that consisted of nine seconds of a more than 50-minute speech and, rather than focus just on that, the BBC is trying to distract the judge, ultimately the jurors in this case, from that very limited scenario, and what they’re trying to do is expand the scope of this case to litigate January 6 simply to take the attention off of them for their own wrongful conduct,” a source familiar with the matter told Fox News Digital.
“And so when the judge made that determination that that’s not going to happen, that eliminated the primary defense that the BBC was seeking to employ in this case, which was to create a distraction, to make this case into something that was just going to be unmanageable and unnecessary, which is, ‘We’re going to try the whole January 6 case here.’ The BBC has no standing, legal standing or any basis to bring such a defense,” the source explained.
According to President Trump’s December lawsuit, the BBC made a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump” that was “fabricated and aired by the Defendants one week before the 2024 Presidential Election in a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment.”
Doctoring Trump’s speech, “in the form of distortion of meaning and splicing of entirely unrelated word sequence,” the lawsuit says, “is part of the BBC’s longstanding pattern of manipulating President Trump’s speeches and presenting content in a misleading manner in order to defame him, including fabricating calls for violence that he never made.”
