(WASHINGTON) – President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the BBC, which seeks an extraordinary $10 billion, represents a coercive ploy to globalize his domestic threats to a free and independent press and to chill reporting overseas, PEN America said in a statement today.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Florida, accuses the BBC of broadcasting a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump,” saying its edits – which spliced together two different parts of Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, 2021 – constituted an attempt to influence the 2024 election. The lawsuit seeks $5 billion for defamation and $5 billion for unfair trade practices.
“President Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC is not about accountability or accuracy, but rather a sitting U.S. president exporting the same coercive tactics he has repeatedly deployed at home to chill scrutiny and erode press freedom around the world. This legal action goes even further by extending his campaign to dismantle and delegitimize public media – an effort he waged in the United States while targeting PBS and NPR – to another democratic nation,” said Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America. “Responsible news organizations acknowledge and correct mistakes, as the BBC has done in this case, but Trump seeks something else entirely: to intimidate the BBC and to deter other news organizations from providing rigorous coverage of his administration. The president should abandon this dangerous effort to use the courts as a cudgel against the free press.”
The BBC has already apologized for an editing error made more than a year ago in a show broadcast only in the UK, yet the president appears to be using this case to undermine support for British public media and chill his critics abroad, echoing tactics he has employed against public broadcasting in the United States.
Since the broadcast in question was never shown in the United States, it is not clear that the federal court in Florida, where the suit was filed, would have jurisdiction to hear the case – or that the president could show he suffered reputational damage. But, as is usually the case with Trump’s legal cases and threats, whether a sound legal basis for the lawsuit exists is not allowed to get in the way of the main focus: to silence critics preemptively, both with respect to the target news outlet and all other outlets and, potentially, to pull other punitive levers against the independent press.
PEN America Actions on Trump Threats to the Free Press
PEN America has issued numerous statements and actions regarding President Trump and the press. Its statements involved his defamation lawsuit against Penguin Random House and The New York Times, restricting press access, threatening to revoke licenses, and other measures PEN America argues undermined the First Amendment. PEN America has also criticized the Trump administration for threats to pass laws or sue writers using anonymous sources. These concerns echo those raised by the PEN International Congress, which in its 2024 Resolution on Free Expression in the United States warned of escalating governmental hostility toward the media and urged U.S. authorities to safeguard press freedom as a cornerstone of democracy.
About PEN America
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. Learn more at pen.org.
Contact: Suzanne Trimel, [email protected], (201) 247-5057