Donald Trump has threatened to sue the British Broadcasting Corporation after it aired an edited version of a speech he gave ahead of the 2021 Capitol Riots.
The edited speech was included in part of a Panorama episode, prompting Trump’s lawyers to demanded that the BBC remove the documentary before apologizing and compensating him appropriately.”
The letter from the sitting president’s lawyers claims that failure to comply with his demands will lead to the broadcaster being slapped with a lawsuit of “no less” than $1 billion (£760 million).
BBC chair Samir Shah is still considering how to respond to Donald Trump, whom he called a “litigious fellow.”
However, this is far from the first time that Trump has threatened a media company with legal action over perceived damages to his reputation.
September 2025 - The New York Times
Trump sued The New York Times for a staggering $15 billion, in a lawsuit aimed at four journalists and three articles written before the 2024 presidential election.
In a Truth Social post, he called the NYT “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the nation’s history” over stories which covered topics raised in the book Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.
However, the president was forced to refile an amended and shortened version of the lawsuit after a judge threw it out for being “florid and enervating.”
Sentences which described Trump’s 2024 win as “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history” were removed in an effort which halved the complaint to 40 pages.
July 2025 - The Wall Street Journal
Donald Trump sued The Wall Street Journal in July 2025, after the newspaper published a story which claimed that Trump had allegedly written a lewd letter for convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.
The WSJ claimed that the letter had been included in a 50th birthday book for Epstein and that it included a drawing of a woman’s torso, with Trump’s signature above her navel.
The president has sued the Wall Street Journal, its publishing company Dow Jones and Company, Down Jones’ owner News Corps and its owner Rupert Murdoch as well as two WSJ journalists for $10 billion (£7.5 billion) in damages.
The publication since filed a motion to dismiss Trump’s claim, on the grounds that they believe the letter to be authentic.
Trump has denied writing the letter.
December 2024 - Walt Disney and ABC ‘rape’ claims
Walt Disney, which owns ABC News, settled a lawsuit for $15m against the company after anchor George Stephanopoulos repeatedly made claims that Trump had been liable for raping E Jean Carroll.
Walt Disney agreed to pay $1m for Trump’s legal fees and donate $15m to Trump’s future presidential library foundation.
The lawsuit focused on Stephanoplous referring to a civil case, in which Caroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a New York department store in the 1990s.
In fact, Trump had been found as being liable for defamation and sexual abuse, but not rape, which is considered a separate offence.
October 2024 CBS Lawsuit
In October 2024, Trump sued CBS News over claims that it had released two different clips of an interview with Kamala Harris from its 60 Minutes program.
He claimed that this amounted to deceitful manipulation to harm his bid for reelection as President of the United States.
In July 2025, Paramount, which owns CBS, agreed to pay $16 million towards Trump’s presidential library and to release full transcripts of interviews with presidential candidates on 60 Minutes.
Critics slammed the broadcaster’s decision, accusing it of settling with Trump in order to get approval for a planned merger.
Pulitzer Prize
The president sued board members of the Pulitzer Prize after awards were given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for stories related to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
He filed the lawsuit in 2022, almost six years after the election, and claimed that the articles were defamatory, according to court documents seen by Politico.
The 4th District Court of Appeal in Florida ruled that Trump’s lawsuit could proceed since he was a “willing participant,” despite being president, meaning the Floridian Supreme Court will need to review the case and decide whether it can move forward.
CNN “big lie” lawsuit
Trump was defeated in a lawsuit after a judge delivered a bombshell ruling that CNN’s use of the phrase “big lie” was not defamatory.
The president had sued the broadcaster for $475 million over the phrase, which was used in reference to Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was “stolen,” and also for allegedly comparing him to Adolf Hitler.
However, Trump’s case was dismissed after District Judge Raag Singhal, one of the president’s own appointees, said that neither claim meets the standards of defamation.
“CNN’s use of the phrase ‘the Big Lie’ in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people,” Singhal wrote, according to CNN. “No reasonable viewer could (or should) plausibly make that reference.”
“Being “Hitler-like” is not a verifiable statement of fact that would support a defamation claim,” Singhal added, while noting that Nazi references made by any political party are “odious and repugnant.”
Miss USA 2012
In 2014, Miss Pennsylvania Sheena Monnin settled a $5 million arbitration judgment against her after alleging that the Miss USA 2012 results were rigged.
Trump owned the pageant from 1996 until 2015.
Monnin alleged that another contestant had told her that she had seen a list of which five women would make it to the final. She added that the women were allegedly called in the same order as they were listed, according to The Guardian.
The settlement meant that Monnin did not need to retract her statements, which the Trump Organization’s lawyer suggested had discouraged women from taking part in the Miss USA.
TrumpNation
The New York City born businessman sued an author named Timothy L. O'Brien for $5 billion, after the writer suggested that Trump’s real net worth was between $150 and $250 million.
He made the claims in his book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.
At the time, Trump claimed that his net worth was numbered in the billions and suggested that the author had made his claims in malice.
However, an appellate court upheld a New Jersey Superior Court judge’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit on the basis that three of O’Brien’s confidential sources made claims which were consistent.
Steele dossier
In October 2023, Trump filed a lawsuit in London against Orbis Business Intelligence and ex-British spy Christopher Steele.
He alleged that Orbis had violated British data protection laws by compling a 2016 dossier about Trump which was named the Steele Dossier.
The president claimed that Steele had made "'shocking and scandalous claims’ that were false.”
"I can confirm that I did not, at any time engage in perverted sexual behaviour including the hiring of prostitutes to engage in 'golden showers' in the presidential suite of a hotel in Moscow,” Trump wrote in his witness statement.
However, Steele’s name was later removed from the lawsuit and the High Court sided with Orbis and dismissed Trump’s claim in February 2024 on the basis that he was filing outside of the six-year period of limitations.
In March 2024, Trump was ordered to pay legal fees of £300,000 to Orbis.
The Chicago Tribune
Trump’s legal battles with the media date all the way back to 1984, when he sued Paul Gapp, an architecture critic for The Chicago Tribune, according to ABC News.
He claimed that Gapp had "virtually torpedoed" his plan to build a 150-storey skyscraper off the southern tip of Manhattan in his column.
At the time, Gapp wrote that the tower was "one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.”
District Judge Edward Weinfeld ruled that Gapp’s opinion column was protected by the First Amendment and dismissed Trump’s $500 million lawsuit.
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