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The landing page for “Trump: A Second Chance?”—an episode of the BBC’s investigative show Panorama , which originally aired in October of 2024—is missing a play button. In its place, there’s a note : “Sorry, this episode is not currently available.” A disclaimer says that the documentary has been retracted. All that remains is a still photograph of Trump, glowering into the camera.

That episode—or, really, a snippet from it—is at the heart of Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the BBC. In an edited clip of a Trump speech, delivered on January 6, 2021, the BBC stitched together sentences he had uttered about fifty minutes apart, making it sound like he was directly inciting the insurrection at the Capitol that day. After the edit was highlighted in a leaked internal memo in 2025, the BBC apologized for the error.…