United States President Donald Trump has threatened to sue the British public broadcaster, the BBC, for $1bn in the latest of a series of actions he is taking against major news outlets.
Trump’s lawyers said the BBC violated Florida defamation law by editing a video clip in a 2024 Panorama documentary – aired just one week before the November presidential election – to give the impression that he had actively encouraged his supporters to riot at Capitol Hill in January 2021 after he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden.
In the BBC documentary, Trump is shown delivering a fiery speech before the confirmation of the election result in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. In it, he says, “We fight like hell”, directly after telling supporters, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol”. However, editors had spliced together two unrelated sentences, which were in fact 54 minutes apart, to make it sound like he was encouraging his supporters to riot.
In a letter sent to the BBC by his counsel, Alejandro Brito, Trump has demanded a retraction of the documentary, which, he says, contains “malicious, disparaging” edits. He has also demanded payments to “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused”.
The broadcaster has been given until Friday 22:00 GMT to respond, or, Brito said, he will be “left with no alternative but to enforce his legal and equitable rights, all of which are expressly reserved and are not waived, including by filing legal action for no less than $1,000,000,000 in damages”.
It is understood that he would file a suit in the US, not the United Kingdom.
The BBC has been mired in accusations of institutional bias since a leaked memo by a former consultant accused it of airing “false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading, and inflammatory statements” about Trump, as well as in other areas of coverage.
The leak was followed by a public apology from BBC chair Samir Shah for the “error of judgement” over the editing of Trump’s speech and the resignations of Director General Tim Davie and Chief Executive of News Deborah Turness on Sunday.
Emma Thompson, a reputation management lawyer at the UK law firm Keystone Law, said, technically, Trump has a good case against the BBC. “If you slice a video and conflate two comments in order to drive a narrative, that’s exactly what libel is,” Thompson told Al Jazeera.
However, media experts say it is typically very difficult for public figures like Trump to win defamation cases under US law.
‘Unbelievably difficult’ proving defamation under US law
David Erdos, professor of law at the University of Cambridge, said a US court would first have to establish “what sort of meaning should be ascribed to what is being published”, validating or contradicting Trump’s claim that the message conveyed by the edited footage was misleading.
But as opposed to UK law, where defamation cases rest on whether the published information was false or misleading, in the US, the plaintiff must prove “not only that it was false, but that there was reckless disregard of falsity”.
In other words, US law requires proving malice, which sets an “incredibly high bar” for suing for defamation. “One would have to prove falsity or that they [the BBC] showed reckless disregard of falsity – and we obviously don’t know that,” Erdos told Al Jazeera.
