Trump says he will take legal action against BBC over Panorama edit
US President Donald Trump has said he will take legal action against the BBC over how his speech was edited by Panorama, after the corporation apologised but refused to compensate him.
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday evening, Trump said: “We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1bn and $5bn probably sometime next week.”
The BBC has said the edit of the 6 January 2021 speech had unintentionally given “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”.
The BBC apologised but said it would not pay financial compensation.
The controversy led to the resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness.
“I think I have to do it,” Trump told reporters of his plan to take legal action. “They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”
He said he had not raised the issue with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer but that Starmer had asked to speak to him, and Trump would call him over the weekend.
Earlier this week the US president’s lawyers threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn in damages unless the corporation issued a retraction, apologised and compensated him.
Searches of public court record databases earlier showed no legal action had been filed so far.
Federal and state courts in Florida, where a case would likely be filed, are now closed for the weekend.
In an interview aired on GB news on Saturday and recorded before Trump confirmed he would take legal action, the US president said: “I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’ve never seen anything like that. That’s, that’s the most egregious. I think that was worse than the Kamala thing with CBS and 60 Minutes.”
In July this year, US media company Paramount Global agreed to pay $16m (£13.5m) to settle a legal dispute with Trump regarding an interview it broadcast on CBS with former vice-president Kamala Harris.
“I think I have an obligation to do it,” he said. “If you don’t do it, you don’t stop it from happening again with other people.”
The BBC’s apology came hours after a second similarly edited clip, broadcast on Newsnight in 2022, was revealed by the Daily Telegraph.
In its Corrections and Clarifications section, published on Thursday evening, the BBC said the Panorama programme had been reviewed after criticism of how Trump’s speech had been edited.
“We accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the statement said.
Lawyers for the BBC have written to President Trump’s legal team in response to a letter received on Sunday, a BBC spokesperson said on Thursday.
“BBC chair Samir Shah has separately sent a personal letter to the White House making clear to President Trump that he and the corporation are sorry for the edit of the president’s speech on 6 January 2021, which featured in the programme,” they said.
They added: “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
In its letter to Trump’s legal team, the BBC set out five main arguments for why it did not think it had a case to answer.
First it said the BBC did not have the rights to, and did not, distribute the Panorama episode on its US channels.
When the documentary was available on BBC iPlayer, it was restricted to viewers in the UK.
Secondly, it said the documentary did not cause Trump harm, as he was re-elected shortly after.
Thirdly, it said the clip was not designed to mislead, but just to shorten a long speech, and that the edit was not done with malice.
Fourthly, it said the clip was never meant to be considered in isolation. Rather, it was 12 seconds within an hour-long programme, which also contained lots of voices in support of Trump.
Finally, an opinion on a matter of public concern and political speech is heavily protected under defamation laws in the US.
