Copyright The Daily Beast
President Donald Trump has threatened to sue the BBC, the British broadcaster and one of the world’s most renowned journalistic organizations, for $1 billion over how it edited a tiny segment of a documentary it aired about his political comeback in October 2024. Already the storm has forced the BBC’s director general and its CEO of news to quit, and Trump claims to be pressing ahead. Here England’s most distinguished libel lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, tells the president why this is a court case he cannot win. Donald Trump’s vainglorious threat to sue the BBC for $1 billion in damages over reporting in its flagship Panorama program about his campaign for re-election could well be his undoing. Another problem for Trump is that it is not defamatory to make an editorial mistake. He must plead and prove that the broadcast caused serious harm to his reputation. Given Trump is known in England as a liar and braggart, inclined to attack and harm his enemies, it is most unlikely that the BBC will be found to have lowered that reputation in any meaningful way. And besides, England has a public interest defense to libel actions, not to mention strict time limits on bringing them, which Trump has well overstepped. As Panorama was not broadcast in the United States, he must sue in the UK or not at all. He has no reason to be upset with the program, which showed a number of his supporters explaining to a British audience why he was likely to win. For 11 seconds, it showed two clips (unseparated) from his January 6, 2021 speech to a crowd of his supporters before many set off to despoil the Capitol. In the first few seconds, he urges them to march (but only to meet some senators—an objective that was edited out). Then the footage cuts to his inflammatory rhetoric inciting his followers to “fight like hell or we won’t have a country anymore.” This clip had been key evidence in his impeachment trial, where his conviction for inciting the insurrection was blocked by Republican senators. It was a stupid and unprofessional mistake to run the two clips together, and the BBC has apologized. But this does not make the program defamatory. The BBC has a good defense to any claim by Trump, and that defense is “truth”—actually, in English law, it is “substantial truth,” easy to prove not only from the second clip but from all the other evidence available from his impeachment. The case will be decided not by partisan senators, but by a High Court judge who will not give Trump the latitude he has received in his US trials, where his disrespect to the judge would in England earn him a prison sentence for contempt of court. He would spend up to a week in the witness box under cross-examination from barristers in wigs and gowns on the subject of his real reputation and whether it is possible to lower it. There is a further defense of public interest that should protect the BBC. There can be no doubt that transmission of the Panorama program served that purpose, in the run-up to the presidential election—the result of which would affect England as well as the world. The only snag is that it requires reasonable behavior by the defendant—and the edit fails that test. But other factors must be taken into account which can override a single mistake, namely that the broader program was well-researched and almost excruciatingly fair to Trump. Its overall impact served the public interest, was not damaging and did not lower his reputation in England then or now. Trump’s best hope is that the BBC will cave in, as some law firms and media organizations have done in the US. Yes, the BBC sometimes settles unnecessary defamation actions to avoid legal costs. But in this case it knows it must not quail—its reputation is actually the strongest “soft power” that Britain has in the world, and can only be enhanced if it makes a full-blooded defense of its right to inform that world of US politics, and it has made an apology for the error that occurred in that process. If it surrenders, its own reputation will lie in tatters. If Trump ventures again to England, where he was last feted by the King himself with a carriage ride round Windsor, he will not return to the White House with $1 billion in his pocket, and it is hard to see how his reputation will be enhanced. If the BBC fails to fight, that will damage its own reputation irretrievably, so the likelihood is that it will come out with legal guns blazing to defend any suggestion that it is false to suggest that Trump egged on the insurrectionists.
