Copyright Deadline
The President of the United States is threatening to sue the BBC for $1B. That sentence needs a bit of digesting, although given Donald Trump’s litigious ways and the febrile political atmosphere surrounding the UK’s 100-year-old public broadcaster, it maybe shouldn’t come as such a surprise. Alongside getting to grips with the loss of Director General Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness, the corporation is now grappling with what could end up being a rather expensive lawsuit, and the BBC has by Friday to respond. We understand that this response is currently being prepared as the BBC simultaneously handles the wider fallout of the excoriating Prescott memo. The BBC declined comment on the lawsuit. The filing from Trump’s legal team says the BBC “intentionally sought to completely mislead its viewers by splicing together three separate parts of President Trump’s speech to supporters on January 6 2021,” which it calls “salacious, “fabricated,” “damaging” and “inflammatory.” This edit, as is currently making headline news around the world, was the catalyst for yet another BBC crisis and the shock resignations of Davie and Turness. Trump’s lawyers are also demanding an apology and a retraction of the doc. Notably, they are threatening to sue in Florida, not the UK, where defamation laws are tighter and these suits tend to be easier to win. The issue with suing in the UK would be that the 12-month statute of limitations for a defamation suit has elapsed (the show aired in late October 2024). The Trump family has in the past won legal battles across the pond, but this amounted to just $3m of damages and legal costs when The Daily Mail’s publisher settled with Melania Trump over an article about her modelling career. Thoughts have turned immediately to whether there is a world in which the BBC would have to cough up this colossal figure, which amounts to £760M at current conversion rates. The figure is around one fifth of the BBC’s overall licence fee income and amounts to more than double the BBC’s news and current affairs budget. The idea of hard-working licence fee payers forking out to help settle a Trump lawsuit may be too much for the British public to stomach, especially in this atmosphere. The legal filing, which has been obtained by Deadline, cites Florida law that states words are defamatory when “they tend to subject one to hatred, distrust, ridicule, contempt or disgrace or tend to injure one in one’s business or profession.” “Even if the BBC attempts to whitewash its conduct as simply an expression of its opinions, Florida law makes clear that such a defense will not absolve its liability,” it adds. Legal experts and commentators have responded with scepticism. Were this to go to court, Trump’s team would struggle to get anywhere near the $1B figure, they say. In fact, many point to America’s far more liberal freedom of expression laws compared to the UK and think the BBC would have a great shot of winning, although it could of course still be costly. Trump’s threat is “totally meaningless” and he does this “very very often,” George Freeman, the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York, told the BBC. Robert Peston, a well-known face on British screens who presents a weekly show on ITV, said on X: “The legal advice to the BBC I am told is that President Trump was not meaningfully damaged by Panorama’s manipulation of his 6 January speech, and that therefore there is no legal necessity to pay him compensation. The BBC board is therefore likely to resist and fight his demand to be “appropriately compensated” out of court, and will risk him carrying through on his threat to seek $1bn in damages by going to court.” The BBC’s defense could rely on the fact that for a person in the U.S. to show they have been defamed, “that person you are accusing needs to have acted with malice,” according to Joshua Rozenberg, a lawyer and legal commentator who spoke to the BBC’s Today program this morning. “There are therefore restrictions on the arguments you can put forward,” he added. BBC Chair Samir Shah yesterday said the clipw as edited as such because BBC News wanted its audience to “better understand” how Trump’s January 6 2021 speech was being “received by his own supporters.” There are also question marks over just how widely the Panorama episode titled Trump: A Second Chance has been disseminated. The doc did not air on U.S. streamer BBC Select and so was not actually available in the U.S., while it has now come off BBC iPlayer in the UK. Blue Ant Media sells it around the world and has taken information about the doc off of its website. The documentary has really only come to the world’s attention over the past week or so since the leaking of the Prescott memo, which highlighted the ruckus the edit caused among the BBC Board and top brass behind the scenes. Rather than stating that the doc has been watched by U.S. audiences, the Trump lawsuit says clips “have been widely disseminated throughout various digital mediums, which have reached tens of millions of people worldwide.” This, it says, has “caused President Trump to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm.” The likely reality is that Trump was only made aware of the doc over the past week. Even Chris Ruddy, the founder of Conservative-leaning Newsmax and a friend of Trump’s, told Today that “if the BBC took the case to court they would prevail.” The spectacle But Ruddy pointed out that it is the spectacle of these lawsuits, as much as whether they are won or lost, that really matters to Trump. “A lot of media companies would prefer to not have to go through that spectacle,” he added. “The President would see this as a big victory in his claim that the media is ‘out to get him’.” One only needs examine recent settlements with CBS owner Paramount and ABC News as proof. Both were settled out of court for $16M and $15M respectively but have been a major blow to their newsrooms’ reputations, while leading to tricky questions around Trump’s influence over the media in the States. The BBC doesn’t have anywhere near the cut-through of an ABC or CBS in America but the corporation is widely respected around the world as a bastion of impartial news – arguably much more so than in its home country – and any drawn-out legal wrangling that ends in settlement is not what the corporation needs.
