US President Donald Trump has threatened to sue British public broadcaster the BBC for $1 billion, the latest in a series of actions against major news organizations.
Trump’s lawyers said the BBC violated Florida libel laws by editing video clips from the 2024 Panorama documentary, which aired just a week before the November presidential election, to give the impression that the BBC actively encouraged supporters to riot at the US Capitol after losing the presidential election to Joe Biden in January 2021.
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A BBC documentary shows President Trump giving a fiery speech in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, before the election results were finalized. In it, President Trump tells his supporters that he will “walk to the Capitol,” then immediately says, “We will fight like hell.” But the editors spliced together two unrelated sentences that were actually 54 minutes apart to make it appear as if he was encouraging his supporters to riot.
In a letter sent to the BBC by his lawyer, Alejandro Brito, President Trump demanded that the documentary be retracted, saying it contained “malicious and derogatory” editing. He also requested a payment to “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused.”
Brito said the broadcaster had until 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on Friday to respond or it would have “no choice but to exercise its legal and equitable rights, all of which are expressly reserved and not waived, including the filing of a lawsuit seeking damages in excess of $1 billion.”
He is expected to sue in the US rather than the UK.
The BBC has been mired in accusations of institutional bias since a leaked memo from a former consultant accused it of broadcasting “false, defamatory, derogatory, misleading and inflammatory statements” about Trump and other areas of coverage.
Following the leak, BBC chairman Sameer Shah publicly apologized for an “error in judgment” over the editing of Trump’s speech and for the resignations of director general Tim Davie and news director Deborah Turness on Sunday.
Emma Thompson, a reputation management lawyer at British law firm Keystone Law, said Mr Trump technically has a favorable case against the BBC. “If you slice up the video and conflate the two comments to advance a narrative, that’s exactly defamation,” Thompson told Al Jazeera.
But media experts say it is typically very difficult for public figures like Trump to win defamation lawsuits under U.S. law.
Defamation is ‘incredibly difficult’ to prove under US law
David Erdos, a law professor at the University of Cambridge, said U.S. courts would first need to establish “what is the meaning of what is being published” to justify or deny President Trump’s claim that the message conveyed by the edited footage was misleading.
But in contrast to English law, where defamation suits are based on whether the published information is false or misleading, in the United States the plaintiff must prove “not only that it was false, but that there was reckless disregard for the falsehood.”
In other words, U.S. law requires proof of malice and sets an “incredibly high bar” for defamation claims. “We need to prove the falsehoods, or we need to prove that they (the BBC) recklessly ignored the falsehoods, and we obviously don’t know that,” Erdos told Al Jazeera.
“Even if something is defamatory, and even if it’s serious, unless you can prove that the person knew the statement was false, the claim will fail.”
Thompson, of Keystone Law, said the First Amendment guarantees free speech, protects a wide range of expression, and places the burden of proof squarely on the claimant, in this case the president of the United States.
She called the requirement to prove malice “incredibly difficult.” “Unless you have evidence like emails or meeting notes, you can’t prove what someone else is thinking,” the lawyer said. “You have to prove that the act was intentional, you have to show that the act was intended to cause harm to that person, whether it’s reputational or financial damage.”
How easy is it to prove “reputational damage”?
Mr Trump’s lawyers claimed the BBC broadcast caused him “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” and called on the British company to apologize and “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused”.
If financial loss is involved, it is easier to prove that a publication or broadcast has caused reputational damage. “Companies could claim they lost a contract because of the (news) story,” Thompson said. But it would be much more difficult to prove whether the US presidency was compromised.
But she said Trump would take the timing of publication to his side as an “aggravating factor.” The BBC aired the documentary just before the US presidential election in November 2024, which Mr Trump’s lawyers claim was a clear attempt to influence the election.
Gavin Phillipson, a law professor at the University of Bristol, said that under U.S. law, plaintiffs must prove reputational damage claims by showing “how many people heard the allegations or saw the media coverage in question.”
In this case, BBC services, including the main streaming platform iPlayer, are not available in the US. “It’s a hurdle to show that the Panorama documentary is damaging his reputation in Florida,” Phillipson said.
litigation in uk
He could sue in British courts, where the hurdles for proving a defamation claim are lower, but he is unlikely to win anything close to what he would get if he were successful in the United States.
Mr Phillipson said Trump’s proposed $1 billion figure was “ridiculous” and would never be accepted in a British court, where the highest payout ever recorded in a similar case was £350,000 ($461,000).
Mr Erdos, the Cambridge lecturer, said the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recognized that large-scale litigation, particularly for libel, interferes with freedom of expression. “There is recognition that something like this can curtail freedom of expression,” he says.
Several US media companies, including CBS and ABC News, have paid tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits brought by the US president.
In July, CBS News parent company Paramount agreed to pay him $16 million for editing a 2024 interview aired by its CBS subsidiary.
The lawsuit was filed over a 60 Minutes broadcast featuring then-Vice President Kamala Harris, which President Trump claimed was deceptively edited to favor Democrats ahead of the 2024 election. President Trump initially sought $10 billion in damages, but later increased his claim to $20 billion.
Last December, Disney-owned ABC agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ on-air comments that Trump was “found responsible for raping” author E. Jean Carroll.
The BBC could follow the example of these broadcasters and settle the case, or it could follow the example of the New York Times and fight back. Last year, President Trump filed a complaint seeking $15 billion in damages from media outlets over their reporting of an affair with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
So far, the Manhattan-based newspaper has refused to suspend publication, saying, “The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics.”
