British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has said it will fight a lawsuit filed by US President Donald Trump over edited clips of a January 6, 2021 speech. The clips were shown in a BBC Panorama documentary and, according to Trump, made it appear that he directly encouraged supporters to storm the US Capitol.
A BBC spokesperson said on Tuesday, “As we have made clear previously, we will be defending this case. We are not going to make further comment on ongoing legal proceedings.”
Trump’s allegations against BBC
Trump has sued the BBC for up to $10 billion in damages, accusing the broadcaster of defamation and of violating a Florida law that bans deceptive and unfair trade practices. He is seeking $5 billion for each of the two claims made in the lawsuit.
According to Trump, BBC edited together different parts of his January 6 speech, including moments where he told supporters to march to the Capitol and said “fight like hell.” The edit did not include a part of the speech in which he called for peaceful protest. Trump argues this created a false impression that he was calling for violence.
BBC’s apology and legal stance
BBC has previously apologised to Trump, admitting an error of judgment. It acknowledged that the edit gave the mistaken impression that Trump had made a direct call for violent action. However, the broadcaster has also said there is no legal basis for the lawsuit.
British minister Stephen Kinnock backed the BBC’s position, saying the apology was sufficient and that there were no grounds for legal action. “It’s right that the BBC stands firm on that point,” he told Sky News on Tuesday.
Trump says apology is not enough
In the lawsuit filed on Monday in a Miami federal court, Trump said that despite apologising, BBC “has made no showing of actual remorse for its wrongdoing nor meaningful institutional changes to prevent future journalistic abuses.”
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team accused the broadcaster of bias, saying BBC “has a long pattern of deceiving its audience in coverage of President Trump, all in service of its own leftist political agenda.”
The controversy has become one of the biggest crises in the BBC’s 103-year history. The broadcaster has said it has no plans to rebroadcast Panorama documentary on any of its platforms. The fallout from the dispute led to the resignations of the BBC’s two most senior executives.
The BBC is funded largely through a mandatory licence fee paid by UK television viewers. Legal experts say this could make any potential payout to Trump politically sensitive. The broadcaster reported total revenue of £5.9 billion ($7.9 billion) in its last financial year.
BBC has said the documentary was not broadcast in the United States. However, Trump’s lawsuit claims it was available in the US through BritBox, a BBC-owned streaming platform. The lawsuit also says Canadian company Blue Ant Media held rights to distribute the documentary in North America.
Trump may have chosen to file the case in the United States because defamation cases in Britain must be brought within a year of publication, a deadline that has already passed for the Panorama episode. To succeed in a US court, Trump will need to prove not only that the edit was false and defamatory, but also that the BBC knowingly misled viewers or acted recklessly.