US President Donald Trump has threatened to take legal action after the BBC apologized but refused to compensate Panorama for editing his speech.
“We’re going to file a $1 billion to $5 billion lawsuit against them, probably next week,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday evening.
The BBC said on Thursday that edited content from the January 6, 2021, speech inadvertently gave “the false impression that President Trump had directly called for violent action” and it would never be broadcast again.
The company apologized to the president but said it would not provide financial compensation.
The BBC issued a statement after Trump’s lawyers threatened to seek $1 billion in damages unless the BBC retracted, apologized and paid compensation.
“I think we should do it,” Trump told reporters, announcing plans to take legal action. “They lied. They changed the words that came out of my mouth.”
The President said he had never raised the issue with Sir Keir Starmer but that the Prime Minister had asked to speak to him. Trump said he would call Starmer over the weekend.
A search of public court records databases found no lawsuits had been filed in federal or state courts in Florida as of Friday evening.
“I have an obligation to sue the BBC,” Trump said in a separate interview recorded before his remarks about Air Force One. “If we don’t, we can’t stop this from happening again to other people.”
He called the edits “serious” and “worse than the Kamala incident,” a reference to his dispute with US news outlet CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris.
In July this year, US media company Paramount Global agreed to pay $16 million (£13.5 million) to settle a legal dispute over the interview.
The controversy stems from the way Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech was edited by Panorama for a documentary that aired in October 2024. He told supporters during his speech: “We will walk to the Capitol and cheer on our brave senators and representatives.”
In a speech more than 50 minutes later, he said: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”
A clip from the Panorama program shows him saying: “We’ll walk to the Capitol. And I’ll be with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
BBC director Tim Davie and news director Deborah Terness have resigned following a controversy over editing Trump’s speech.
The BBC said the Panorama program had been reviewed following criticism of how Trump’s speech had been edited in a corrections and clarifications section published on Thursday evening.
“We acknowledge that our editing unintentionally gave the impression that we were showing a single, continuous section of the speech rather than extracting several points from it, which gave the false impression that President Trump had directly called for violent action,” the statement said.
This week, a BBC spokeswoman said BBC lawyers had sent a letter to Trump’s legal team.
“BBC Chairman Samir Shah has separately sent a personal letter to the White House making it clear to President Trump that he and the company apologize for the editing of the President’s speech of January 6, 2021, which appeared on the programme,” they said.
He added: “The BBC sincerely regrets the way in which the video was edited but strongly disagrees that there are grounds for a claim of defamation.”
In a letter to Trump’s legal team, the BBC set out five key arguments for why it believes there is no case to answer.
First, the BBC stated that it had no rights to and would not distribute Panorama episodes to its US channels.
When the documentary was made available on BBC iPlayer, it was limited to UK viewers only.
Second, it was stated that the documentary did not harm Trump because he was re-elected shortly after.
Third, it was stated that the video was not produced to cause misunderstanding, but was simply produced to make a long statement short, and was not edited with malicious intent.
Fourth, we said that clips should not be considered in isolation. Rather, it was only 12 seconds in a one-hour program, and it contained many voices supporting Trump.
Finally, opinions of public interest and political speech are strongly protected under U.S. defamation laws.
The BBC’s apology came hours after a second, similarly edited clip, broadcast on Newsnight in 2022, was revealed by the Daily Telegraph.
