Donald Trump has confirmed he will sue the BBC over a spliced Panorama edit for ‘anywhere between $1 billion to $5 billion’.
The broadcaster apologised to the US president after a clip of one of his speeches appeared on Panorama, which was edited to make it seem like he was explicitly urging people to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
He said: ‘We’ll sue them. We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion (£792m) and five billion dollars (£3.79bn), probably sometime next week.
‘We have to do it, they’ve even admitted that they cheated. Not that they couldn’t have not done that. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.’
The spliced clip implied that Trump told the crowd: ‘We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.’
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The words broadcast were spoken by Trump almost an hour apart.
The broadcaster told Trump it was an ‘error of judgement’ and the program will ‘not be broadcast again in this form on any BBC platforms’.
A BBC spokesperson said chairman Samir Shah has sent a personal letter to the White House to apologise for the editing of the speech in the Panorama program, but added: ‘While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.’
Trump threatened legal action after a report from Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee.
following controversy over the editing of a Donald Trump speech in a Panorama documentary Tim Davie and BBC Head of News Deborah Turness have resigned
The scandal, for which the BBC has apologised, has also led to high-profile resignations, with BBC director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness quitting on Sunday.
The episode, Trump: A Second Chance? has been taken down from the BBC website, and a retraction was published on the webpage on Thursday evening.
It said: ‘This program was reviewed after criticism of how President Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech was edited.
‘During that sequence, we showed excerpts taken from different parts of the speech.
‘However, we accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.
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‘The BBC would like to apologise to President Trump for that error of judgement.
‘This program was not scheduled to be re-broadcast and will not be broadcast again in this form on any BBC platforms.’
Can Trump actually sue the BBC?
Robert Spritzer, an American political scientist and author, stated that the statute of limitations for when such a $1 billion suit could be filed in Britain has passed.
This means that if this suit goes forward, it would likely be filed in an American court, where the statute of limitations doesn’t apply.
Spritzer argues that the key to understanding Trump is realizing litigation is one of his chief weapons that he’s used for decades.
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