Trump threat to sue BBC over speech edit faces high hurdles

President Donald Trump, unswayed by the BBC’s apology and resignations of its top officials, is persisting with his threat to sue the network for as much as $5 billion despite significant legal barriers to prove he was deliberately defamed.

“I think I have to do it,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Friday, continuing his quest to punish the British television network over an edit of his Jan. 6, 2021, speech that made it seem he was directly calling for violence at the U.S. Capitol.

The effort faces a host of legal questions.

First, it’s not clear that U.S. courts even have jurisdiction, given that the documentary never aired in the U.S. and was geo-blocked in the U.S. on the BBC’s streaming service.

The president would also need to prove that the BBC had acted with “actual malice” toward him when it edited the documentary — a high bar required for public figures that was established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964 in order to protect free speech.

“They’ve got to meet the actual malice standard with New York Times versus Sullivan, which is a very tough standard,” said Gregory Germain, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law. Trump is “the ultimate public figure.”

Trump’s lawyer said in a Nov. 9 letter to the British Broadcasting Corp. that it had until Friday evening to issue an apology, retract the Panorama documentary at the center of the dispute and offer financial compensation for “harm caused” — or face a $1 billion defamation lawsuit.

“The damages he asked for were completely unrealistic and he would be very unlikely to recover anywhere near that,” said Lyrissa Lidsky, a professor at University of Florida Levin College of Law. “He’s claiming reputational harm but he won the presidency afterwards.”

The BBC met some of Trump’s demands on Thursday when it issued a formal apology and retracted the broadcast, titled “Trump: A Second Chance,” which aired a week before the 2024 presidential election. That followed the surprise resignations of BBC Director-General Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness days earlier. But no compensation was offered.

‘Sincerely regrets’

“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,” the broadcaster said in a statement.

The White House referred a request to comment to Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, who didn’t immediately respond to an email.

On Thursday, after the BBC apology, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team said “It is now clear that BBC engaged in a pattern of defamation against President Trump by intentionally and deceitfully editing his historic speech in order to try and interfere in the Presidential Election.”

The BBC’s editing spliced together two parts of Trump’s speech before the riot in a way that gave the impression of a direct call for violence. While more than a thousand Trump supporters invaded the Capitol building, injuring 140 police officers and causing millions of dollars in damage, his speech never directly called for the attack.

The time limit for filing defamation lawsuits in the U.K. is one year, meaning it’s too late for Trump to sue there. His lawyer has said the suit will be filed in Florida.

Fighting the media

The case, if filed, would also have to surmount another legal standard that protects publications that are “substantially true,” Germain said. The remarks that were spliced together were both things Trump said, even if the edit was poorly done, he said.

“I don’t think they should win a Pulitzer Prize for the editing, but it’s not defamatory,” Germain said. “What he’s alleging is that he doesn’t like the way they edited the video, he’s not alleging that they posted a deep fake or something.”

A lawsuit against the BBC would add to a growing list of complaints Trump has filed against news outlets he claims have treated him unfairly, including recent multi-billion cases he has pending against the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, both of which deny wrongdoing.

CBS agreed to pay $16 million to settle Trump’s suit accusing it of election interference over how the network’s "60 Minutes" edited a quote from an interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris, which he claimed smoothed out a meandering answer. ABC paid a similar amount to settle a suit over news host George Stephanopoulos’s incorrect reference to Trump being “found liable for rape” in a suit by E. Jean Carroll, while the jury had only found him liable for sexual abuse. The jury had rejected Carroll’s rape claim.

Benjamin Zipursky, a professor at Fordham Law School in New York, said a lawsuit by Trump against the BBC would likely fail because the Supreme Court has long recognized “the importance of not chilling political speech with the threat of lawsuits.”

“It’s the entire foundation of the Supreme Court’s protection of free speech that threats of costly lawsuits could cause the media to censor itself, and this case is a dramatic example of that,” Zipursky said.

———

(With assistance from Hadriana Lowenkron and Airielle Lowe.)