President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Airforce One on Friday that he will sue the BBC for between $1 and $5 billion for cheating and putting words in his mouth in a Panorama television edit that featured a few seconds of his speech at the Ellipse outside the White House on January 6, 2021, for which the BBC’s director general and head of news resigned last week
The BBC is a fine broadcasting institution renowned worldwide for its reliable news and political analyses. And Panorama is its oldest current affairs flagship programme on television. It has been presented since 1953 by Britain’s best television journalists: Richard and his son David Dimbleby, Sir Robin Day, Sir Ludovic Kennedy, Sir Charles Wheeler and others.
In its programme titled Trump: A Second Chance shown on October 28, 2024 Panorama showed a clip of Trump’s speech compressed to show him encouraging his supporters “to walk down to the Capitol… and we fight, we fight like hell”.
The unedited true version shows him encouraging his supporters much earlier in the speech “to walk down to the Capitol and cheer on our senators and congressmen and women”.
What happened after Trump’s speech was that the joint session of Congress was violently attacked by a mob that had gathered earlier that morning to hear Donald Trump, though it is not clear whether those who spearheaded the attack heard the end of Trump’s speech.
The mob attacked the Capitol while Vice President Mike Pence was presiding a joint meeting of the US Congress to certify the election of Joe Biden. Pence and other members of Congress had to be removed in a hurry for their own safety as the mob shouted, “Hang Mike Pence!”; “Where is Pence? Bring him out!”; and “Traitor Pence.”
Trump described his speech at the Ellipse as perfect and beautiful and very calming. I read a transcript of it and found it rambling and incoherent. Near the beginning of his speech, he calls on his supporters to go to the Capitol and cheer their senators and congressmen and to go peacefully and patriotically.
The crescendo of his speech was when he tells his supporters near the end “And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore” and finishes with a call on his supporters to walk down Pennsylvania avenue to the Capitol to embolden the weaker Republican members of Congress “to take back our country”.
Between August 2023-24 Trump was indicted for knowingly making false claims of election fraud to supporters and falsely telling them that the vice president had the authority and might alter the election results, and directed them to the Capitol to obstruct the certification and pressure the vice president to take fraudulent actions he had previously refused to take.
The charges were dropped when he became president but without prejudice. In other words, they were left on the file and may be actioned after he leaves office – as the indictment is a statement of alleged facts in legal proceedings it cannot be used to found a defamation claim against anyone.
Immediately after the BBC resignations, Trump’s lawyers threatened the BBC with an absurd $1 billion dollar claim for defamation in the state of Florida unless there is “a full and fair retraction, an apology and the BBC compensates President Trump for the harm caused” by Friday, November 14, 2025.
The letter from Trump’s lawyers claims overwhelming substantial and reputational harm as the programme was distributed worldwide. In their reply the BBC’s lawyers said there was no defamation case to answer to which Trump replied personally by upping the ante to an even more absurd range of between $1 and $5 billion.
A defamation claim requires publication, falsity, malicious intent and serious damage to the good reputation of the claimant if he has one. The BBC retracted the offending clip – surprisingly it accepted that the offending edit of Trump’s speech gave the impression that Trump had called for violent action – and apologised as requested.
But the BBC robustly rejected Trump’s claim for compensation for a number of reasons, the most fundamental being that as the programme was not distributed in the US there was a jurisdictional bar to bringing an action in the state of Florida or any other state. The other reasons were that there was no serious damage to Trump as he was elected US president anyway; no malicious intent as the reason for the edit was to compress the crescendo of the speech; the programme as whole was not unfavourable to Trump; and finally and most importantly it was fair comment about a public figure on a matter of huge public interest in the US.
As for Trump’s wild claim of up to $5 billion as compensation for damage to his reputation, he must know that in England damages in defamation cases have been capped by case-law to the maximum people can recover in personal injury cases for losing a physical faculty for which juries in defamation cases are told the maximum is £300,000.
Two recent cases in the US may be the reason for his hyperbolic claims in billions of dollars. In Alex Jones v. Sandy Hook Families (2022) the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay $1 billion to 26 Sandy Hook families for falsely claiming the massacre of 20 children and six teachers at their elementary school was a hoax perpetrated to justify gun control – still unpaid owing to Jones’ bankruptcy.
In US Dominion v Fox News Network, LLC (2023) a defamation case settled for $787.5 million after Fox News accepted it had falsely claimed Dominion’s voting systems had manipulated votes in the 2020 presidential election – the one that Trump claimed was fraudulent.
It would be ironic if the BBC that has strived for over one hundred years to be truthful and impartial and a byword for honest reporting has to pay millions to Donald Trump for damage to his reputation.
