Donald Trump will sue BBC over Panorama speech editing US president tells reporters on board Air Force One
US President Donald Trump has said he will take legal action over the BBC’s editing of a speech broadcast on the corporation's Panorama show.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday (November 14), Donald Trump has confirmed he does plan to sue the BBC. The corporation previously apologised for its edited version of a 2021 speech broadcast by Panorama but declined to compensate the US president.
Mr Trump’s lawyers threatened to sue the BBC for one billion dollars in damages unless a retraction and apology were published and had given the BBC a 10pm Friday deadline to respond.
After the deadline elapsed, Mr Trump said: “We’ll sue them for anywhere between 1 billion dollars (£759.8 million) and 5 billion dollars (£3.79 billion), probably sometime next week.”
Earlier in the week, Mr Trump said in an interview with Fox News that the BBC had “defrauded the public” over the edit, which made it appear as if he was explicitly urging people to attack the US Capitol on January 6 2021.
Chairman Samir Shah has sent a personal letter to the White House to apologise for the editing, and lawyers for the corporation have written to the president’s legal team, a BBC spokesperson said.
The spokesperson 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.”
Mr Trump told GB News he has had “a lot of success” litigating against news organisations.
“Because it’s fake news,” he said. “But I’ve never had anything so fake as the BBC. I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’ve never seen anything like (the BBC edit). That’s, that’s the most egregious. I think that was worse than the Kamala (Harris) thing with CBS and 60 Minutes.”
In July, US media giant Paramount agreed to pay Mr Trump 16 million dollars (£13.5 million) to settle a lawsuit over a 2024 CBS interview with Ms Harris, the former vice-president and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.
Mr Trump also said the lawsuit would “probably” be filed “someplace in the US”, but commented that litigation in the UK “moves a little bit quickly”.
The Panorama scandal prompted the resignations of two of the BBC’s most senior executives: director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness.
Donald Trump Panorama edit: What did it say?
The programme, broadcast a week before the 2024 US election results, spliced two clips together so that Mr Trump appeared to tell 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.”
The broadcaster said it will not air the Panorama episode Trump: A Second Chance? again, and published a retraction on the show’s webpage on Thursday.
It said: “This programme was reviewed after criticism of how President Donald Trump’s 6th January 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. The BBC would like to apologise to President Trump for that error of judgment.”