US President Donald Trump, who vows to sue the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for “between $1 billion and $5 billion” over a misleadingly edited clip in a Panorama documentary, faces an uphill battle in court, with legal analysts pointing to a host of formidable jurisdictional and legal hurdles.
“We have to do it, they’ve even admitted that they cheated, not that they couldn’t have done that. They cheated. They changed the words that came out of my mouth,” President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
bbc They also issued a formal apology last week for an edit of the October 2024 documentary that stitched together two parts of the president’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech.
In the edited version, the “erroneous impression” emerged that he was directly calling for violent action.
While the apology led to the resignation of the corporation’s two top executives, the news agency refused to pay financial compensation, stating that it “did not agree that there was a basis for the defamation claim”, as Sky News reported.
Although bbcBecause of the regret, legal experts suggest that a successful lawsuit is a long shot.
Legal obstacles in the UK
The easiest route to bring a defamation case would be in the UK, as the show was originally broadcast here. But this road seems to be closed.
The one-year statute of limitations for a defamation lawsuit in the UK has almost certainly expired, as the show aired in October 2024. But even if it hadn’t, President Trump would face a difficult task in proving serious harm to his reputation, a key requirement under UK law.
It is expected that bbcThe defense would be that the editing was an error of judgment, not malice, and that Trump was re-elected as president shortly after the documentary aired, and suffered no tangible damage to his reputation in the UK as a result.
Legal obstacles in the US
The other way is to take the case to a US court, potentially in Trump’s home state of Florida, which introduces a different set of challenges, mainly related to jurisdiction and the high bar for public figures to prove defamation.
The main problem that Trump will face is that the bbcThe Panorama program was not broadcast on any American television and was geographically restricted on the BBC’s iPlayer platform.
To sue in Florida, Trump’s legal team would have to convince the court that bbc intentionally targeted its content at a Florida audience, which seems like a difficult argument to make.
If a court accepts jurisdiction, the President of the United States would have to meet the “actual malice” standard established by the United States Supreme Court in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.
From bbc has already stated that the editing was “involuntary” in his formal apology when writing his retraction: “We accept that our editing 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 this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.”
This statement directly contradicts the “actual malice” standard.
A political quagmire for the UK prime minister
The situation also created a diplomatic and political dilemma for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Trump told reporters he plans to have a phone conversation with Starmer over the weekend.
From bbc is a public corporation, funded by a licensing fee and legally independent of the government, Starmer steps in to dissuade Trump from the lawsuit, may accuse him of compromising the bbcEditorial independence.
If he remains silent, he will leave a beloved British institution facing a potentially costly and protracted legal battle with a sitting American president, a fight that could ultimately be funded by British taxpayers.
In a separate interview on Saturday, Nov. 15, recorded before his comments about Air Force One, Trump declared the lawsuit a “must,” adding, “If you don’t do it, you won’t stop it from happening again to other people.
However, the legal path to a multimillion-dollar settlement comes with complications that can make the threat of a lawsuit more potent than its eventual filing.
