United States President Donald Trump says he will take the BBC to court over the way his 6 January 2021 speech was edited in a Panorama documentary, despite the broadcaster issuing an apology.
Trump spoke to reporters on Air Force One on Friday evening, saying the lawsuit could be filed next week.
He said, “We’ll sue them for anywhere between one billion dollars and five billion dollars, probably sometime next week.”
The BBC had earlier admitted that the edited clip gave a wrong impression of Trump’s remarks on the day of the Capitol riot. The corporation said the edit unintentionally made it seem as though Trump directly encouraged violent action.
In its statement on Thursday, the BBC said the programme would not air again. It apologised to the president but said it would not pay compensation.
Trump’s lawyers had demanded one billion dollars in damages unless the BBC retracted the edit, apologised and paid him.
Speaking on the flight, Trump insisted he would go ahead with legal action. “I think I have to do it. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth,” he said.
He added that he had not spoken about the matter with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, though Starmer had asked to speak with him. Trump said he planned to call him over the weekend.
A search of public court records showed that no case had been filed in Florida as of Friday evening.
In an earlier interview recorded before the Air Force One comments, Trump said he felt an obligation to sue the broadcaster. “If you don’t do it, you don’t stop it from happening again with other people,” he said. He described the edit as “egregious” and “worse than the Kamala thing,” referring to a past dispute with CBS over an interview with Kamala Harris. That case ended in July, when Paramount Global paid 16 million dollars to settle.
The controversy began after Panorama cut together two separate parts of Trump’s 2021 speech. In the original version, Trump first told supporters, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.” More than 50 minutes later, he added, “And we fight. We fight like hell.”
In the documentary, the edit played as a continuous line: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
Public pressure over the edit led to the resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness.
In its Corrections and Clarifications note, the BBC said the programme had been reviewed after complaints. “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,” the corporation said.
A BBC spokesperson confirmed that its lawyers had written to Trump’s legal team. The spokesperson added that BBC chair Samir Shah also sent a personal letter to the White House expressing regret for the error.
The broadcaster said it did not believe Trump had a valid defamation case, listing several points in its response. It argued that the BBC did not air the programme in the United States, that Trump suffered no harm as he was re-elected soon after, that the edit was made only to shorten the speech, and that the clip formed just 12 seconds of an hour-long documentary. It also noted that political speech is strongly protected under US defamation law.
The BBC’s apology came the same day the Daily Telegraph revealed another similar edit from a 2022 Newsnight broadcast.
