US President Donald Trump has said he will sue the BBC over the way his speech was edited by Panorama, after the corporation apologized but refused to compensate him.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday night, Trump said, “We'll sue them for $1 billion or more.” [£759m] and $5 billion maybe sometime next week.”
On Thursday, the BBC said editing of the Jan. 6, 2021, speech had inadvertently created “the erroneous impression that President Trump made a direct call for violent action” and said it would no longer be broadcast.
The corporation apologized to the president, but said it would not pay financial compensation.
The BBC issued the statement after Trump's lawyers threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion in damages unless the corporation retracts, apologizes and compensates him.
“I think I have to do it,” Trump told reporters of his plan to sue. “They cheated. They changed the words that came out of my mouth.”
The President said he had not raised the issue with Sir Keir Starmer, but the Prime Minister had asked to speak to him. Trump said he would call Starmer over the weekend.
A search of public court databases confirmed that as of Friday evening, no lawsuits had been filed in federal or state court in Florida.
In a separate Saturday interview recorded before his comments about Air Force One, Trump said he had a “duty” to sue the BBC, adding: “If you don't do it, you won't prevent it from happening to other people.”
He called the redaction “egregious” and “worse than the Kamala story,” referring to a dispute he had with US news outlet CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris.
In July this year, the American media company Paramount Global agreed to pay $16 million (£13.5 million) to settle a legal dispute over this interview.
The controversy stems from the way Trump's January 6, 2021 speech was edited by Panorama for a documentary aired in October 2024. During his speech, he told supporters: “We are going to go down to the Capitol and cheer on our brave senators, congressmen and women.”
More than 50 minutes into his speech, he said: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”
In the Panorama program, a clip shows him saying: “We're going to go down to the Capitol… and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
Controversy over how Trump's speech was edited led to the resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness.
In a Corrections and Clarifications section published on Thursday evening, the BBC said the Panorama program had been revised following criticism of the way Trump's speech was edited.
“We acknowledge that our edits inadvertently created the impression that we were showing a single, continuous section of speech rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this created the erroneous impression that President Trump made a direct call for violent action,” the statement said.
BBC lawyers have reached out to Trump's legal team, a BBC spokesman said this week.
“BBC Chairman Samir Shah separately sent a personal letter to the White House making clear to President Trump that he and the corporation regretted the editing of the President's speech of January 6, 2021, which appeared on the program,” they said.
They added: “While the BBC sincerely regrets the way the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree that there is a cause of action for libel.”
In its letter to Trump's lawyers, the BBC outlined five main arguments for why it does not believe it has a case to respond.
He first stated that the BBC did not have the rights to distribute the Panorama episode on its American channels and was not distributing it.
When the documentary was made available on BBC iPlayer, it was only available to viewers in the UK.
Second, it says the documentary did not harm Trump because he was re-elected soon after.
Third, it said that the clip was not created to mislead, but simply to shorten a long speech, and that the editing was not done with malicious intent.
Fourth, it states that this clip was never intended to be viewed in isolation. Or rather, it was 12 seconds in an hour-long program that also included many pro-Trump voices.
Finally, opinion on a matter of public interest and political speech are strongly protected by defamation laws in the United States.
The BBC's apology came hours later. similarly edited clipbroadcast on Newsnight in 2022, the Daily Telegraph reported.
