Trump says he’ll sue BBC ‘probably sometime next week’, will seek up to $5B in damages

WASHINGTON, DC: President Donald Trump said he is going to sue the BBC for between $1 billion and $5 billion in damages over the misleading edit of his January 6 speech, noting that he will file the lawsuit "probably sometime next week." 

This came after the British broadcaster issued an apology for the edit and confirmed it will not rebroadcast the controversial program, but strongly disagreed that there is a basis for a defamation claim.

Trump says he has to sue the BBC after it admitted cheating

Donald Trump said to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday, November 14, "I think I have to do that, I mean, they've even admitted that they cheated."

He claimed the edit "changed the words coming out of my mouth, that's worse than what CBS did with Kamala."

Trump also said he would raise the BBC issue with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer by asserting, "I'm going to call him over the weekend. He actually put a call into me. He's very embarrassed."

Trump slams BBC edit as ‘most egregious’

Speaking to Bev Turner of GB News ahead of his trip to Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Donald Trump talked about the nature of the edit and its implications.

On the crudeness of that manipulation, he mentioned, "You worry about AI because things like this can happen, you know, with their different geniuses. I mean, you know, you can do things. I've seen things that are incredible, but you can't imagine that BBC did this somewhat crudely, actually. Yeah. You know, it was done sort of crudely."

Turner said, "They'd clipped together, hadn't they? Two parts of the speech that were nearly an hour apart," to which Trump replied, "It's incredible."

Turner then added that the clips were used "to depict the idea that you had given this aggressive speech which led to this riot," and Trump replied, "And one making you into a bad guy. And the other one was, you know, my statement was a very calming statement. Uh, it's pretty incredible. I mean, I just, I couldn't believe it actually, I've never seen it. I've been doing this for a long time. I've never seen anything like that. That's the most egregious. I think that was worse than the Kamala thing with CBS in 60 Minutes."

BBC calls misleading edit an 'error of judgment'

The controversy emerged after the Daily Telegraph published portions of an internal BBC report by a former standards advisor. The report criticized a 'Panorama' news programme titled 'Trump: A Second Chance?' which aired just before the 2024 US election.

The program reportedly took three different clips from Trump's 6 January 2021 speech and put them together to make it seem like one quote. It made it seem that he urged supporters to march to the Capitol with him and "fight like hell."

The BBC characterized the edit as an "error of judgment." While it stopped short of a direct apology, the broadcaster confirmed that its chair, Samir Shah, sent a personal letter to the White House on Thursday to express regret for the mistake.

However, the BBC said it "strongly disagreed there is a basis for a defamation claim" and refused to pay compensation, rebuffing the earlier deadline given by Trump to pull the documentary and issue an apology while warning of a legal claim for "no less" than $1 billion.