United States President Donald Trump has threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn over an edited clip that has plunged the broadcaster into a public relations crisis and prompted the resignations of two top executives.
In a letter sent to the BBC, Trump’s legal team has demanded the retraction of “false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading, and inflammatory statements” contained in a Panorama documentary aired a week before the 2024 US presidential election.
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The letter, written by Trump’s lawyer Alejandro Brito, gives the BBC until Friday to provide a “full and fair” retraction of the documentary and “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused”, or face legal action in the US state of Florida.
“The BBC is on notice. PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY,” says the letter, which was widely circulated on social media.
A BBC spokesperson told Al Jazeera the broadcaster was reviewing the letter and would “respond directly in due course”.
Despite his legal threat, Trump would find it difficult to prove defamation in the US, where the 1st Amendment provides expansive protections of speech.
Kyu Ho Youm, a 1st Amendment expert at the University of Oregon, said he was “very doubtful” that Trump would be able to succeed in a suit against the BBC.
“Insofar as what I can tell, the broadcast seems to be factually truthful. Hence, there’s not much falsity in the broadcast,” Youm told Al Jazeera.
“If there’s no actionable falsity, 1st Amendment law is irrelevant. By the way, what’s Trump’s reputation? By every measure, he is more or less ‘libel-proof’ as a convicted felon.”
US courts are also barred from enforcing foreign judgements that are incompatible with the 1st Amendment, Youm said, limiting Trump’s ability to take a case in a more plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction such as the United Kingdom.
“There’s no chance that the judgement will be enforced, simply because the SPEECH Act of 2010 prohibits it,” he said.
The BBC documentary, titled Trump: A Second Chance?, has been mired in controversy since the leak of an internal memo that criticised producers for editing Trump’s remarks to make it appear that he had directly encouraged the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
In the documentary, Trump is shown saying, “We fight like hell”, directly after telling supporters, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol”.
Trump had actually followed his comments about going to the Capitol with a remark about cheering on “our brave senators and congressmen and women”, and made his “fight like hell” comment nearly an hour later.
The memo, written by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s standards committee, also accused the broadcaster of suppressing critical coverage of transgender issues and displaying anti-Israel bias within the BBC Arabic service.
The BBC’s director-general, Tim Davie, and its head of news, Deborah Turness, stepped down on Sunday amid the fallout of the controversy.
Trump welcomed the resignations in a post on Truth Social, accusing the BBC executives of being “corrupt” and “very dishonest people”.
BBC chair Samir Shah on Monday acknowledged that the clip was misleading and apologised for the “error of judgement”, but rejected claims that the broadcaster is institutionally biased.
Shah also said the memo did not present “a full picture of the discussions, decisions and actions that were taken” by the standards board in response to concerns raised internally before the leak.
Trump’s legal threat is the latest in a flurry of actions he has taken to punish critical media.
Those moves include defamation claims against outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and ABC News, funding cuts at NPR and PBS, and the removal of Associated Press journalists from the White House press pool.
