U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he would likely sue the BBC next week for between $1 billion and $5 billion after the British broadcaster admitted it wrongly edited a video of his speech but insisted there was no legal basis for a defamation claim.
The British Broadcasting Corporation is facing its biggest crisis in decades after two senior leaders resigned over allegations of bias, including the editing of Trump’s Jan 6, 2021 speech before his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s lawyers had initially set a Friday deadline for the BBC to retract its documentary or face a lawsuit seeking “no less than $1 billion.” They also demanded an apology and compensation for what they said was “overwhelming reputational and financial harm.”
The BBC acknowledged the edit was an “error of judgement” and issued a personal apology to Trump on Thursday, but said it would not rebroadcast the documentary and rejected the defamation claim.
“We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion, probably sometime next week,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he traveled to Florida.
“They admitted that they cheated,” he said. “They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”
Trump said he had not spoken with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer about the matter, but planned to call him this weekend, adding that Starmer had tried to reach him and was “very embarrassed.”
The documentary aired on the BBC’s flagship “Panorama” programme spliced three video excerpts of Trump’s speech together, creating the impression that he incited the Jan 6 riot. His lawyers said the edit was “false and defamatory.”
In an interview with GB News, Trump called the edit “impossible to believe” and likened it to election interference.
“I made a beautiful statement, and they made it into a not beautiful statement,” he said. “Fake news is not strong enough; this is corrupt.”
Trump said the apology was not enough, adding that the edit stitched together two speech segments nearly an hour apart to portray him as provoking riots, when one of the clips was actually calming in tone.
BBC Chair Samir Shah sent a personal apology to the White House on Thursday, and British culture minister Lisa Nandy called the apology “right and necessary.”
The broadcaster said it has no plans to rebroadcast the documentary and is now investigating fresh allegations involving editing practices on another programme, “Newsnight.”
