Trump says he will sue BBC for at least $1bn over Panorama edit

US President Donald Trump has said he will take legal action against the BBC over how his speech was edited by Panorama, after the corporation apologised but refused to compensate him.

Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday evening, Trump said: “We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1bn [£759m] and $5bn, probably sometime next week.”

On Thursday, the BBC said the edit of the 6 January 2021 speech had unintentionally given “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action” and said it would not be broadcast again.

The corporation apologised to the president but said it would not pay financial compensation.

The BBC released that statement after Trump’s lawyers threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn in damages unless the corporation issued a retraction, apology and paid him compensation.

“I think I have to do it,” Trump told reporters of his plan to take legal action. “They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”

The president said he had not raised the issue with Sir Keir Starmer but that the prime minister had asked to speak to him. Trump said he would call Starmer over the weekend.

A search of public court record databases confirmed that no lawsuit had been filed in federal or state court in Florida as of Friday evening.

A BBC spokesperson said on Saturday evening: “We have had no further contact from President Trump’s lawyers at this point.

“Our position remains the same.”

In a separate interview on Saturday recorded before his comments on Air Force One, Trump said he had an “obligation” to sue the BBC, adding: “If you don’t do it, you don’t stop it from happening again with other people.”

He called the edit “egregious” and “worse than the Kamala thing”, a reference to a dispute he had with US news outlet CBS over an interview on the 60 Minutes programme with his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris.

In July this year, US media company Paramount Global agreed to pay $16m (£13.5m) to settle a legal dispute over that interview.

Sir Craig Oliver, former BBC editor and ex-director of politics and communications for former Prime Minister David Cameron, told BBC Today programme that this is a “nightmare” situation for the public broadcaster.

“The problem is that public money could be spent fighting this or settling this,” Sir Craig said, adding that Trump doesn’t “understand the BBC, how it is funded or how it works”.

The controversy stems from the way in which Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech was edited by Panorama for a documentary which aired in October 2024. During his address, he 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 in the speech, he said: “And we fight. We fight like hell.”

In the Panorama programme the clip shows him as saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

Controversy around how Trump’s speech was edited has led to the resignations of BBC director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness.

In its Corrections and Clarifications section, published on Thursday evening, the BBC said the Panorama programme had been reviewed after criticism of how Trump’s speech had been edited.

“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, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” the statement said.

Lawyers for the BBC have written to Trump’s legal team, a BBC spokesperson said this week.

“BBC chair Samir Shah has separately sent a personal letter to the White House making clear to President Trump that he and the corporation are sorry for the edit of the president’s speech on 6 January 2021, which featured in the programme,” they said.

They added: “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”

In its letter to Trump’s legal team, the BBC set out five main arguments for why it did not think it had a case to answer.

First it said the BBC did not have the rights to, and did not, distribute the Panorama episode on its US channels.

When the documentary was available on BBC iPlayer, it was restricted to viewers in the UK.

Secondly, it said the documentary did not cause Trump harm, as he was re-elected shortly after.

Thirdly, it said the clip was not designed to mislead, but just to shorten a long speech, and that the edit was not done with malice.

Fourthly, it said the clip was never meant to be considered in isolation. Rather, it was 12 seconds within an hour-long programme, which also contained lots of voices in support of Trump.

Finally, an opinion on a matter of public concern and political speech is heavily protected under defamation laws in the US.

The BBC’s apology came hours after a second similarly edited clip, broadcast on Newsnight in 2022, was revealed by the Daily Telegraph.