Trump threat to sue BBC for up to $7.7b over speech edit faces high hurdles
The BBC issued an official apology on Thursday, complying with some of Trump’s demands and withdrawing the broadcast titled: Trump: A Second ChanceIt was released a week before the 2024 presidential election. It follows the surprise resignations days earlier of BBC director general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness. However, no compensation was offered.
‘I really regret it’
“Whilst the BBC sincerely regrets the way the video clip has been edited, we strongly disagree that there is a basis for a claim of defamation,” the broadcaster said in a statement. he said.
US President Donald Trump will need to prove that the BBC acted with “actual malice” against him.Credit: access point
The White House referred a request for comment to Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, but the lawyer did not immediately respond to the email.
On Thursday, following the BBC’s apology, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team said: “It is now clear that the BBC engaged in a pattern of defamation against President Trump by deliberately and deceptively editing his historic speech in an attempt to interfere with the presidential election.”
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The BBC’s editing combined two parts of Trump’s pre-riot speech in a way that gave the impression of a direct call for violence. While more than a thousand Trump supporters invaded the Capitol, injuring 140 police officers and causing millions of dollars in damage, Trump’s speech never directly called for an attack.
The deadline to file a defamation lawsuit in the UK is one year, so it is too late for Trump to file a lawsuit there. His lawyer said the case would be filed in Florida.
Fighting the media
If the lawsuit is filed, another legal standard that protects publications that are “substantially accurate” must also be overcome, Germain said. Even if the editing was poorly done, he said, the words put together were both things Trump said.
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“I don’t think they should win the Pulitzer Prize for editing, but it’s not libelous,” Germain said. “What he’s claiming is that he didn’t like the way they edited the video, he’s not claiming they posted a deepfake or anything like that.”
A lawsuit against the BBC would add to Trump’s growing list of grievances, including recently pending multibillion-dollar lawsuits against news organizations he claims have treated him unfairly. New York Times And Wall StreetJournalBoth deny wrongdoing.
CBS agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit accusing Trump of election interference over the operation of the network. 60 Minutes He edited an excerpt from an interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris and claimed it corrected a convoluted answer. ABC paid a similar amount to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’s erroneous statement that Trump was “found responsible for rape” in a lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll; The jury found Trump responsible only for sexual abuse. The jury rejected Carroll’s rape claim.
Benjamin Zipursky, a professor at Fordham Law School in New York, said Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC will likely fail because the Supreme Court has long recognized “the importance of not chilling political discourse with the threat of litigation.”
“The fact that threats of costly litigation can cause the media to censor itself is the entire basis for the Supreme Court’s protection of free speech, and this case is a dramatic example of that,” Zipursky said.
Bloomberg
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