The BBC has asked a US court to dismiss Donald Trump’s $10bn (£7.5bn) lawsuit over the way a documentary edited one of his speeches, warning that pursuing the case would have a “chilling effect” on its reporting on the president.
In papers filed with the Florida court hearing the case, US lawyers for the BBC claimed that Trump’s reputation had not been damaged by the documentary, given that it aired in the UK a week before his re-election.
The station’s lawyers also reiterated that the Panorama documentary, Trump: A Second Chance, was simply not published in the United States, including Florida, so the court did not have jurisdiction to hear the case.
They also cited other cases to argue that defendants should not have to deal with “expensive but meritless litigation,” which restricted the ability to cover public figures.
“Even more so when (the) claimant is among the most powerful and prominent people in the world, on whose activities the BBC reports every day,” the BBC case states.
“The chilling effect is clear. Therefore, Florida federal courts frequently dismiss flawed defamation lawsuits like this one at the pleading stage.”
Lawyers for the corporation cited Trump’s recent lawsuit against CNN, which was dismissed as “baseless.” The 2022 lawsuit objected to the network’s use of the phrase “the big lie,” which it used to refer to the president’s claim that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
The BBC already personally apologized to Trump for a 12-second clip in the 2024 documentary, which stitched together two parts of the speech given on January 6, 2021. The clip suggested Trump told the crowd: “We’re going to walk to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we’ll fight. We fight like hell.”
The words were taken from sections of his speech nearly an hour apart. When the edit emerged late last year, the BBC retracted it for “unintentionally” giving “the erroneous impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.”
However, the BBC said the documentary was not shown in the United States or Florida.
Their case reads: “More than a year later, even after being re-elected with the support of a sizable majority of Florida voters, the president alleged that the documentary defamed him in Florida, where the defendants never aired it.”
He said that despite claims by Trump’s lawyers, the BBC never made the documentary available in the United States on BritBox International, a paid streaming service owned by BBC Studios, or on BBC.com, the broadcaster’s international website.
He said that while third-party distributors acquired the rights to show the documentary abroad, none aired it in the United States. He said a shorter international version of the documentary did not even contain the edit of the Jan. 6 speech.
“The court should dismiss this claim from the outset,” the BBC case states.
A BBC spokesman said: “We have said throughout that we will vigorously defend the case against us. Simply put, the documentary was never broadcast in Florida, nor in the United States.
“It was not available to view in the US on iPlayer, online or any other streaming platforms, including BritBox and BBC Select. Therefore, we challenged the Florida court’s jurisdiction and filed a motion to dismiss the president’s claim.”
