Why the BBC should stand up to Trump's legal threat

As a lawyer, I have seen my fair share of ambitious lawsuits.

- MARK STEPHENS

But even by those standards, Donald Trump’s threat to sue the BBC for $1bn (£759m) - over its edited broadcast of his January 6 speech - is a spectacular legal misadventure. From where I sit, it looks less like a fight for justice and more like a public relations gambit that could backfire badly on him.

There are a few legal tripwires between Trump and any conceivable victory against the BBC. For a start, the limitation period for any UK defamation claim has lapsed: the US president had one year from the broadcast date of 28 October 2024, meaning the deadline expired on 28 October 2025 - about two weeks ago. However, a claim in Florida would still be within time, since the limitation period there is two years, but less likely to succeed.

Trump’s problem is that the edition of Panorama wasn’t broadcast in the United States, and BBC iPlayer isn’t available there either, so no one in that jurisdiction would have watched it there on catch-up. That means it is not clear that any US court could entertain the claim. Setting aside that technicality, even if the case somehow got off the ground, the legal and evidential hurdles facing Trump remain formidable.

The most ticklish problem for Trump’s lawyers is that his reputation in relation to January 6 was already in tatters before the BBC aired its documentary, which took the president’s rally cry to “fight like hell” - a reference to contesting the presidential elections - and spliced it onto a comment made almost an hour earlier when he told supporters he was going to walk with them to the Capitol (“to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”).