Can Donald Trump sue the BBC for $1bn and which party would win?

Donald Trump has grabbed the headlines after threatening to sue the BBC for $1bn (£760m) for what the corporation has accepted was a misleading edit of his speech on 6 January 2021 during the Capitol Hill insurrection. Here the Guardian examines the US president’s potential path to bringing and winning a libel claim. Where will Trump sue? As the Panorama episode was first broadcast on 28 October last year, Trump has missed the boat for filing a defamation claim in London, where it must be brought within a year. However, in Florida the statute of limitations is two years, so he is not timed out, and BBC content is available through BBC.com in the US, where there is also the BBC Select streaming service. A letter from Trump’s lawyer to the BBC notified them of his intention to bring proceedings in Florida if there is “not a full and fair retraction of the documentary”, an apology and appropriate compensation for the harm caused. Can he really sue for $1bn? In the UK the biggest defamation award made by a court is believed to be £1.5m, but in the US the highest award was the $1.4bn, the Infowars founder and conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, was ordered to pay to the families of victims from the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, which he claimed was a hoax. However, that case is an outlier, with the next highest US payout believed to be the $787.5m Fox agreed to pay the voting equipment company Dominion in settlement over a claim that Dominion was involved in a plot to steal the 2020 election. Trump has not elaborated on how the $1bn was reached and has form for making legal claims with eye-catching amounts, including the $10bn (later increased to $20bn) he sought from the BBC’s US partner CBS News, which he accused of doctoring an interview with Kamala Harris to cast her in a positive light; the $15bn defamation lawsuit filed against the New York Times for “spreading false and defamatory content” about him; and a $10bn libel claim against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting of his links to Jeffrey Epstein. Which party would win a court case? Unlike in the UK, public figures in the US are held to a higher standard of proof in defamation cases than the general public, as they must prove actual malice. Hence the letter from Trump’s lawyer that referred to “the actual malice behind the decision to publish the wrongful content, given the plain falsity of the statements”. As in the UK, the claimant must show that they suffered injury as a result of the libel. The letter to the BBC states that Trump has suffered “reputational and financial harm”. If it got to court, lawyers for the BBC would probably argue that the content in question was part of a documentary that also featured pro-Trump voices. They would also probably question whether the polarising president had actually suffered harm, and could argue that most people had already made their mind up on what his role was with respect to the Capitol Hill insurrection. The debate over his role in the attack has already been well played out in the US, where he was acquitted by the Senate after a 2021 impeachment trial in which he was accused of “incitement or insurrection”. George Freeman, the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York, told the BBC that the $1bn figure was “totally meaningless” and that Trump “has a long record of unsuccessful libel suits – and an even longer record of letters like the one you received that don’t end up as lawsuits at all. They’re just there to threaten and to scare media he doesn’t like.” How is the BBC likely to respond? The BBC has said it will respond in due course. It has already made something of an apology and retraction, although probably not to the extent Trump wants, and the bigger decision will be whether to offer a settlement. Paramount, the parent company of CBS News settled with Trump for $16m, despite many legal experts believing the claim was baseless. However, that was widely seen as intended to ensure approval of Paramount’s merger with Skydance media. The ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos agreed to pay $15m in settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed over comments Stephanopoulos made saying Trump had been found “liable for rape”, whereas the jury had actually found that he “sexually abused” the columnist E Jean Carroll.