BBC apologizes to Trump over its misleading edit, but says there's no
basis for a defamation claim
[November 14, 2025]
By BRIAN MELLEY
LONDON (AP) — The BBC apologized Thursday to U.S. President Donald Trump
over a misleading edit of his speech on Jan. 6, 2021 but said it had not
defamed him, rejecting the basis for his $1 billion lawsuit threat.
The BBC said Chair Samir Shah sent a personal letter to the White House
saying that he and the corporation were sorry for the edit of the speech
Trump gave before some of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as
Congress was poised to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in
the 2020 election that Trump falsely alleged was stolen from him.
The publicly funded broadcaster said there are no plans to rebroadcast
the documentary, which had spliced together parts of his speech that
came almost an hour apart.
“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 BBC wrote in a retraction.
Trump’s lawyer had sent the BBC a letter demanding an apology and
threatened to file a $1 billion lawsuit for the harm the documentary
caused him. It had set a Friday deadline for the BBC to respond.
While the BBC statement doesn’t respond to Trump’s demand that he be
compensated for “overwhelming financial and reputational harm," the
headline on its news story about the apology said it refused to pay
compensation.
The dispute was sparked by an edition of the BBC’s flagship current
affairs series “Panorama,” titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” broadcast
days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The third-party production company that made the film spliced together
three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech into what appeared to
be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and
“fight like hell.”
Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted
supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
Director-General Tim Davie, along with news chief Deborah Turness, quit
Sunday, saying the scandal was damaging the BBC and “as the CEO of BBC
News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me.”
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A view of the logo outside the BBC Headquarters in London,
Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
The letter from Trump's lawyer demanded an apology to the president
and a “full and fair” retraction of the documentary along with other
“false, defamatory, disparaging, misleading or inflammatory
statements” about Trump.
Legal experts have said that Trump would face challenges taking the
case to court in the U.K. or the U.S. They said that the BBC could
show that Trump wasn’t harmed because he was ultimately elected
president in 2024.
Deadlines to bring the case in English courts, where defamation
damages rarely exceed 100,000 pounds ($132,000) expired more than a
year ago. Because the documentary was not shown in the U.S., it
would be hard to show that Americans thought less of him because of
a program they could not watch.
While many legal experts have dismissed the president’s claims
against the media as having little merit, he has won some lucrative
settlements against U.S. media companies and he could try to
leverage the BBC mistake for a payout, potentially to a charity of
his choice.
In July, Paramount, which owns CBS, agreed to pay $16 million to
settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over a “ 60 Minutes” interview with
former Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump alleged that the
interview was edited to enhance how Harris, the Democratic nominee
for president in 2024, sounded.
That settlement came as the Trump-appointed head of the Federal
Communications Commission launched an investigation that threatened
to complicate Paramount’s need for administration approval to merge
with Skydance Media.
Last year, ABC News said it would pay $15 million to settle a
defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos ’ inaccurate
on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly
liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. A jury found that he was
liable for sexually abusing her.
The apology and retraction came as BBC said it was looking into a
report in the Daily Telegraph that its Newsnight program in 2022 had
similarly spliced together parts of the same speech by Trump.
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