Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett predicted President Trump could be entitled to “considerable” damages from BBC should he move forward with a lawsuit against the outlet over an allegedly misleading edit of his Jan. 6 speech featured in a 2024 documentary.
“It’s hard to put a value on it at this early juncture, but it’s considerable,” Jarrett said Monday on “Fox & Friends.”
“Two top executives resigned in disgrace when they removed the slander,” he continued, referencing the resignations of BBC News CEO Deborah Turness and BBC director-general Tim Davie.
“And yet the BBC still claims it wasn’t defamatory, which is absurd. They knew it was wrong.”
The outlet drew heavy backlash for a documentary examining Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, remarks before the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
“[It’s] a clear case of what I think is defamation,” Jarrett added.
“They deleted his caution to act peacefully, and then they spliced together the video to give the opposite impression, almost certainly defamatory.”
Critics like Jarrett claim the documentary was misleading because it omitted Trump urging supporters to protest “peacefully,” and stitched together remarks the president made nearly an hour apart to make it appear like one long statement.
TRUMP’S $5 BILLION LAWSUIT THREAT AGAINST BBC COMES AMID SPATE OF LEGAL WINS OVER MEDIA COMPANIES
Trump has threatened an up to $5 billion lawsuit over the ordeal.
In a previous statement to Fox News Digital, a spokesman for the president’s legal team accused the network of editing the documentary – which aired a week before the 2024 United States presidential election – “in order to try and interfere in” the outcome.
A BBC spokesperson said last Thursday that lawyers for the outlet had written to Trump’s legal team in response to a letter they had previously received, adding that BBC chair Samir Shah “separately sent a personal letter to the White House making clear to President Trump that he and the corporation are sorry for the edit of the president’s speech…”
The spokesperson said it has “no plans” to rebroadcast the documentary at the center of the controversy on any of BBC’s platforms, but added that, “While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”
According to Sky News, Shah pledged to combat Trump’s legal threats, writing in an email to staff, “There is a lot being written, said and speculated upon about the possibility of legal action, including potential costs or settlements.
“In all this we are, of course, acutely aware of the privilege of our funding and the need to protect our license fee payers, the British public. I want to be very clear with you – our position has not changed. There is no basis for a defamation case and we are determined to fight this.”
Turness — one of the company’s executives who resigned after the fact — also defended BBC against criticism, stressing that the outlet is “not institutionally biased” and that its journalists are “not corrupt.”
“There is no institutional bias. Mistakes are made,” she said.
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn and Brian Flood contributed to this report.
