Donald Trump’s £7.4billion BBC lawsuit is predicated on fewer than 300 individuals watching Panorama

The US President has taken the broadcaster to court over an episode of Panorama that aired in the UK a week before the 2024 election, but was not broadcast in the United States

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Donald Trump is still suing the BBC despite his lawyers admitting fewer than 300 people saw the programme he’s suing over.

The US President has taken the broadcaster to court over an episode of Panorama that aired in the UK a week before the 2024 election.

In a right-wing media meltdown earlier this year, it emerged the introduction of the episode truncated a series of things Trump said at his speech to the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6 2021, shortly before his followers tried to storm the US Capitol Building to prevent the lawful certification of his election loss to Joe Biden.

The BBC has acknowledged the programme may have led viewers to believe Trump said the sentences one after the other, which he did not. But Congress and US courts have ruled repeatedly that Trump did use the speech to inspire his followers to march on the Capital, in what became the bloodiest insurrection in modern American history.

Trump has occasionally indicated he believed the BBC had used AI to make it appear that he’d said words he did not say. This is untrue, and is not in the lawsuit.

Trump’s lawyers sued the BBC for a total of £7.4billion ($10bn) – claiming the corporation had made a “brazen” attempt to interfere with the 2024 election, and had caused him reputational damage. But when a revised version of the lawsuit was published this week, it emerged the episode was seen by fewer than 300 people in the United States.

This figure was taken from testimony by Richard Cooper, the BBC’s director of digital distribution. In a deposition, Cooper told Trump’s lawyers the programme had been watched 570,000 times on iPlayer. But of those, only 285 are from IP addresses that could have been based in America, and 34 of those were from Florida, where the case is being heard.

Cooper also said the US-based IP addresses didn’t necessarily mean the viewer was actually in the United States. For example, of those 34 streams from Florida, most were traced back to an IP address in Slough, via the cruise ship company Carnival, which has its HQ in Florida.

That 285 is also over the entire period the documentary was available online, which is about a year. And only a week of that was before the election.

It means Trump is seeking $35,087,719.30 (£25,974,385.96) for each potential viewer linked to a US internet connection.

Last week Trump’s legal team scrambled to re-write the lawsuit, which originally claimed the programme had caused Trump financial damage – and the judge told them the President would have to prove it by handing over information about the financial performance of hundreds of his companies. The judge accepted the new complaint, which now “focuses President Trump’s damages allegations on the reputational harm that he has suffered”, according to his legal team. It also now considers “personal reputational harm as the primary compensatory injury.”