Comment on Trump says he will likely sue the BBC for up to $5 billion
Denjin@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Make it a trillion, you still won’t get a penny.
Comment on Trump says he will likely sue the BBC for up to $5 billion
Denjin@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Make it a trillion, you still won’t get a penny.
tal@lemmy.today 1 week ago
I dunno. In the US, I’d say it wouldn’t go anywhere, as US law heavily favors the defendant (which would be BBC here) in a defamation suit, but English law has historically been exceptionally favorable to someone suing over defamation (here, Trump) than American law is, and this has actually led to some major disagreements in the past.
At one point, there were so many people trying to engage in venue shopping trying to find ways to sue over US works from the UK’s legal jurisdiction that the US passed a law saying that it wouldn’t recognize defamation lawsuits from courts that didn’t extend at least as much protection as the First Amendment did precisely for this reason, which was an exceptional situation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
There were some revisions made to English law in response as well, so the situation has changed somewhat, but I don’t know to the degree:
kagis
This article says that he probably can’t, just because he’s waited too long to do so:
newsweek.com/why-donald-trump-bbc-defamation-clai…
reads further
Oh, wait. He’s threatening to sue in Florida. Yeah, I don’t think that that’d succeed.
en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_defamation_law
Trump would qualify as a public figure, so it’s really hard for him to win defamation suits.
The Newsweek article I linked to also says that because the content in question wasn’t intentionally displayed in Florida, Florida courts probably wouldn’t have jurisdiction in the first place.
Denjin@feddit.uk 1 week ago
As the BBC have said in a statement, there was no material damage done to Trump (he was elected just a few days later after the programme aired), the programme wasn’t shown in the US, and it was about 6 seconds of a 1 hour episode that featured a mix of pro and anti Trump points of view.
There is literally no case to answer.