Donald Trump’s legal letter was addressed to the wrong building and contained a pretty embarrassing choice of words.
On Monday, the US president threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn in damages over an edit of his January 6 speech in a Panorama programme.
The sequence appeared in the BBC documentary Trump: A Second Chance?, which aired the week before last year’s US election.
A leaked 19-page memo on impartiality by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee, ruled the broadcaster gave the impression that he told supporters he would march with them to the US Capitol to “fight like hell.”
Following this, Trump threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn in damages if the corporation doesn’t issue a full apology and retraction of the programme. In a legal letter, he gave the corporation until Friday evening to apologise and “appropriately compensate” him.
But there seem to be two embarrassing gaffes with the letter.
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The first error is that the letter was addressed to the wrong BBC building. Naming BBC chairperson Samir Shah and BBC General Counsel Sarah Jones, the letter is addressed to BBC Studios Productions Limited, registered at the BBC’s HQ of Broadcasting House.
But the full address used on the letter is that of the old BBC Television Centre in West London, where BBC Studios Limited is located.
BBC Television hasn’t been based at the White City location since 2013, when it moved to Broadcasting House, which serves as the BBC HQ and home of BBC News.
Secondly, the writer of the letter might need to brush up on their vocabulary, after they used the word “salacious” to describe the “fabricated statements” aired by the BBC.
The word salacious would usually only be used in sexual matters. Merriam-Webster’s definitions of the word are “arousing or appealing to sexual desire or imagination” or “lecherous, lustful.”
Both errors were pointed out by veteran BBC journalist John Simpson.