A federal magistrate judge has ordered President Donald Trump to sit for a deposition by Dec. 11 in his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation, unless the discovery deadline is pushed past Dec. 18.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett issued the order Thursday after the BBC’s legal team complained about delays in scheduling the deposition. Trump had previously canceled a deposition that was set for Oct. 16. The BBC had filed a motion to compel the deposition, noting that Trump’s sit-down requires “additional planning” but that he “accepted the obligations of civil litigation” when he chose to file suit.
Trump’s legal team pushed back hard on the BBC in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“The formerly respected and now disgraced BBC defamed President Trump by intentionally, maliciously, and deceptively doctoring his speech in a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 Presidential Election,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said. “The BBC has a long pattern of deceiving its audience in coverage of President Trump, all in service of its own leftist political agenda. President Trump’s powerhouse lawsuit is holding the BBC accountable for its defamation and reckless election interference just as he has held other fake news mainstream media responsible for their wrongdoing.”
A spokesperson for the BBC declined to comment.
What the lawsuit is about
Trump filed the $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC late last year over a 2024 “Panorama” documentary that spliced together separate portions of his Jan. 6, 2021 speech to supporters, creating what critics say was a misleading impression that he directly incited violence.
The documentary showed Trump saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And I’ll be there with you. And we fight — we fight like hell.”
In the actual, unedited speech, Trump said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
It was 54 minutes later in the same speech that Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” for election integrity — a detail the edited documentary omitted.
The BBC has since apologized for the edit and pulled the program from its platforms, but it maintains the error does not rise to the level of defamation. The fallout from the controversy led to the resignations of BBC News CEO Deborah Turness and BBC director-general Tim Davie.
A separate court order has also limited the BBC from relitigating the events of Jan. 6 as part of its defense in the lawsuit, and the judge earlier threatened Trump with sanctions if he continued to delay sitting for his deposition.
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