Little by little, week by week, the BBC is humiliating President Donald Trump in a Florida courtroom that lies just 15 miles from his much-prized golf resort outside Miami.
Trump’s defamation lawsuit, which is seeking $10 billion in damages from the UK’s public broadcaster over an October 2024 Panorama documentary that included clumsy editing of the President’s inflammatory speech to his supporters in Washington on 6 January 2021, is beginning to show signs of being on life support.
On Tuesday, Judge Enjoliqué Lett ruled in favour of the BBC’s motion to force Trump and his businesses to divulge detailed financial information to support claims contained in the original lawsuit. That suit argued that Trump: A Second Chance? caused “massive economic damage to his brand value, and significant damage and injury to his future financial prospects”.
Lett gave the BBC the green light to try to force Trump’s lawyers to hand over the President’s financial records, in an effort to interrogate whether the broadcast’s US transmission truly resulted in financial damages. She observed in her ruling that “all of President Trump’s brand, properties and businesses…are said to have been impugned….Reputational, economic damages, all of that is now at issue in the case”.
Trump, of course, has no intention of placing his financial data in the hands of BBC lawyers, and even during Tuesday’s hearing the President’s attorney indicated that a massive climbdown may soon be underway.
Al Brito, leading Trump’s legal team, told the judge that the President’s claims against the BBC had “evolved”. He said that an amended version of the lawsuit would soon be unveiled in which “the damages are limited in a way that is different from when the case was originally filed. Even if there has been harm to the brand, we are not pursuing that as part of our damages”, he said, predicting that the amended lawsuit would have a “far more narrow scope”.
Supporters of President Trump stormed the United States Capitol building in 2021 (Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)The BBC scents blood in the water. The corporation’s lawyers say Trump’s legal team are dragging their feet over efforts to schedule the President’s deposition in the case. The corporation continues to call for the entire lawsuit to be dismissed, arguing that Auntie is not the broadcasting powerhouse in south Florida that the President claims.
Only last week, Trump’s legal claims suffered another flesh wound when his lawyers agreed to drop the BBC’s commercial operations from the lawsuit. The BBC successfully argued that neither BBC Studio Productions nor BBC Studios Distribution played any role in producing or creating the documentary and were uninvolved in its American broadcast.
Lett has also ruled that the broadcaster can now issue subpoenas against top figures within Trump’s inner circle, forcing them to testify about the President’s thoughts and intentions in the hours leading up to the 6 January 2021 riots on Capitol Hill. The BBC has already apologised for the careless way in which the President’s noon speech that day was edited in the documentary, but now appears willing to challenge Trump’s contention that he did not fuel the deadly riot that followed.
Trump’s efforts to target media houses with lawsuits is unprecedented in the modern era, and several of the President’s other defamation claims have been tossed out of court by Florida judges.
Earlier this month, Judge Thomas Barber, a Trump appointee, dismissed Trump Media and Technology Group’s $3.8 billion defamation claim against The Washington Post over an article that said his social media operation was partly funded by a bank with links to the porn industry. Last September, a $15 billion defamation claim against The New York Times was similarly dismissed by Judge Steven Merryday, who found the lawsuit was “tedious and burdensome” and risked being nothing more than a “megaphone” for the President. And in April, Judge Darrin P Gayles dismissed Trump’s suit against The Wall Street Journal over its report on a bawdy letter he sent the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
While ABC and CBS have settled multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Trump rather than choosing to fight the President in court, many legal analysts believe his claims are often flimsy. The BBC has made the high-stakes choice to battle Trump in court, and executives may now be feeling cautiously optimistic about the lawsuit’s outcome.
But Trump’s threat to America’s First Amendment protections on free speech continues unabated.
Only last week, he called for ABC and NBC to have their broadcast licences revoked after they refused to broadcast live his primetime address amplifying unfounded election-related conspiracy theories. This month, several New York Times reporters were issued subpoenas after Trump objected to their reporting of concerns over the new Air Force One, gifted to him by the government of Qatar. Trump is even now seeking the phone and text records of relatives of those reporters, in a widening effort to pursue them.
The BBC may be in the process of proving that it’s possible to stand up to a bully and win, especially when grandiose claims made in a lawsuit simply do not stand up to scrutiny. But Trump’s lawyers are likely to remain very busy, as an irascible president funds them to wage his war on reporting.
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