President Donald Trump’s financial records won’t be turned over to the BBC — not yet, anyway — thanks to an emergency order from the Trump-appointed judge in Florida who is presiding over his defamation case against the British broadcaster.
The president filed suit in December over what he called a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction” of him in a documentary. Among his claims was that the BBC “intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers around the world by splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021.”
In his complaint, the president said the value of his personal brand alone “is reasonably estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars,” that business ventures bearing his name “generate hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue” and that the injury to his personal and professional brand allegedly inflicted by the BBC casting him as a “violent insurrectionist” has caused “massive economic damage to his brand value and significant damage and injury to his future financial prospects, in addition to continuing to harm his reputation as President of the United States of America.”
The BBC moved to dismiss the case, disputing the substance of Trump’s complaint while also arguing that the U.S. court doesn’t have jurisdiction in the dispute brought against the U.K.-based corporation over a documentary that was produced in London and didn’t air in the United States.
To aid in its defense against the multibillion-dollar claim, the BBC sought records from the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust regarding the president’s finances. The broadcaster said that information is relevant to his allegation of billions of dollars in damages, but the trust objected to the request as unwarranted. In a late July order, federal magistrate judge Enjolique Lett said records sought by the BBC are “relevant and material to any damages analysis.”
But ahead of a Thursday deadline to comply with the order, the trust filed an emergency motion to Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Roy Altman, seeking to avoid compliance. Among the trust’s bases for urgent relief was that Trump had moved to file an amended complaint that seeks to narrow the nature of his suit to focus on “personal reputational harm,” which the trust argued makes the basis for the magistrate judge’s discovery order “obsolete.”
The BBC opposed the emergency motion, calling it “a transparent effort to evade this Court’s clear and direct order and to continue to avoid the discovery obligations that Plaintiff took on when he chose to file this lawsuit.” The BBC also opposed Trump’s motion to amend his underlying complaint, arguing that it was filed several months after the relevant deadline for such pleadings and is merely a “transparent effort to avoid the imminent court-ordered deadline to begin producing financial discovery.”
Granting emergency relief for Trump, Altman said the trust had a “compelling argument” when it came to the amended complaint. He said that if the new complaint makes it unnecessary to disclose confidential financial information, then it’s “prudent to enter a brief stay” of the discovery order until the issue of the amended complaint is resolved.
Altman noted that Trump’s lawyer (who also represents the trust) said the presidential plaintiff no longer intends to pursue a damages theory based on alleged injury to his brands and businesses. The district judge said it therefore makes sense to hold off on compliance with the magistrate’s discovery order because it was issued “on precisely that potentially-moot damages theory.”
Altman specified that enforcement of the production order is halted pending the resolution of Trump’s motion for leave to file an amended complaint. So while this emergency relief is a win for the president, it’s not an ultimate resolution to the litigation.
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