President Donald Trump just won permission to file a new, narrower complaint against the BBC in his defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster. But whether his procedural win leads to a successful suit in the end remains to be seen.
U.S. District Judge Roy Altman granted Trump’s motion to file an amended complaint, despite the BBC’s opposition argument that doing so would reward the president’s “gamesmanship” in this litigation.
The Trump-appointed judge’s order followed another one he issued in the president’s favor last week, which let Trump put off handing over sensitive financial information to the broadcaster in discovery.
The president filed the 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 initial 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 claims while also arguing that the U.S. court doesn’t have jurisdiction in the dispute, brought against the U.K.-based corporation for a documentary that was produced in London and didn’t air in the United States.
To aid in its defense against the multibillion-dollar allegations, the BBC sought records from the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust regarding the president’s finances. The broadcaster said the 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 Enjoliqué Lett said records sought by the BBC are “relevant and material to any damages analysis.”
But ahead of a deadline last week to comply with the order, the trust filed an emergency motion to 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 initial 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 the emergency relief for Trump, Altman said last week that 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.”
Now, Altman has granted the president’s motion to file that new complaint. But as the judge noted, the complaint’s success is not guaranteed.
In his new order letting Trump file the narrower amended complaint, Altman rejected the BBC’s “gamesmanship” argument, calling it an unfair characterization of how the litigation has unfolded. Plus, on the subject of what Trump must turn over to the broadcaster in discovery, the district judge observed: “Whether the amended complaint actually alters the Plaintiff’s discovery obligations is a question we’ll leave for Magistrate Judge Lett.”
Altman further noted that the BBC will still be able to press its argument that the U.S. court doesn’t even have jurisdiction to hear the case. And he said the narrowing of Trump’s complaint is helpful to the broadcaster, because, as Altman put it, the president now “won’t be able to pursue reputational damages that are premised on any alleged harm to his brands and businesses.”
So while the judge’s latest order gave Trump what he asked for, it doesn’t resolve the bigger questions of whether and to what extent the suit will succeed.
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