The BBC said President Donald Trump can’t sue it for defamation in a Florida court over a documentary that was produced in London that didn’t air in the United States and the British broadcaster even made efforts to stop from being viewed here.
Calling Trump’s legal theory unprecedented, the BBC said a U.S. court endorsing it would “upend personal jurisdiction jurisprudence and have massive implications for foreign companies with online presences.”
And that’s before getting to the substance of Trump’s lawsuit, which the broadcaster said is so lacking that it shouldn’t move forward.
Those arguments came in the BBC’s motion to dismiss the president’s first amended complaint, which he filed after a Trump-appointed judge in Florida gave him permission to narrow his claims when he was on the verge of having to hand over sensitive financial information in discovery.
Trump is still seeking billions of dollars in damages, now based only on alleged reputational harm as opposed to additional alleged harm to his brands and businesses.
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 that aired in 2024 about his re-election campaign. He said the broadcaster “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.”
Before he brought his initial complaint, his counsel wrote to the BBC to argue that its edit of his Jan. 6 speech defamed him. The broadcaster published a retraction and apologized but maintained that it didn’t defame him and that a lawsuit would be jurisdictionally defective in any event because the documentary wasn’t broadcast in Florida.
On top of arguing that Trump can’t clear the high bar of “actual malice” for public figures who want to bring defamation cases, the BBC said he can’t prove reputational harm.
The broadcaster noted that he won the 2024 election after the documentary aired, and that he won Florida by a greater margin than he did in 2016. Also, Trump had already been indicted for his allegedly criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 election (that federal prosecution was later dismissed before it reached a jury, due to his 2024 election win and the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents).
“Given the many allegations prior to the Documentary’s release regarding Plaintiff’s Speech, the fact that the Documentary was never broadcast in the U.S. — and that after its release, the President won reelection and carried Florida by a wide margin — Plaintiff cannot plausibly claim that the Documentary harmed his reputation,” the BBC said in its motion to dismiss, which was filed Monday.
The filing follows a recent development in a separate case dealing with similar themes, with Trump asking the Supreme Court this month to revive his defamation suit against CNN over the network’s use of the phrase “big lie” in connection with his claims about the 2020 election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden. The lower courts in Florida have ruled against him, deeming his arguments meritless. The justices have not yet decided whether they will agree to consider his appeal.
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