Trump v BBC

Broadcaster’s preliminary challenge dismissed as trial date set

A judge in Florida has ruled that Donald Trump’s multi-billion-dollar defamation claim against the BBC will be tried in 12 months from now, unless resolved in the meantime. District Judge Roy K Altman scheduled the jury trial in Miami for next February after dismissing a preliminary challenge by the broadcaster and ordering the parties to attempt to settle their dispute by mediation.

The US president is suing the BBC over an episode of Panorama broadcast in 2024 which he says edited a speech he gave in 2021 in a way that was “false, deceptive and defamatory”. The BBC is defending the case.

On 12 January, the BBC filed what’s called a motion to stay discovery in part pending adjudication of their motion to dismiss. The BBC will be challenging the Florida court’s jurisdiction to hear the president’s claim against it and the corporation did not want to disclose material “implicating the BBC’s entire scope of coverage of Donald J Trump over the past decade or more and claiming injury to his entire business and political profiles” before that issue was resolved.

The BBC motion was challenged by Trump’s lawyers on 2 February. The BBC replied as recently as Wednesday.

Later on Wednesday, the judge decided that the BBC’s motion was “fully briefed” — argued — “and ripe for adjudication”. He then gave two reasons for dismissing the BBC’s motion to stay discovery:

1. The “motion is premature”, he said. “We can’t ‘take a preliminary peek at the merits’ of the forthcoming motion to dismiss” — the test laid down in an earlier case — “because it hasn’t even been filed and thus hasn’t been fully briefed.” He added: “We’ve conducted a preliminary review of both parties’ positions and can’t say with certainty that President Trump’s claims are unmeritorious or that any order granting the motion to dismiss would dispose of the complaint ‘in its entirety and with prejudice’.”

2. “The BBC parties haven’t carried their burden of showing that they’ll be prejudiced if we don’t grant the stay,” Altman said. “The BBC parties try to indicate the scale of the burden they’ll face by relying on hypothetical discovery requests they expect to receive… But this speculation — offered before discovery has even begun —isn’t sufficient to satisfy the BBC parties’ ‘specific burden’ here… We aren’t persuaded that the case-specific discovery problems the BBC parties anticipate — including privilege issues and the need to comply with the UK’s data-privacy laws — are sufficiently burdensome to warrant a stay.”

The BBC has not explained why it made two applications relating to its disclosure obligations instead of simply filing its motion to dismiss, the deadline for which is 17 March.

Timetable

Also on Wednesday, the judge set a timetable for the coming year. The parties must choose a mediator early next month and let the judge know whether attempts at mediation have proved successful.

If there are further disputes over disclosure of evidence, the parties must not file any motions without the consent of the magistrate judge to whom Altman has now delegated the case. “Counsel must actually confer and engage in reasonable compromise in a genuine effort to resolve their discovery disputes before seeking the court’s intervention,” he ordered.

An exchange of emails between lawyers, Altman added, would not satisfy the obligations for “conferral in good faith”; the parties had to “confer either telephonically or in person”.

The case was “set for trial during the court’s two-week trial calendar beginning 15 February 2027”.

Palestine Action

The High Court in London is expected to rule today on whether the former home secretary Yvette Cooper acted lawfully when banning Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act last July. Three judges headed by Dame Victoria Sharp reserved judgment after a hearing that ended in December. An hour has been set aside for delivery of the judgment this morning.