Donald Trump must submit to questioning in his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC by December 11, a federal judge has ruled. Failure to appear could put the case at risk of dismissal.
US Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett set the deadline during a hearing in Miami on Thursday after BBC attorneys accused Trump of repeatedly delaying his deposition.
“With two months left in the discovery period, we still haven’t been able to depose the plaintiff,” BBC lawyer Charles Tobin told the court.
The parties had agreed that Trump would be questioned on October 16. He later canceled the meeting, citing a “matter of national importance.”
Tobin said Trump was instead in Georgia campaigning.
“He was participating in party politics and prioritized that over sitting for the deposition,” Tobin said.
Judge Lett warned that Trump could face sanctions—including dismissal of the lawsuit—if he misses the new deadline, unless the discovery schedule is extended beyond December 18.
Trump filed the Florida lawsuit last December over a BBC Panorama documentary that edited together portions of his January 6, 2021, speech in a way he says falsely suggested he called for violence at the US Capitol.
Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Pendleton, South Carolina, on Wednesday
The BBC apologized for the editing but has denied defaming Trump. The controversy led to the resignations of director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness.
The broadcaster has asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that the documentary was not broadcast in Florida or elsewhere in the United States. It also maintains that Trump’s allegations fall “well short of the high bar of actual malice” required for a public figure to prevail.
BBC lawyers further argued that Trump “cannot plausibly claim that the documentary harmed his reputation,” noting that he won the 2024 election a week after the program aired and carried Florida by a wide margin.
“Indeed, the documentary was prescient in accurately describing the loyalty plaintiff enjoys among his supporters, and that led to his return to the White House,” the BBC said in its motion.
In a court filing dated October 13, BBC lawyers said they began requesting possible deposition dates in July and followed up repeatedly before the two sides settled on October 16.
According to the filing, the broadcaster heard nothing for several weeks. Then, on September 28, Trump’s attorney said, “the President is no longer available for his deposition on October 16 due to other matters of national importance.”
The attorney pledged to “endeavor to provide you with a replacement date by the end of this week,” the filing said. “He did not,” BBC lawyers wrote.
Trump’s legal team subsequently told the BBC that he “has no availability whatsoever for a deposition” before discovery ends on December 18. They offered instead to make him available during the second or third week of January.
“Two months of discovery remaining, the BBC still has not been able to depose, and does not even have a schedule to depose, the most central figure in this case: Plaintiff himself,” Tobin wrote.
The BBC is also seeking testimony from Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. The broadcaster told the court that Trump’s two eldest children were present when he revised his January 6 speech and when he delivered it.
The BBC says Kushner prepared a statement condemning the Capitol attack that was never released by the White House. Trump’s attorneys have accused the broadcaster of pursuing “politically-driven leverage” against the president by targeting his family.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner at Joint Base Andrews on January 20, 2021. The BBC has subpoenaed the pair in the defamation suit
Trump speaks to his supporters outside the White House on January 6, 2021
Police turned away the BBC’s process servers at Ivanka and Kushner’s Miami home in May, and a Secret Service lawyer later said the agency was not authorized to accept subpoenas for them. A bid to serve Don Jr at Trump Tower also failed.
Lett cleared the way on October 9, allowing the BBC to serve the trio by certified mail to their home and business addresses and by email to Trump’s lawyers. The ruling does not settle any objections to the scope of the subpoenas.
Lawyers for both sides tussled on Thursday over the BBC’s separate bid to depose Jack Smith, the former special counsel who brought the federal January 6 case against Trump. The president strongly opposes the move.
Smith charged Trump in August 2023 with four felony counts over his bid to overturn the 2020 election, but the case was dropped after his 2024 victory under a Justice Department policy barring the prosecution of a sitting president.
The broadcaster subpoenaed Smith earlier this month, but Trump’s lawyers argued in a joint filing that there was no reason for Smith, who is not a party to the case, to appear.
‘Smith lacks any personal knowledge regarding the issues in this matter,’ they wrote. ‘He was not present when President Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech… was made, nor did he participate in its preparation.’
Trump’s team also argued that ‘Smith’s testimony would be duplicative,’ pointing out that he published a lengthy report on January 6 and testified for hours. ‘The entirety of his testimony is publicly available,’ the filing said.
‘It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source on these issues than Mr. Smith, who spent years gathering evidence on those topics with the force of the Justice Department and the power of the grand jury behind him,’ the BBC’s lawyers countered.
‘No one forced Plaintiff to file this lawsuit and to dispute that his speech on January 6 incited the violence that followed at the Capitol,’ they added.
Smith never charged Trump with incitement and wrote in his final report released in January 2025 that prosecutors did not develop direct evidence of ‘Trump’s subjective intent to cause the full scope of the violence that occurred on Jan. 6.’
