Trump judge saves Trump from financial compliance in BBC defamation case
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.”
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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