A federal magistrate judge in the United States has issued a formal order requiring former President Donald Trump to give a sworn deposition in his ongoing defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) no later than December 11. The legal dispute centers on a 2023 episode of the BBC’s flagship investigative program *Panorama*, which edited together two separate segments of a speech Trump delivered on January 6, 2021, ahead of the riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Legal representatives for the BBC recently told the court that they had not yet been able to depose Trump, with just two months remaining in the pre-trial evidence-gathering phase known as discovery. This latest order comes after Trump canceled a previously scheduled deposition set for October 16, claiming he needed to attend to “matters of national importance” while campaigning in Georgia. On that original date, Trump instead appeared at a midterm campaign rally in Dalton, Georgia, followed by a fundraising event at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Last week, BBC attorneys filed a motion asking Judge Enjoliqué Lett, the U.S. Magistrate overseeing the case, to compel Trump to attend the deposition after the canceled session. In response to that motion, Trump’s legal team submitted a separate filing Wednesday proposing that the deposition take place between January 11 and 22 of next year, and pushed back against the BBC’s assertion that their client has been intentionally avoiding the deposition process.
Trump originally filed the lawsuit in a Florida federal court, accusing the BBC of “intentionally, maliciously, and deceptively doctoring” his January 6 speech to create a false narrative. The edited broadcast, the suit claims, incorrectly portrayed Trump as directly calling for violent action during the Capitol riot. The BBC has publicly apologized for the editing error, acknowledging that the final broadcast created the misleading impression that Trump endorsed violence. The broadcaster has also filed a motion to dismiss the entire suit, arguing that the program does not meet the legal standard for defamation under U.S. law and that the segment was never made available to audiences in the United States.
In a major development back in July, Trump’s own legal team conceded that they lacked evidence to support their original claim that the documentary was accessible to U.S. viewers via the BBC’s BritBox subscription streaming service, the BBC website, BBC Select, or any U.S. broadcast partner. Following that concession, Trump agreed to remove BBC Studios, the BBC’s commercial division, from the suit after the broadcaster argued that the unit had no role in creating or producing the controversial *Panorama* episode.
Under U.S. civil procedure rules, a deposition is a sworn out-of-court questioning of a party or witness, conducted in the office of one of the attorneys involved in the case rather than in a formal courtroom setting, without a judge present during the questioning. Despite being outside the courtroom, depositions carry substantial legal weight: all statements are given under oath, a professional court reporter transcribes every word verbatim, and the resulting transcript can be introduced as evidence during a subsequent trial.