The BBC is again seeking to dismiss Donald Trump‘s $10 billion lawsuit against the network, including a challenge to the president’s claim that a documentary at issue aired in the United States.
Trump sued the BBC in December over edits that were made in a documentary about the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
The network has been seeking a quick dismissal in part by noting a lack of jurisdiction, in that the BBC did not broadcast the documentary in the United States. In an amended complaint earlier this month, Trump’s legal team has claimed that the Panorama documentary, Trump: A Second Chance?, was streamed on iPlayer by “hundreds of individuals” using a VPN in the U.S., despite it being geoblocked in America. Of that, 34 streams were claimed to have originated in Florida, where the case was filed.
In a filing with the U.S. District Court in Florida, the BBC’s legal team argued that “exercising jurisdiction based on the mere possibility of unauthorized access via VPN—which no court has done—would upend personal jurisdiction jurisprudence and have massive implications for foreign companies with online presences.”
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The BBC legal team added that despite the Trump lawsuit’s “attempt to use unreliable data reflecting 34 unconfirmed, unauthorized attempts to play the Documentary from Florida, the BBC never broadcast it in the U.S. and never even had rights to do so.”
They also pointed to measures to prevent efforts to access the iPlayer from outside the United Kingdom.
In the documentary, Trump: A Second Chance?, a clip is shown from his January 6 speech, in which he says, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol … and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.” In fact, the remark was an edit of different portions of the speech.
Trump claimed in his lawsuit that the documentary was “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory and malicious,” and its airing a week before the 2024 election was a “brazen attempt to influence the election’s outcome.”
In the fallout from the focus on the edited speech, BBC director general Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, who led the news division, stepped down. The BBC apologized, calling it an “error of judgment,” but they did not offer to pay any damages.
In its latest motion to dismiss, the network also challenged Trump’s lawsuit on the grounds that he had not claimed actual harm, and would not be able to prove such a thing.
The network’s legal team wrote, “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.”
They also wrote that Trump had failed to show actual malice and that the documentary contained protected expressions of opinion.
