The BBC has filed a motion in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida indicating that it intends to ask the court to dismiss President Trump’s defamation claim.

As has been widely reported (including in our recent Media Law 2025 update here), the President has sued the BBC for 10 billion dollars in relation to a Panorama documentary which included a section that spliced together two separate parts of his speech to supporters on 6 January 2021 to make it sound like a single soundbite. It is the President’s position that this “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction” of him, aired a week before the 2024 Presidential Election, represented a “brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the Election’s outcome to President Trump’s detriment”.

The fallout from the Panorama documentary was significant: both the Director General and Head of News at the BBC resigned, and its Chair apologised to the President, acknowledging that the edit had given “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”.

Despite these events, President Trump followed though with his threat to sue at the end of last year, claiming 5 billion dollars in defamation, and a further 5 billion dollars under Florida’s unfair and deceptive trade practices laws.

The BBC has now filed a motion with the Court indicating that it intends to file a motion to dismiss the President’s case. While the motion that it has recently filed is largely a procedural one – asking the Court to stay discovery (i.e. disclosure) until after the BBC’s substantive motion has been addressed – it nonetheless gives a preview of some of the arguments that the BBC will advance in support of its position that the President’s case be thrown out.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the arguments are jurisdictional: the BBC will argue that it is not subject to the jurisdiction of Florida, not only because it lacks the requisite presence there, but also because the documentary was neither created, produced, or broadcast in the state. On the merits, the motion also argues that President Trump will not be able to prove that the documentary “caused him any cognizable injury”, pointing out that he won re-election (including carrying Florida by a considerable margin) and that, by the time of the airing of the documentary, he had already been indicted by a grand jury on a number of counts, which included the allegation that he “directed the crowd in front of him to go to the Capitol”. More fundamentally, the BBC also argue that the President will fail to establish that it acted with ‘actual malice’ – as is required under the law – and that the documentary contains expressions of opinion that are protected in law.

The BBC’s motion to dismiss is expected to be filed on 17 March 2026. To read the its motion to stay discovery, click here. To read President Trump’s complaint, click here.