Donald Trump’s legal team has cancelled the president’s deposition in the $10 billion defamation lawsuit he filed against the BBC, telling the broadcaster he is unavailable until at least mid-December — and the fight over his testimony is fast becoming a political flashpoint.
The two sides had agreed in July that Trump would sit for questioning on October 16, on the condition the location and details stay private. On September 28, his lawyers told the BBC’s legal team the date no longer worked, citing what they described as other matters of national importance, and floated January as an alternative.
BBC asks the judge to force a date
The broadcaster has now asked a federal judge to intervene. In a court filing on Tuesday, the BBC’s lawyers asked US Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett to compel Trump to commit to a firm deposition date and to take up the issue at a hearing scheduled for next week.
With nearly eight months of discovery completed and only two months left, the BBC argues it has taken seven depositions of its own witnesses while still having no schedule to question the man who brought the case. The broadcaster’s lawyers have described Trump as the most central figure in the case.
Why the fight matters beyond the courtroom
The case revolves around a BBC documentary aired one day before the 2024 presidential election, which the lawsuit says misleadingly edited Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech to make it appear he explicitly urged supporters to attack the US Capitol. Trump filed the suit in December 2025, seeking at least $5 billion on each of two counts. The BBC has apologised for the edit — a step that prompted resignations of senior executives — while denying the edit caused real injury and moving to dismiss the case.
Politically, the optics are awkward for the plaintiff’s side: the man who filed the lawsuit is now the one who cannot find time to be questioned in it. The BBC’s motion turns that delay into a central talking point, framing it as a test of whether a sitting president can push his own sworn testimony past the discovery deadline. With trial provisionally set for February 2027, the judge’s ruling on the scheduling fight will shape how much scrutiny the documentary’s editing faces under oath.
Legal clashes involving the administration continue to pile up in federal courts, from a judge’s order unsealing the Kennedy Center closure plan to the DOE’s emergency grid order across 13 states. Independent coverage of the deposition dispute tracks how the courts are weighing the competing claims.
