NEW YORK — Lawyers for the BBC say U.S. President Donald Trump is trying to delay sitting for a deposition in the defamation case he brought against the British broadcaster until January 2027. In a filing this week, they asked a Florida court to compel the president to appear in the US$10 billion case after they say he cancelled an agreed-upon date this week, citing “matters of national importance.” “Two months of discovery remaining, the BBC still has not been able to depose, and does not even have a schedule to depose, the most central figure in this case: Plaintiff himself,” attorney Charles D. Tobin wrote in the filing. “Those delays have flouted the cooperative spirit of discovery and precluded the BBC from obtaining the evidence necessary to robustly litigate its defense.” Trump, who has a history of avoiding depositions, filed the lawsuit against the BBC last December, seeking $10 billion in damages as he accused the British broadcaster of defamation as well as deceptive and unfair trade practices related to a documentary, “Trump: A Second Chance.” Britain’s publicly funded national broadcaster admitted filmmakers spliced together quotes from different sections of the speech Trump delivered to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, before the storming of the U.S. Capitol, to make it seem like he was directly urging violence. The 33-page lawsuit accused the BBC of broadcasting a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump,” calling it “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The broadcaster apologized to Trump over the edit and the head of the BBC and the British broadcaster’s top news executive both resigned. But the broadcaster has denied Trump’s claims that it defamed him. In the filing this week, BBC lawyers said that they first requested dates for the deposition in July, and followed up repeatedly. Both sides, they said, eventually agreed on Oct. 16. However, after weeks of silence, they wrote, “Plaintiff’s counsel responded on September 28, 2026, indicating that ‘the President is no longer available for his deposition on October 16 due to other matters of national importance’ and that counsel would ‘endeavor to provide you with a replacement date by the end of this week.’ He did not.” Instead, they said, they were told last week that Trump “has no availability whatsoever for a deposition” before discovery is set to close on Dec. 18. and were told that Trump would instead make himself available the second or third week of January. In a statement in response to the filing, a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team did not address the reasons for Trump’s delay, but repeated its allegations against the BBC and said the president was holding the broadcaster “accountable for its defamation and reckless election interference just as he has held other fake news mainstream media responsible for their wrongdoing.” Trump voluntarily dropped a $500 million lawsuit he filed against his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen in 2023, days before he was set to give a deposition in that suit. Jill Colvin, The Associated Press
