A federal judge has refused the BBC’s attempt to dismiss President Trump’s defamation lawsuit, saying the British network tried to make itself part of the story and he deserves to have his day in court.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey T. Kuntz said the BBC’s actions are different than other lawsuits Mr. Trump filed against CNN and The Wall Street Journal, both of which were tossed.
In those cases, Mr. Trump was objecting to the way they covered the news, Judge Kuntz said. In the BBC case, the network tried to forge the news.
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“Here, the news entity created the story. BBC admitted as much by confirming it had edited a video to make it appear as though President Trump made a statement he never made,” the judge wrote. “And it acknowledged it chose to release the video in a documentary only a week before the 2024 presidential election, at the time it would have the most impact.”
He issued an order Tuesday that lets Mr. Trump’s defamation claims move forward, though he did toss the president’s claims that the BBC violated a Florida deceptive practices law, saying Mr. Trump didn’t allege a sufficient personal injury to sustain that part of his lawsuit.
At issue was a BBC documentary that took one part of Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech where he talked about walking with supporters to the Capitol, then spliced it together with another part nearly an hour later where Mr. Trump urged supporters to “fight like hell.”
The BBC left out thousands of words in between those two sections — including Mr. Trump’s admonition to supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically.”
Judge Kuntz, a Trump appointee to the federal bench in Florida, said the BBC apologized for its handling of the video, but now seems to have backtracked from that.
In its legal defense, it argued that the sentiment its reporting conveyed was true, pointing to Jan. 6 criminal defendants who said they took Mr. Trump’s remarks as a call to violence.
Judge Kuntz said that didn’t excuse the network.
To win a defamation lawsuit, Mr. Trump, a public figure, must prove not only that the information was wrong, but also that it was published with “actual malice.”
Judge Kuntz said that’s a matter for later. He said the fact that the BBC fabricated the Trump statement from two separate lines is sufficient to let the case proceed.
“Trump’s claims extend beyond negligence and plead a claim of recklessness,” he wrote.
In the CNN case, Mr. Trump sued the network in 2022 over its reporting denigrating his claims about the 2020 election. That case has been rebuffed by lower courts. Mr. Trump this summer asked the Supreme Court to hear it.
In the Journal case, he sued after the newspaper reported on a 2003 birthday message to now-deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that the paper suggested was written by Mr. Trump.
A federal judge last month dismissed that lawsuit, saying Mr. Trump failed to establish actual malice behind the Journal’s reporting. The president has appealed that ruling to a federal circuit court.
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