US judge orders Trump to sit for deposition in $10bn lawsuit against BBC

A US judge has ordered Donald Trump to cooperate with the discovery process in his $10bn lawsuit against the BBC and to sit for a deposition by 11 December.

The lawsuit stems from a Panorama documentary aired by the BBC that spliced together comments made by Trump during a rally on 6 January 2021, before the US Capitol riot.

Federal magistrate judge Enjoliqué Lett rejected a request by Trump's legal team to prevent the seven-hour-long deposition from being videotaped, though it will only be accessible to attorneys in the case.

The judge gave the plaintiffs 30 days to produce the relevant documents, warning that failure to do so could result in sanctions, including possible dismissal of the suit for failure to prosecute the case and engage in meaningful discovery process.

The BBC's lawyers argued that Trump's team had not been sufficiently forthcoming in handing over internal documents relevant to the case ahead of an 18 December deadline for discovery.

The documents that Trump's team have turned over have primarily been either pulled from the internet or provided by the BBC itself, with the judge expressing dissatisfaction that a thorough search had not been done to determine that all of these requests had been responded to.