(Photo illustration: The LA Globe)

The BBC has asked a federal judge in Florida to throw out President Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit over an edited documentary. The network's new motion to dismiss, filed with the U.S. District Court in Florida, was first reported by Deadline, which quoted from the filing. That account does not say whether a hearing has been scheduled, or how the court treated the network's earlier attempt to have the case dismissed.

The fight is over where a British broadcaster can be sued for a program it says it never showed in the United States. The narrower question is whether viewers who route around a geographic block can pull a foreign broadcaster into an American court.

Trump sued the BBC in December over edits made to a documentary about the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the outlet reported. In an amended complaint filed earlier in August 2026, his legal team claimed the Panorama program, Trump: A Second Chance?, was streamed on the BBC's iPlayer service by hundreds of people using VPNs in the United States, even though the program was geoblocked in America. Thirty-four of those streams were claimed to have originated in Florida, where the case was filed.

What the motion argues

The BBC's legal team told the court that no court has extended personal jurisdiction on that basis, according to the filing as quoted by Deadline.

“exercising jurisdiction based on the mere possibility of unauthorized access via VPN—which no court has done—would upend personal jurisdiction jurisprudence and have massive implications for foreign companies with online presences.”

The same filing describes the plaintiff's numbers as “34 unconfirmed, unauthorized attempts to play the Documentary from Florida,” and says the BBC never broadcast the program in the United States and never held the rights to do so. The network also pointed to the measures it uses to block iPlayer access from outside the United Kingdom, the outlet reported.

The motion makes a second argument that does not depend on geography. The BBC's lawyers wrote that Trump has not claimed actual harm and could not prove it, citing the allegations already circulating about the speech before the documentary came out, the absence of any U.S. broadcast, and the fact that he won reelection and carried Florida by a wide margin. The filing also argues that Trump has not shown actual malice and that the documentary contained protected expressions of opinion.

The edit at the center of the case

The documentary showed a clip of Trump's January 6 speech in which he says he will walk down to the Capitol with his supporters and that they will fight like hell. Deadline reported that the remark was an edit of different portions of the speech.

Trump's lawsuit alleges the documentary was defamatory and says its airing a week before the 2024 election was an attempt to influence the result, the outlet reported. In the fallout over the edit, BBC director general Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, who led the news division, stepped down. The BBC apologized and called the edit an “error of judgment,” but did not offer to pay damages.

Nothing has been decided. A motion to dismiss is a request, and the record described in Deadline's account contains no ruling on it, no hearing date, and no response yet from Trump's legal team to the network's latest filing.

Source: deadline.com, retrieved August 25, 2026.