A federal magistrate judge in Florida has allowed the BBC to pursue Donald Trump’s financial records in discovery in his $10 billion defamation lawsuit over a documentary edit, according to Politico.
The ruling matters because Trump put his own finances into the case. He sued in Florida after arguing that a BBC documentary, shown once in the United Kingdom and not in the United States, harmed business interests tied to the state. The BBC then asked for financial records that could test that claim.
The dispute centers on an edit in a BBC documentary that joined two separated portions of the same Trump speech so they sounded closer together than they were. Trump has repeatedly claimed the BBC used AI to fabricate quotations, according to Techdirt, which reported that the issue was an edit of real remarks rather than machine-generated text.
Why the BBC wants the records
Trump initially claimed damage to business interests, then his lawyers dropped some claims tied to business harm and argued the case was about reputational injury instead. The BBC still pressed for the records, saying they remained relevant to the damages theory.
Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett agreed after a three-hour hearing, Politico reported. Lett said in court that Trump’s brand, properties and businesses had been put at issue, along with reputational and economic damages.
That is a predictable discovery problem for a plaintiff claiming that speech caused reputational damage to a business empire. A defendant gets to ask whether the claimed harm shows up in the books. PBS NewsHour has reported that Trump made around $2 billion in 2025, more than in any prior year, while serving as president.
Trump has already challenged the judge
Trump’s lawyers can ask U.S. District Judge Roy Altman to overrule Lett’s discovery decision. Altman, a Trump appointee, has already rejected an earlier attempt by Trump to move discovery away from Lett.
In May, Altman denied Trump’s request to withdraw the discovery referral from Lett and assign it to another magistrate judge. Trump’s lawyers argued that Lett had previously represented a party adverse to Trump in separate federal litigation, Trump v. Clinton. Altman wrote that any recusal decision should be left to Lett under the federal statute governing judicial disqualification.
Altman also rejected Trump’s comparison to a different case involving the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and Capital One, where discovery had been reassigned after Lett was replaced as Altman’s paired magistrate judge for Miami-based cases. Altman said that reassignment was based on workload and the compressed discovery schedule in that separate case.
The financial records may still stay mostly out of public view. Trump could seek a protective order limiting disclosure, and discovery material often remains private unless it becomes part of a court filing or hearing. He could also try to end the case before producing records.
For now, though, the BBC has won a discovery fight created by the damages theory Trump chose to plead. If a plaintiff tells a court that a documentary hurt his brand and businesses, the defendant gets to look under the hood.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.