The man suing over an edit must now answer for it under oath

The lawsuit was supposed to put the BBC on the stand. On Thursday it put the plaintiff there instead. A federal judge in Florida ordered Donald Trump to sit for a deposition by December 11 in his 10 billion dollar defamation case against the broadcaster, ruling from the bench after the BBC complained that the man who filed the case had spent months avoiding the questions it entitles them to ask.

The missed date is the detail that did the damage. Trump had agreed to be deposed on October 16, then cancelled, citing matters of national importance. The BBC's lawyer, Charles Tobin, told the court what the president had actually been doing that day: campaigning in Georgia. He was participating in party politics, Tobin said, and prioritised that over sitting for the deposition. US Magistrate Judge Enjolique Lett set the December 11 deadline and attached a price to missing it: sanctions up to dismissal of the lawsuit itself, unless the discovery period, currently ending December 18, is extended. She also refused to stop the deposition being videotaped, though only the lawyers in the case may watch it.

The case itself turns on an edit the BBC has already owned. Its Panorama documentary spliced two parts of Trump's January 6, 2021 speech, joining his words about walking down to the Capitol with a later passage about fighting like hell, in a way that made it sound like a single call. The BBC admitted the edit was misleading and apologised, but denies defamation, and it filed the suit's hardest question back at Trump: if he claims 10 billion dollars of harm, it wants the financial records of Mar-a-Lago and his web of businesses to test what the harm actually was. His lawyers call the requests too broad. That fight over his own books is now running alongside the deposition fight, and both exist only because he sued.

None of this says the BBC edited well. It did not, and its apology stands. But a defamation claim of this size has to survive the plaintiff's own evidence, and the judge's language on Thursday suggested patience is thinning: engaging in discovery is burdensome, Lett said, but it is a burden we undertake, especially if we file a lawsuit.

Our call is that the deposition happens, most likely late and possibly after the discovery window moves, because dismissal is the one outcome Trump's side cannot risk bluffing toward. The real case, though, is no longer the edit. It is the damages, and the records fight will decide whether 10 billion dollars is a number with paperwork behind it or a headline in search of one. The BBC's defence now writes itself either way: it apologised for the edit, and it gets to spend the winter asking the plaintiff to prove the price tag.