BBC board members have been advised to seek legal advice before traveling to America, as the British broadcaster defends a $10 billion lawsuit from Donald Trump.
During a BBC board meeting in April, directors were told to take counsel from in-house lawyers if they planned on making a trip to the U.S., per minutes from the gathering.
The item in the BBC board minutes, titled “POTUS legal case,” did not elaborate on why the legal advice was necessary, but the corporation may be alert to the possibility of directors being subpoenaed or compelled to give evidence.
The minutes said: “The board received an update on the legal action being brought by the president of the United States. It was agreed that any board members planning to travel to the United States in future should request advice from the BBC’s legal team.”
A BBC spokesperson declined to comment further.
Trump sued the BBC for defamation in December over edits that were made to a Panorama documentary that misleadingly edited his speech before the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Last week, the BBC filed a motion to have Trump’s lawsuit thrown out of the District Court in Florida. The corporation is seeking a quick dismissal in part by noting a lack of jurisdiction, in that the BBC did not broadcast the documentary in the U.S.
Trump’s legal team has claimed that the Panorama documentary, Trump: A Second Chance?, was streamed on iPlayer by “hundreds of individuals” using a VPN in the U.S., despite it being geoblocked in America. Of those, 34 streams were claimed to have originated in Florida, where the case was filed.
The BBC’s legal team argued that “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.”
In the motion, the BBC also challenged Trump’s lawsuit on the grounds that he had not claimed actual harm, and would not be able to prove such a thing.
The BBC’s legal team wrote: “Given the many allegations prior to the documentary’s release regarding plaintiff’s speech, the fact that the documentary was never broadcast in the U.S.—and that after its release, the president won reelection and carried Florida by a wide margin—plaintiff cannot plausibly claim that the documentary harmed his reputation.”