BBC asks to depose Trump children as a table read of the January 6 sequel
The corporation wants Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner assigned parts, highlighters and a continuity packet, on the theory that political families only tell the truth when they think they are rehearsing
The BBC, already seeking testimony from Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the January 6 documentary lawsuit, has asked a court to run discovery as a formal table read. Lawyers say political families only admit they were in the room when someone hands them a highlighter. The sequel, as usual, is longer than the pitch.
There are only so many ways a political family can be asked what it remembers, and the Anglo-American legal system, having exhausted most of them, has now reached for the craft-services table. The BBC, already seeking to subpoena Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the president's defamation action over a January 6 documentary, has asked a court for something rather more specific than testimony: permission to conduct the entire discovery process as a formal table read, with assigned parts, a marked-up script and a standing instruction that nobody is to improve the dialogue.
The corporation's motion does not dispute the ordinary purpose of a subpoena. It simply observes that American political families have now been deposed so often, on so many adjacent Tuesdays, that conventional questioning produces only the director's cut of previous answers. A table read, the filing contends, is the last remaining format in which a witness will admit to having been in the room, if only because someone has handed them a highlighter and a pastry.
We are not asking for new material. We are asking the witnesses to hit their marks in a story whose plot points have been publicly available since the credits rolled.
"We are not asking for new material," said Harriet Quell, the BBC's director of legacy litigation and archival continuity, a post that did not exist until it became obvious that it should. "We are asking the witnesses to hit their marks in a story whose plot points have been publicly available since the credits rolled. If they would prefer a cold read, we can accommodate that. What we cannot accommodate is another three-hour scene in which everyone claims they were in craft services."
Same lawsuit, tighter blocking
The underlying case is the president's claim that a BBC documentary about the assault on the Capitol defamed him. The network, building a defence, wants records and testimony from the two eldest children and the son-in-law about the events of 6 January 2021. That much is the same film audiences have already sat through. The innovation, such as it is, lies in the proposed method of extraction.
Under the BBC's plan, the three witnesses would be seated at a single table, given bound copies of a continuity packet containing publicly reported timelines, and invited to read their own contemporaneous statements aloud while a continuity supervisor notes discrepancies in pencil. There would be water. There would not, counsel has stressed, be notes from the studio.
"The packet is not a script in the theatrical sense," said Crispin Holbrook, a London solicitor who has spent thirty years serving papers on people who insist they were only in the background of the shot. "It is a courtesy. One does not ask a veteran of a long-running series to remember season four without showing them the episode guide. That way lies improvisation, and improvisation is how we got the sequel."
American media lawyers have greeted the request with the particular exhaustion reserved for a franchise that has announced another origin story. Several pointed out that discovery already resembles a table read, minus the pastries and plus the billing. Others suggested the court might as well approve a live studio audience and be done with it.
"Every administration eventually sues a broadcaster, every broadcaster eventually wants the children, and every child eventually discovers a schedule conflict," said Dr Celia Brompton, who teaches comparative scandal at the Institute for Recurring Events in Croydon, an establishment whose seminar room is booked through the next three election cycles. "The table read is merely an admission that we are no longer pretending this is a first draft. I have sat through the Watergate version, the Iran-Contra version and two separate versions involving emails. The lighting has got worse. The pastries have not improved."
Second unit, familiar faces
A representative for a family office connected to the matter declined to discuss seating charts. Officials already occupied with the lawsuit itself offered no fresh comment on the procedural flourish, having already commissioned the picture that made the flourish necessary.
What the BBC appears to want, beyond calendars and correspondence, is an official record that the January 6 documentary was assembled from the same pile of publicly chewed scenery that every other capital has been using since the invention of the photocopier. Serving the children is, in this telling, less an escalation than a recast. The original leads are busy. The sequels require familiar faces who can still find their light.
"There is a reason these things always migrate to the next generation," Holbrook said. "The principals become unavailable, the plot requires a witness who was in the corridor, and the corridor, as any continuity person will tell you, is where the children stand. We are not inventing a dynasty. We are shooting second unit."
Reaction from the documentary world has been professionally bleak. A producer of political films who asked to be identified only as someone who has already made this movie said the table-read proposal would at least spare editors the customary six months of footage in which nobody remembers who had the phone. "You get better answers when people think they are rehearsing," the producer said. "The moment they understand it is the take, they discover they were in the bathroom. I have lost years of my life to bathrooms."
Legal historians note that Anglo-American procedure has always contained a strain of theatre. Witnesses swear oaths. Judges wear costumes. Someone is always asking for a continuance because the lead is not available until after the holiday special. The BBC's motion simply drops the pretence that any of this is still being written. It is being blocked, shot and, if the court is willing, annotated in the margins by a woman with a stopwatch.
Whether a United States court will authorise a deposition conducted as a rehearsal remains, like every previous cliffhanger, technically unresolved. Judges have tolerated worse innovations, usually after lunch. They have also thrown out worse innovations, usually after lunch. The distinction has never been jurisprudential so much as dietary.
In London, the mood among those who commission these things is the mood of a newsroom that has already booked the graphics. If the table read is denied, the subpoenas will still go out in the ordinary way, which is to say they will be ignored, litigated, narrowed, appealed and eventually answered by a lawyer who was not in the room either. If it is granted, three public figures will sit down with highlighters and discover, as every cast eventually does, that the second act is longer than anyone pitched. History, as ever, declines to take notes. It prefers a table, a jug of water and the faint hope that this time the witnesses will stay on book.
