A federal judge on Monday gave Donald Trump permission to file an amended complaint in his $10 billion lawsuit against the, keeping the case alive after the network tried to end it at the threshold. United States District Judge Roy K. Altman wiped out the ’s earlier motion to dismiss as moot and let Trump go back and rewrite the case.
The move matters because Trump is suing in a personal capacity for $5 billion in defamation and another $5 billion under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. His complaint centers on the ’s 2024 Panorama documentary, Trump: A Second Chance?, which stitched together remarks he made nearly an hour apart during his Jan. 6 speech and, in Trump’s view, made it look as if he told supporters to fight like hell at the Capitol shortly before the riot there that day.
That backdrop is what has kept the case in the headlines since Trump filed it in December. The dispute is not just over editing, but over whether the documentary crossed the line into a false depiction of his remarks and whether the network’s handling of them could support the trade-practices claim as well as defamation.
The said Trump missed the deadline to amend his complaint and accused him of playing tactical legal games to avoid financial disclosures. Altman accepted Trump’s timing argument anyway, which means the court is treating the amendment as timely enough to move forward rather than as a late attempt to reset a losing case. In practical terms, the ’s dismissal bid is now off the table for the moment, replaced by whatever new version Trump chooses to file.
What Trump will change is not yet public. That leaves the next step squarely with his filing, and with Michael Prescott’s whistleblower dossier still hanging over the dispute after The Telegraph cited it in reporting that said the documentary spliced two separate comments made nearly an hour apart. A Trump legal team spokesman called Monday’s ruling a major win for President Trump’s lawsuit, and the did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
