Judge Roy K. Altman said Monday that Donald Trump may update his defamation lawsuit so it no longer claims the 2024 documentary hurt his businesses. The case will now focus only on Trump’s personal reputation, a shift that immediately changes what the can argue about damages and what it may still be able to seek from Trump’s trust.
That matters because the had subpoenaed the trust holding Trump’s assets for financial information it says it needs to support a claim that the documentary caused $10 billion in damages. The subpoena reached into roughly 400 companies tied to Trump, which is why the fight over relevance was so broad in the first place. With the complaint narrowed, the ’s request for business records no longer has the same footing, but the dispute is not over.
Altman said Trump had good cause to amend the lawsuit because he did not have some of the information needed to make the change until more recently. He also said the amended complaint might change the scope of discovery, but he left the key question to Magistrate Judge Lett: whether Trump’s discovery obligations will actually change at all. In practical terms, that means the may still press for some financial records, but it will have to argue from a narrower set of damages theories than before.
The judge said the update will, in some respects, help the because it cuts down the range of damages Trump can ask for. He wrote that the narrowing represents a substantial diminution in the scope of the available damages and removes several contested allegations, allowing the ’s re-filed motion to dismiss to focus more squarely on its most important arguments. Trump’s original complaint had tied the documentary to both his personal reputation and his businesses, but the revised version strips out the business claims entirely.
Trump is due to file the updated lawsuit today, and that filing will set the terms of the next round of the case. What remains unresolved is not whether the complaint can be narrowed, but how much of the trust’s financial information still survives the narrower fight over damages, a question that now sits with Magistrate Judge Lett.
