2 activists who secretly filmed Planned Parenthood charged with felonies
Two anti-abortion activists who filmed controversial undercover videos as they attempted to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood have been charged in California with 15 felonies for allegedly invading the privacy of medical providers by filming without consent.
State prosecutors filed the charges Tuesday against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress, eight months after similar charges were dropped in Texas.
Meanwhile, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld an injunction barring anti-abortion activists from distributing the controversial recordings.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a former Democratic member of Congress, said in a statement that the state “will not tolerate the criminal recording of conversations.”
Prosecutors say Daleiden, of Davis, Calif., and Merritt, of San Jose, filmed 14 people without permission from October 2013 to July 2015 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and El Dorado counties. One felony count was filed for each person. They were also accused of one count of criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.
Daleiden said in an email to The Associated Press that the “bogus” charges are coming from “Planned Parenthood’s political cronies.”
“The public knows the real criminals are Planned Parenthood and their business partners,” Daleiden said.
The conversations included officials from Planned Parenthood and StemExpress, a California company that provides blood, tissue and other biological material for medical research and received fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood.
The videos, released in 2015, reignited the ongoing abortion debate in the U.S. and renewed efforts in Congress to attempt to defund Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood receives about $500 million a year from the federal government to provide cancer screenings, medical checkups and birth control services but is barred by federal law from using taxpayer money to pay for abortions.
An affidavit filed in San Francisco Superior Court alleges Daleiden and Merritt used bogus driver’s licenses and created a sham medical research company, BioMax Procurement Services, to attend the National Abortion Federation’s 2014 conference in San Francisco, the Los Angeles Times reports.
At the conference, according to court documents, the pair posed as BioMax representatives, used phony names and surreptitiously recorded eight attendees and speakers.
In the months after the conference, they are accused of using the same phony biomedical company to set up dinner meetings with women’s health care providers who were also recorded surreptitiously, according to prosecutors.
In one of the meetings, Daleiden posed as “Robert Sarkis” of the phony Biomax company and is shown discussing liver tissue with the chief executive of StemExpress at a Northern California restaurant.
Abortion opponents claimed the recordings showed Planned Parenthood was illegally harvesting and selling the organs. Planned Parenthood said the videos were deceptively edited to support false claims from the anti-abortion forces.
“As we have said from the beginning, and as more than a dozen different state investigations have made clear: Planned Parenthood has done nothing wrong, and the only people who broke the law are those behind the fraudulent tapes,” Mary Alice Carter, interim vice president of communications for Planned Parenthood, said in a statement.
"Their efforts were furtherance of First Amendment values and are clothed with the same Constitutional protection that all investigative journalists deserve and must enjoy," Brejcha said in a statement."Undercover journalism has been a vital tool in our politics and self-governance.“
Last year, Daleiden said in a Facebook post that the California Department of Justice agents raided his home, seizing all of his video footage along with personal information. Until Tuesday, however, there were no indications that the state planned to file any charges.
The similar case in Texas came amid a legal roller coaster ride. A grand jury originally convened to investigate Planned Parenthood found no wrongdoing by the group and instead indicted Daleiden and Merritt. Those charges, however, were eventually dropped after Texas prosecutors said the grand jury overstepped its authority.
In the federal appeals court ruling upholding the injunction against distributing the material, two of the three judges said, "One may not obtain information through fraud, promise to keep that information confidential, and then breach that promise in the name of the public interest."
Contributing: Associated Press