Federal Judge Orders Journalists To Pay Planned Parenthood $13.6 million, Latest Legal Update In Years-long Legal Battles Over Illegal Fetal Tissue Sales Videos

Over the weekend Breitbart reported that “a federal judge in California ordered the video journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s practices in the harvesting and sale of aborted baby body parts to pay the abortion giant $13.6 million” to cover the legal costs of Planned Parenthood suing the video journalists. This order comes after years of legal battles surrounding the recorded video evidence of Planned Parenthood harvesting and selling fetal tissue. But there are a few details you may not know about this story.

Kamala Harris was the Attorney General for California during the time that independent video journalist David Deleiden released the controversial videos. It came as no surprise that Kamala, who had received significant campaign donations over the years from Planned Parenthood and affiliated organizations, chose not to pursue an investigation into the very serious accusations against Planned Parenthood. Instead, Attorney General Kamala Harris applied for a warrant and raided the home of the independent journalist, seizing laptops, hard drives, and cellphones containing all the video footage taken over a 3 year journalistic investigation into Planned Parenthood, “including some very damning footage that has yet to be released to the public.”

At the time, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List organization, Marjorie Dannenfelser, made a statement regarding the obvious conflict of interest for Attorney General Kamala Harris, who was then running for the U.S. Senate.

“The fact that Ms. Harris is seizing private property of a pro-life California activist who has exposed horrific practices conducted by Planned Parenthood, which donated thousands to her last campaign, while her Senate campaign promotes and defends them — the nation’s largest abortion provider — is a conflict of interest and abuse of government power.”

Likewise, the Students of Life of America released statements saying,

“California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who sent agents to raid the home a citizen journalist who exposed Planned Parenthood’s practices of harvesting and selling the body parts of aborted babies, is using her Senate campaign website to advocate for the abortion giant, promoting a petition to defend Planned Parenthood.”

Similarly, Concerned Women for America made the following statement,

“Kamala Harris is engaged in the highest level of corruption and abuse of power. While she uses her KGB-like tactics to seize personal property of an innocent American citizen. The American people and the citizens of California have had enough of corrupt politicians who abuse their power for political gain.”

The video journalist himself, David Daleiden, accused Kamala Harris of refusing to investigate Planned Parenthood because she was so deeply tied to them politically.

“This is no surprise — Planned Parenthood’s bought-and-paid-for AG has steadfastly refused to enforce the law against the baby body parts traffickers in our state, or even investigate them — while at the same time doing their bidding to harass and intimidate citizen journalists. We will pursue all remedies to vindicate our First Amendment rights.”

Planned Parenthood of course accused Daleiden of selectively editing and manipulating the video footage to present falsehoods. In 2017, the California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed charges against Daleiden for “criminal invasion of privacy,” saying, “We will not tolerate the criminal recording of confidential conversations.”

Daleiden responded in a statement reiterating that it is also illegal to harvest and sell fetal tissue.

Despite all this, in November of 2019, the jury in the federal civil case that had been brought against Daleiden sided with Planned Parenthood, finding that the pro-life journalist “caused significant harm to the abortion chain with its sting video series and awarded punitive damages to the abortion chain of over $2.2 million.” The jury also found the defendants in violation of or conspiring to violate the Federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). And as seems to be standard operating procedure with Planned Parenthood, (pun intended), the judge in the case was embroiled in controversy.  Judge William Orrick III and his wife have obvious ties to Planned Parenthood as evidenced on social media and he “is actually the founder of a Planned Parenthood of Northern California clinic in San Francisco.”

Interestingly, significant new information has come to light in recent months.

In April, the public became aware of unsealed documents detailing charges for $25,000 by Planned Parenthood for fetal tissue and blood samples. Fox News detailed some of the specific invoices that were unsealed during the course of legal proceedings.

“The invoices were unsealed as part of Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit with David Daleiden, the pro-life journalist whose undercover videos prompted both state and federal calls for investigations. According to the invoices, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte charged StemExpress $55.00 per “POC,” or products of conception — another term for fetal remains — and $10.00 per sample of blood.

Three invoices — dated Aug. 2, Sept. 5, and Sept. 28 — show the abortion provider charging $5,860, $11,365, and $7,715. That totals $24,940, along with more than 200 POC’s.”

Daleiden told Fox News,

“The federal law against selling aborted fetal organs and tissues in exchange for ‘valuable consideration’ was enacted to prevent monetary incentives to turn children in the womb into a commodity. The law lays out the unmistakable difference between a researcher reimbursing a clinic for used up PPE, versus StemExpress paying solely for the number of ‘usable’ body parts it could collect and then sell from Planned Parenthood’s abortions. Planned Parenthood and StemExpress’s business relationship — sadly not unique to them — sets quotas for certain types of abortions, treats pregnant women like a cash crop, places a price tag on human beings, and declares that our nation’s children are worth more dead than alive.”

Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood director turned anti-abortion activist likewise told Fox News,

“This is literally what I have been saying for years. They are charging. They have just been line item-ing it under different wording…transport, handling, processing, etc…when the process for handling the POC after an abortion isn’t any different. You either throw it in a biohazard bag that stays in the clinic or a styrofoam container that goes to the procurement company.”

Then in May, Fox News reported on testimony given in sworn depositions by Planned Parenthood executives. This testimony “has raised questions about the organization’s initial response to journalist David Daleiden’s undercover videos, and refocused attention on whether the nation’s largest abortion provider violated federal law regarding fetal tissue donations.”

Daleiden reasonably argues that this sworn testimony actually confirms the accusations of illegal collection and sale of fetal tissue made in the videos for which he was investigated. In fact, one of the most controversial segments in Daleiden’s videos detailed Doctors Deborah Nucatola and Mary Gather, both senior management at Planned Parenthood, discussing how to abort fetuses more carefully or, to use their words, use a “less crunchy” technique to remove the fetal tissue.

And in the recently surfaced sworn depositions, both of those doctors actually confirmed that they did indeed alter their abortion “techniques,” but maintained that the “procedure” never changed. Gatter testified to altering her “technique,” saying,

“By the time I was at PP [Planned Parenthood] Pasadena, many of us were moving in the direction of making this distinction between method and procedure, method and technique. And so I was very comfortable at that time that the difference in technique did not – doing different techniques: manual aspiration versus electronic aspiration – did not really affect the procedure or the method; so it was, therefore, permissible in terms of fetal tissue donation.”

She’s arguing that the “procedure” is to remove and dispose of a baby, which is ultimately accomplished whether they use a careful manual removal technique to preserve as much intact tissue for future sale or whether they just slice up the baby and suck the body parts into a bag.

The argument now made by Catherine Glenn Foster, Attorney for Americans United for Life, is that the Planned Parenthood distinction between method, technique, and procedure “doesn’t matter legally. They are changing the procedure in order to sell…the bodies of abortion victims.”

In fact, Fox News talked to Dr. Forrest Smith, an OBGYN who has performed thousands of abortions, who explained that

“The “techniques” phrasing was just one of several “semantic sleight-of-hand trick[s]” PPFA has employed to shoehorn compliance with federal law — which prohibits the “alteration of the timing, method, or procedures used to terminate a pregnancy.” One of those “tricks,” he said, included PPFA’s decision to add “substantively” as a modifier to “altering” in its policies — phrasing that Cecile Richards, then-PPFA president, used in a 2015 letter to congressional leaders.”

Unfortunately for journalism and First Amendment rights nationwide, the biased federal judge who oversaw the civil case from last year, U.S. District Judge William Orrick III, has now ordered David Daleiden and his associates at the Center for Medical Progress to pay Planned Parenthood $13.6 million over the $2.2 million previously awarded, in order to cover the legal fees for Planned Parenthood.

In an op-ed for Breitbart News back in October, Daleiden wrote that Kamala Harris, the Attorney General who who refused to investigate Planned Parenthood and instead raided his home and confiscated his journalistic materials, is “one of the biggest threats to First Amendment civil liberties that our country has ever seen.”

“Does anyone doubt that if I had been investigating and publishing undercover video reports on unlicensed gun sales, factory farming, or unsanitary grocery practices, that Harris never would have dreamed of raiding my home? Local news reporters in California tape and publish undercover conversations with corrupt chiropractors in their offices, fraudulent repairmen in private homes, and vendors in unlicensed marijuana dispensaries, but are not prosecuted under the California video recording law. Yet I, who filmed in crowded public restaurants and hotel lobbies, had my home raided and face the first-ever criminal charges for newsgathering under the recording law.”

“Is there any doubt why Kamala Harris subjected me alone among undercover video reporters in California to this selective standard of ‘justice?’”

This disregard for the First Amendment and obvious political double standard are just two of the many reasons that I am terrified of being subjected to a Biden Harris administration.