The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) reports today that the fetal parts procurement company StemExpress has dropped its lawsuit again CMP and is “walking away with nothing.”
StemExpress sued CMP in late July 2015, seeking an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech with a preliminary injunction gag order to prevent the release of undercover video of a business dinner with its Founder and CEO, Cate Dyer. In the video, Dyer made several shocking admissions about StemExpress obtaining fully intact fetuses from abortion cases, seeking “another 50 livers a week” from a “volume institution” like Planned Parenthood, and asserting that supplying fetal tissue should be “profitable” for abortion clinics.
The fetal parts company had made much ado about its lawsuit and gag order against CMP but as CMP reports:
StemExpress’ request for a gag order was denied in August 2015, and CMP released the footage. Less than a month after the release of the video, StemExpress counsel at McDermott, Will & Emery first approached CMP seeking a settlement in the case, and less than a year later, McDermott, Will & Emery withdrew from representation of StemExpress.
Meanwhile, StemExpress has bigger problems than CMP since the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives issued its final report, which was laden with criminal referrals recommending both state and federal prosecution for the fetal parts organization. If the Panel’s recommendations are followed, in addition to criminal prosecution, businesses like StemExpress would no longer be able to operate. The report, detailing the activities of StemExpress (pages 136+) lists the deep profits the fetal brokers made by selling fetal parts to Planned Parenthood using a “middle-man business model.”
CMP lead David Daleiden said:
StemExpress was the first of Planned Parenthood’s accomplices to file a retaliatory lawsuit against citizen journalists and the first to seek an unconstitutional prior restraint on our First Amendment rights to speak and publish. Now, the video is out for all the world to see, StemExpress faces criminal referral in multiple jurisdictions, and they are walking away from their own lawsuit empty-handed.
This victory for free speech and citizen journalism was made possible by our masterful and indefatigable legal representation in this case by Chuck LiMandri at the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund, and Katie Short at Life Legal Defense Foundation. StemExpress’ surrender sends an unmistakable message to Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, and all their political cronies who would dare to attack the First Amendment to cover up their crimes.
Not only is this a victory for free speech, as Daleiden notes, but it indicates a defeat on the part of StemExpress, who seems backed into the proverbial corner.
