The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) has continued its years-long battle against Planned Parenthood, appealing a lawsuit in which the abortion giant was awarded $16 million in fees. David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the CMP investigators in the midst of the legal fight, are in the process of appealing the award with the Supreme Court — and Planned Parenthood appears to have dropped a bombshell.
In a filing opposing CMP’s, Planned Parenthood admitted that its employees and executives, filmed in undercover CMP videos showing them discussing the sale of the body parts of aborted babies, actually “spoke the words recorded in the videos.”
According to an emailed press release, “it is the first time Planned Parenthood has acknowledged the authenticity of the footage to the Supreme Court.” CMP’s videos, including full footage, can be found here.
Planned Parenthood argued in the filing that CMP should be forced to pay the $16 million — not because of any falsification of the videos or their content, but because they gained access to the Planned Parenthood executives through deception (emphases added):
When a plaintiff asserts defamation and nondefamation claims side-by-side, based on the same conduct and statements and alleging the same injury, the actual-malice standard plainly applies. Here, however, respondents did not assert defamation and non- defamation claims in parallel. Nor are respondents’ claims based on facts that would have supported an unpled defamation claim. Respondents “stipulated” that the individuals in the videos “spoke the words recorded in the videos,” Planned Parenthood, 2022 WL 13613963, at *4, and petitioners violated the law not by publishing videos, but by producing and transferring fake IDs, lying to gain access to respondents’ conferences, clinics, and staff, and recording surreptitious videos without consent.
This is a marked difference from Planned Parenthood’s past statements.
Planned Parenthood has long claimed the CMP videos are fake, calling Daleiden’s investigation a “campaign of deception” and saying the videos were “deceptively edited.” Yet what Planned Parenthood says to the public and what they tell the courts are two different things; under oath, they will admit to the validity of the statements heard on the videos, as can also be seen here.
Forensic analyses, including from a firm hired by Planned Parenthood, found that the videos had not been faked.
Judge William Orrick, who awarded Planned Parenthood the $16 million, has ties to the abortion giant, and was one of over 100 judges in a Wall Street Journal investigation accused of violating U.S. law and judicial ethics by overseeing court cases involving companies in which the judges were involved. Judge Orrick founded a Planned Parenthood abortion referral facility, but still refused to recuse himself from the case.
The U.S. Reporters’ Committee also filed a friend of the Court submission in support of CMP, determining that the methods used by CMP are journalistic standard.
