California Judge Orders Video Journalists to Pay $13.6 M to Planned Parenthood

David Daleiden, one of the two anti-abortion activists indicted last week, speaks to suppo
AP File Photo/Bob Levey
Dr. Susan Berry

A federal judge in California ordered the video journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s practices in the harvesting and sales of aborted baby body parts to pay the abortion giant $13.6 million to cover its legal costs in its case against them.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Orrick III ordered David Daleiden and his associates at Center for Medical Progress (CMP) to pay $13.6 million over the $2 million in damages they were ordered to pay last year for recording the abortion vendor’s officials while they discussed how they harvest the fetal tissue for sale.

Daleiden and his advocates have now appealed the verdict to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In November 2019, a jury found the pro-life journalists violated the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), causing significant harm to Planned Parenthood with its video series, and awarded the punitive damages to the abortion provider.

Orrick, Daleiden told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight soon afterward, “is actually the founder of a Planned Parenthood of Northern California clinic in San Francisco.”

He added what he and his legal team discovered about the relationship between Orrick and high-level Democrats:

Planned Parenthood, very intentionally and very strategically and with a lot of gamesmanship, filed this case specifically to get it in San Francisco in front of Judge William Orrick, who is an Obama appointee, who was a bundler for the Obama campaign for hundreds of thousands of dollars, is best friends with Tom Steyer.

Daleiden and his attorneys unsuccessfully attempted to get Orrick recused from the case several times.

The judge blocked the jury from viewing all the undercover video he produced during his undercover investigation, Daleiden said.

In addition, Orrick’s wife’s Facebook account was found to have included posted public comments — along with a photo of her and her husband — that indicated support for Planned Parenthood and criticism of Daleiden and CMP.

Planned Parenthood has yet to be prosecuted for any of the allegations of profiting from the sales of the body parts of babies aborted in its clinics.

In June 2019, Senate Judiciary Chairman(SJC)  Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and his predecessor Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), wrote to Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray, seeking an update on the federal investigation that was supposedly launched in 2017 into the allegations raised, in part, through the video documentation by CMP.

The senators asked Barr and Wray to respond to their inquiry no later than July 2 of last year.

In August 2019, Breitbart News reached out to the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) press team for an update on the Department of Justice/FBI response and was informed SJC was still awaiting a response.

In January 2020, Daleiden told Breitbart News the civil and criminal cases against him and his colleagues “are really all part of the same conspiracy.”

“Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation and Kamala Harris and the California Attorney General’s office,” he said. “All violating our First Amendment civil rights.”

In an op-ed at Breitbart News in October, Daleiden wrote that Harris, who ordered a raid on his California home, is “one of the biggest threats to First Amendment civil liberties that our country has ever seen.”

He continued:

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?’” he asked. “It is because I dared to question Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry, and to speak the truth: Planned Parenthood sells baby parts.”

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