By Dave Andrusko
The United States Supreme Court today declined to hear an appeal by the Center for Medical Progress of a decision by a federal appeals court which rejected CMP’s motion to dismiss Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit against David Daleiden.
Mr. Daleiden, a citizen journalist and the project lead at The CMP, became nationally known in 2015 when undercover investigators posed as buyers of “fetal tissue” (an umbrella term that includes intact hearts and lungs and pancreas and brains), and asked the kinds of questions someone who is the middleman would ask of the abortion industry.
The product of this 30-month-long “Human Capital” investigation was a lengthy series of videos that documented Planned Parenthood’s unsavory involvement in the procurement and sale of body parts from aborted babies. The CMP videos revealed the participants’ cavalier, flippant attitudes of towards the unborn babies whose body parts they were harvesting.
Planned Parenthood sued him in 2016 claiming among other things fraud, invasion of privacy, and trespassing.
Following the decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to allow the lawsuit to continue, attorneys for Daleiden asking the Supreme Court “to apply California’s Anti-SLAPP statute to dismiss Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit and vindicate Daleiden,” according to the Thomas More Society. “The statute gives defendants like Daleiden the ability to quickly end Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, known as ‘SLAPP” lawsuits.’
“Anti-SLAPP statutes prohibit lawsuits that are intended to silence advocates for justice by intimidating them, wearing them out, and bankrupting them until they will abandon their advocacy,” Thomas More Society special counsel Sarah Pitlyk explained back in November 2018. “Planned Parenthood’s goals will have been accomplished if either we surrender to intimidation, mounting legal costs, or simple exhaustion and abandon the cause. California and more than 30 other states have anti-SLAPP statutes because SLAPP lawsuits are, by definition, attempts to violate the free speech rights of the defendants in those lawsuits. Of course, neither we nor David will ever surrender!”