Going on Offense, Planned Parenthood Sues Orchestrators of Smear Campaign

Planned Parenthood on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against the people behind the ongoing, widely discredited video smear campaign that they say has “created a poisonous environment that fuels political attacks on access to reproductive health care and feeds threats against our health centers.”

The civil suit, filed in San Francisco, charges that the defendants—including the shadowy anti-choice group Center for Medical Progress; its president and secretary David Daleiden and Troy Newman; and Biomax Procurement Services, LLC, the fake firm created by anti-abortion extremists for the smear campaign—engaged in a “complex criminal enterprise to defraud Planned Parenthood and prevent the health care organization from providing preventive and reproductive health services to millions of women and men,” according to a press statement from the organization.

“The people behind this fraud lied and broke the law in order to spread malicious lies about Planned Parenthood.”
—Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood Federation of America

It cites violations of the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO Act) and says defendants engaged in wire fraud, mail fraud, invasion of privacy, illegal secret recording, and trespassing.

“The people behind this fraud lied and broke the law in order to spread malicious lies about Planned Parenthood,” said Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “This lawsuit exposes the elaborate, illegal conspiracy designed to block women’s access to safe and legal abortion, and we filed the case to hold them accountable.”

The video campaign, which launched last summer, involved the use of hidden cameras and deceptively edited interviews to suggest that Planned Parenthood was involved in the illegal selling of human tissue obtained while performing late-term abortions.

The ensuing fallout included Congressional and state-level votes to defund Planned Parenthood and enact additional abortion restrictions. Planned Parenthood clinics also reported a nine-fold increase in threats and criminal activities against their health centers. In fact, the alleged shooter in November’s deadly attack at a Colorado Springs clinic, 57-year-old Robert Lewis Dear, allegedly told police “no more baby parts” as he was taken into custody—an apparent reference to the slanderous videos.