Right there with them
Planned Parenthood is suing the people behind the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), the anti-abortion group that released a series of misleading videos this summer claiming that the women’s health organization sells fetal tissue for profit.
“The people behind this fraud lied and broke the law in order to spread malicious lies about Planned Parenthood,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. “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 lawsuit, announced to reporters Thursday afternoon, might seem a little late, given that the first tapes were released about six months ago and the provider has taken a lot of heat since then. But it took time to do a full investigation into the “complex conspiracy” behind the videos, Laguens told reporters. “We wanted to make sure we had every bit of it right.”
Planned Parenthood isn’t pulling any punches with this lawsuit. The organization is calling CMP a “criminal enterprise” and is suing under federal racketeering law (which has been used once before against anti-abortion protesters but ultimately failed at the Supreme Court). Planned Parenthood is also suing for other damages and bringing a civil action for CMP’s alleged violations of state criminal codes about secret recordings.
The organization says that CMP and its officers engaged in an elaborate three-year criminal conspiracy to mislead Planned Parenthood and public officials, breaking both federal and state laws (in Maryland, Florida, and California, where the suit was filed) in the process.
[…]
It’s worth noting that no state or federal investigations thus far, even those led by anti-abortion officials like Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, have found evidence that Daleiden’s claims about “profit” are true.
Yes, that is worth noting. It’s also worth noting that the state of Texas used the pretext that these videos were truthful to kick Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid – to be more accurate, it blustered about it without ever producing any evidence of malfeasance on Planned Parenthood’s part. There’s another lawsuit related to that, and a separate federal lawsuit filed against the CMP last year, which was narrower in scope. Somebody’s been lying all along, and one way or another the courts will sort that out. You can see a copy of the lawsuit here, and ThinkProgress, RH Reality Check, and the Current have more.
UPDATE: More from the Press.
good! Actions always have responsibilities – time to pay the piper.