Antiabortion activist held in contempt
A federal judge held antiabortion activist David Daleiden and his lawyers in contempt of court Monday for defying the judge’s order by posting videos of conversations secretly recorded at national meetings of abortion providers.
The lawyers’ claim they were protecting Daleiden’s right to a fair trial on criminal charges related to the recordings was “a fig leaf to cover their plan to violate the (court order) ... to score a win in the court of public opinion,” said U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco.
He issued contempt orders against Daleiden, his nonprofit company, the Center for Medical Progress, and his criminal defense lawyers, Steve Cooley — a former Los Angeles County district attorney — and Brent Ferreira. Orrick said they would be required to reimburse the National Abortion Federation, whose conventions they entered, for the added security costs as a result of the inflammatory disclosures as well as attorneys’ fees, sums that add up to $140,000 so far.
Ferreira said the lawyers would appeal. The Center for Medical Progress issued a statement calling the contempt order “an unprecedented attack on David Daleiden’s rights as a defendant in a criminal case,” the felony charges filed by state Attorney General Xavier Becerra for recording the conversations without consent.
The “bogus criminal case is so weak that the AG needs a biased, Planned Parenthoodaffiliated judge to intervene in it to try to rig the outcome,” Daleiden’s organization said.
Orrick had served until 2006 on the board of a San Francisco charity that hosted a Planned Parenthood clinic on its grounds. Daleiden claimed Orrick was biased and sought to remove him from the case, but another federal judge rejected that argument last month, finding no relationship between Orrick and Planned Parenthood or any other organization on either side of the issue.
Daleiden and others from the Center for Medical Progress posed as fetal researchers to enter the abortion federation’s conventions, in San Francisco in 2014 and in Baltimore in 2015, and surreptitiously record conversations that they posted on line.
They said they had been acting as investigative reporters. But Orrick ruled that they had obtained the recordings by fraud and issued a nationwide injunction in February 2016requiring them to remove the postings and prohibiting further disclosure.
Becerra’s office filed criminal charges this March against Daleiden and an employee, Sandra Merritt, under a California law forbidding the secret recording of conversations. After Cooley and Ferreira, Daleiden’s lawyers in that case, obtained the videos from Becerra’s office, links to the conversations and much more — 144 hours of recordings from the conventions — were posted on YouTube by the lawyers and the Center for Medical Progress on May 25.
The abortion federation got YouTube to remove the links but said its members received numerous threats. Cooley and Ferreira, who refused to answer Orrick’s questions at a hearing last week, contended they were not bound by the judge’s orders in the National Abortion Federation lawsuit. But Orrick said the order clearly applied to Daleiden and to any lawyers representing him.