San Jose woman charged in Planned Parenthood case
Davis man also accused of making undercover videos at clinics in state
A San Jose woman named Sandra Susan Merritt was one of two antiabortion activists California prosecutors charged Tuesday for making undercover videos of themselves trying to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood.
Merritt, along with David Daleiden, of Davis, faces 15 felonies for invading the privacy of medical providers by filming without consent.
The announcement this week comes eight months after similar charges were dropped in Texas against the pair, who work with an Irvine-based anti-abortion group called the Center for Medical Progress.
The case was spearheaded by state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a longtime congressional Democrat who took over the investigation in January.
In a statement, he said California “will not tolerate the criminal recording of conversations.”
Each of the defendants is charged with 14 counts, one for each of the 14 people who were filmed without their permission between October 2013 and July 2015 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and El Dorado counties.
The 15th count is for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.
Merritt was not immediately available for comment, and a spokesman for the Center referred calls to the group’s attorney, former L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley, who ran unsuccessfully for California attorney general against Kamala Harris, now a U.S. senator.
Daleiden and Merritt had previously been indicted in Texas on similar charges in January of 2016, but all of the charges were eventually dropped by July as prosecutors said a grand jury had overstepped its authority.
The grand jury had originally been convened to investigate Planned Parenthood, but after finding no wrongdoing turned around and indicted Daleiden and Merritt instead.
Last summer, a Los Angeles judge declined to remove Merritt as a defendant in a lawsuit related to the videos, refusing to accept her claim that she was working for the anti-abortion group as a journalist at the time the videos were made and therefore enjoyed First Amendment protections.
A Texas native, Merritt lives in South San Jose, has operated a tutoring service and has held a cosmetology license since 1982, according to public records.