SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – Planned Parenthood's federal lawsuit accusing anti-abortion activists of hampering abortion access with doctored videos creating the impression clinics sell aborted fetal tissue will proceed intact, the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday.
The court's unanimous three-judge panel affirmed U.S. District Judge William Orrick III's refusal to strike Planned Parenthood's 13 state claims against anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress, its founder David Daleiden and his colleague Sandra Merritt for legal insufficiency under California's Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation statute.
Better known as the anti-SLAPP statute, the law is meant to curtail frivolous or malicious lawsuits with the potential to chill free speech. Planned Parenthood also sued on federal racketeering and wiretapping claims.
The panel concluded that Orrick used the correct federal standard to adjudicate the anti-SLAPP motion to prevent conflicts between state and federal procedural rules, and correctly declined to evaluate the factual sufficiency of Planned Parenthood's complaint at the pleading stage.
"If defendants’ anti-SLAPP motion was based on legal deficiencies, plaintiffs were not required to present prima facie evidence supporting plaintiffs’ claims," U.S. Circuit Judge Ronald Gould wrote for the panel. "Requiring a presentation of evidence without accompanying discovery would improperly transform the motion to strike under the anti-SLAPP law into a motion for summary judgment without providing any of the procedural safeguards that have been firmly established by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. That result would effectively allow the state anti-SLAPP rules to usurp the federal rules. We could not properly allow such a result."
Planned Parenthood sued in 2016, claiming Daleiden and Merritt endangered the safety of its doctors and patients and caused it to lose millions of dollars after they set up a fake fetal tissue procurement company called BioMax to infiltrate abortion conferences and secretly record videos of themselves trying to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood doctors.
The organization said the defendants edited the videos to create the impression that Planned Parenthood sells the tissue, and then posted the videos online. The videos led to a near-shutdown of Planned Parenthood in 2015, after GOP lawmakers threatened to pull its funding.
Planned Parenthood also claims the videos caused a dramatic increase in threats, harassment and vandalism against abortion providers, culminating in a November 2015 shooting at a clinic in Colorado Springs.
Daleiden and Merritt separately moved to dismiss the suit and strike state claims of fraud, trespass, invasion of privacy, nonconsensual taping and contract. The pair insist their activities as “investigative journalists” – which included using fake driver’s licenses to gain access to the conferences – were protected by the First Amendment. They said Planned Parenthood failed to adequately plead its claims or marshal enough evidence to support them.
But Orrick tossed all four motions, ruling that although the defendants had raised “serious arguments” regarding some of the claims, Planned Parenthood had pleaded them sufficiently.
Combining its 2001 ruling in Metabolife Intern., Inc. v. Wornick and its 2012 non-precedential opinion in Z.F. v. Ripon Unified School District, the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday ruled that to prevent California's anti-SLAPP statute from overriding federal procedural rules, anti-SLAPP motions to strike must be reviewed under different standards depending on the motion's basis.