David Daleiden Sues PP Exec for Defamation

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GOLDEN, Colo. (ChurchMilitant.com) - A pro-life undercover journalist is suing a former Planned Parenthood executive for calling his investigative exposés deceptive and false.

David Daleiden, head of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), has filed a defamation suit against Savita Ginde, formerly vice president and chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

Announced in a Nov. 27 statement, the suit comes after Ginde wrote a book claiming his undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood were "based on lies."

In a series of undercover videos released in 2015, CMP investigators posed as representatives of a medical company interested in purchasing aborted babies' body parts.

Ginde was in one of those undercover videos, talking about the way pricing works for fetal tissue and organs. She told the undercover reporter, "We don't want to do just a flat fee of, like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it."

She also detailed how abortion victims' organs are harvested: "With the second-tris [i.e., babies in second trimester], we won't even put water, because it's so big you can just put your hand in there and pick it up, the parts. And so I don't think it would be as war-torn."

In 2018, Ginde published a book titled The Real Cost of Fake News: The Hidden Truth Behind the Planned Parenthood Video Scandal. The book denounces CMP's undercover videos as "fictional" and "deceptively edited."

In a statement, Daleiden called for honesty and transparency from the abortion industry: "I welcome Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, current and former, speaking honestly and publicly about their work, especially as it regards fetal experimentation and organ harvesting."

"This is the reason CMP's undercover footage continues to have such a profound impact on the public conscience," Daleiden said. "But anyone who tries to attack our undercover reporting by making false statements about our work should expect to make a public correction or be held accountable in a court of law."

This new lawsuit is especially significant because Ginde's claim emboldened the mainstream media's narrative that CMP's undercover videos were heavily edited and misleading.

Samantha Kamman observes in a Washington Examiner op-ed, "Ginde's labeling of the videos as 'fake' made it easy for media outlets to decry the recordings as having been 'heavily edited,' an accusation that was later refuted by an investigation by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals."

Kamman further notes that Ginde herself admitted in her book to never having viewed the entirety of CMP's videos.

Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who filed the legal complaint in court on behalf of Daleiden and CMP, commented, "When someone makes demonstrably false statements and refuses to correct them, as Dr. Ginde repeatedly did in multiple forums, our clients have the right to set the record straight in court, and we look forward to our day in court against Dr. Ginde."

As stated in a court filing, Ginde's book made the following claims about those videos:

• "As I give you a glimpse into the impact of these fictional videos, I am writing this as a multifaceted human because the videos have impacted all areas of my life."
• "In July of 2015, following a multiyear infiltration led by a well-known anti-abortion extremist named David Daleiden, a series of deceptively edited videos were released attempting to implicate Planned Parenthood in the selling of fetal tissue. These allegations are not only completely false, but in the videos in which I am featured many of my words are taken out of context, other words are actually dubbed in, and actions are attributed to me that never actually happened. The words and actions are completely false — literally, FAKE NEWS — and nevertheless, the immediate aftermath of the infiltration was devastating."
• "I wouldn't lie. I wasn't good at it because it never felt right to me. Then there is David Daleiden, who knowingly built a house of cards based on lies."
• "David Daleiden manipulated the audio and added words to make it look like I did something that I have actually never done and said things I actually never said."
• "The entire video campaign that David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress created is based on lies. The facts were fabricated. The videos that included me were edited to manipulate context, with words and phrases that I never said dubbed in and attributed to me."

These and other quotes from Ginde's book are listed as grounds for the defamation suit.

"Each of these statements is provably false," the court filing argues.

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