Other lawyers don’t necessarily agree with youabout the impropriety of investigating the processes of distributing fetal tissue.
Regards,
Shodan
Well that’ a non-story if ever I saw one. Back in July, when the videos were all in the news, an obviously uninformed Hilary Clinton said “I have seen pictures from them and obviously find them disturbing.”
Wait, she saw pictures from the video that were disturbing? What the hell did she see? Did the lady on hidden camera use the wrong fork for her salad or something?
Well, the jerks tried to publicly embarrass Planned Parenthood. I find I’m okay with PP trying to publicly embarrass the jerks.
Is this your money quote from that article?
In practical terms, this lawsuit is Christmas for the CMP, right? With Planned Parenthood having put the accuracy of the videos at issue, the CMP will now get to turn PP upside down, I assume, taking discovery into all aspects of the organization’s finances and handling of fetal tissue, seeing every transaction and reading every email about every transaction.
“It’s improprietous to investigate these allegations” - no one. Of course you investigate allegations of wrongdoing - but when the investigations turn up nothing, it’s fair game to speculate that the allegations were lies all along.
Oh, no, he played the “liberal hypocrisy” card! Curses, foiled again!
No. It’s not a (classic) defamation or false light suit, at least based on the OP’s link; I haven’t seen the actual complaint. It’s an invasion of privacy and illegal recording suit, so the truth of the allegations is not at issue.
IANAL, but my guess is no and probably why they aren’t suing for libel. The organization’s finances and tissue handling procedures has nothing to do with whether these videos were legally made and distributed.
From the OP’s link:
or what RNATB said.
In his defense, he may have been gobsmacked by the epiphany that admitting to an error is a thing a person can do.
WHEN Planned Parenthood wins, I’m taking all of you out for abortions! 
Can we instead get miniature American flags?
That makes sense, and most of the complaint (here) looks like it was designed that way. However, it does allege that the CMP fraudulently misrepresented PP’s operations to the public, at paras. 121-24, and Count VII, at para. 196, alleges that one of the unlawful business practices of the CMP was “deceiving the public through misrepresentations and misleading statements as to the nature and legality of Planned Parenthood’s practices.” They may have opened their doors.
Separately, I wonder if pleading around defamation means they will have a problem proving causation. CMP will argue that the various harms they are alleging didn’t come about because of the alleged false representations to gain entry to meetings, but because of the alleged misrepresentation to the public of PP’s operations.
It also seems to me that damages may be hard to prove. Most of what they allege as harm consists of supervening (i.e., independent) criminal actions, and my recollection is that those are not ascribed to a civil defendant even when foreseeable. And I don’t know that undergoing an official investigation can be called damages, if the investigating body was acting within its purview.
It’s a good set of law school questions in some ways. RNATB, I would be interested in your thoughts.
I probably won’t have time to read the whole complaint today, but the parts I skimmed suggest that all the normally-supervening criminal acts are supposed to have been done at the behest of the defendants rather than outside the scope of the “investigation.” So they would be directly liable for those, if not vicariously liable under a respondeat superior theory.
I see your point on paragraph 121-124, but on reflection, I don’t think PP is trying to avoid opening its books and practices after all. It knows its local affiliates are largely in the clear due to the state investigations, and now it gets to prove it in open court. Having said that, I suspect that portion of the complaint will be disposed of at the summary judgment stage; motivating outside anti-abortion activitists to do bad things is not actionable.
Actually, it occurs to me that those might be the supervening harms you referenced now. :smack: But that goes back to my previous point: PP can show damages in the form of the state funding that has been withdrawn, though the causal link is somewhat tenuous. But it may not care about damages at all; the suit is a handy vehicle for clearing its name.
Medium rare, please.
Planned Parenthood cleared, activists indicted. In Texas, no less.
Can I have a margarita instead of an abortion?
Yeah, this is pretty interesting. A Republican DA who started off investigating PP ended up presenting evidence to a grand jury sufficient to have CMP activists indicted.
I think it’s a good time to laud some Republicans for integrity: this DA shows every sign of being a person of integrity, inasmuch as he clearly let facts on the ground change his mind. (A similar circumstance might be if a Democratic DA, under other circumstances, prosecuted PETA activists for similar crimes–although the analogy breaks down due to extremist influences, but that’s another discussion).
I’m really curious to see what the “tampering with a government record” charge consists of. If it’s fake documents they used to gain access to PP, I don’t much care, and might even oppose the charge based on the general benefits of undercover journalism (“might” being a key word there, would need to know specifics). If it’s tampering in the sense that they engaged in deceit sufficient to lead to investigations of Planned Parenthood, I’m much more pleased with the charges; while I support undercover journalism, I absolutely don’t support bearing false witness.
Sorry, that’s a criminal indictment, not a civil suit finding.
He didn’t say it was a civil suit finding. He said the grand jury had cleared the Planned Parenthood operatives (who the probe was initially aimed at).
I was assuming Harris County was the one with Austin in it (which is a bastion of [del]sanity[/del] liberal thought), but it turns out it’s where Houston is. So this is quite a shock.