Court mostly upholds verdict against activists behind undercover Planned Parenthood videos
A federal judge on Friday upheld a jury’s guilty verdict against four activists who are accused of filming undercover videos involving the nation’s largest abortion provider while they worked under the guise of making them for a conservative news channel.
The ruling comes as an appeal of the five-week trial of four Florida residents, including the director of a pro-life group, is pending in a different court. The group that produced the videos, “Project Veritas,” had sought to suppress the public release of the videos, claiming they were secretly recorded without their knowledge and that they would reveal their identities.
“It was not our intention to reveal any other than the truth, and we look forward to that process being complete and the whole thing going away once and for all,” the undercover videos’ director, James O’Keefe, said in an email to supporters, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Paul G. Lewis III ordered the videos, which were made as undercover reporters in 2012, not to be released — a ruling that came as a relief for two advocacy groups who sued to publish the videos and a pro-abortion advocacy organization with a news arm.
The Associated Press called the ruling a victory for O’Keefe and his group, which is known for its controversial tactics, such as secretly recording conversations with controversial individuals, and said the case against the four Florida participants was “the first court to consider the full implications of the state’s anti-terrorist law.”
In addition to the videos of abortion providers, O’Keefe has been accused of planting fake news stories on conservative websites in an attempt to trick the news outlets, and he had the identities of the news organizations that published stories on a computer that he says were planted with malware.
In the videos, the activists — Scott Olson, who is accused
