The final charge in a California case against pro-life journalists who exposed the abortion industry’s fetal body parts practices was dismissed Wednesday.
California negotiated a settlement with Center for Medical Progress (CMP) founder and president David Daleiden and undercover reporter Sandra Merritt in January 2025 in exchange for a “no contest” plea on a single video recording charge. The condition of the settlement was that the “no contest” plea be entered into judgment as a misdemeanor and then ultimately converted into a “not guilty” plea before being dismissed and expunged.
Daleiden announced the official dismissal in a post to X after an arduous ten-year legal battle.
“As promised, the final charge has been DISMISSED and the case completely expunged — after a couple months’ administrative delay, and a truly bizarre last-minute ‘April Fool’s’ attempt by @PPFA and @NatAbortionFed to overturn the State’s agreement,” he wrote. “More on that later…Today, a big THANK YOU to my incredible defense team at Steve Cooley & Associates, who secured this victory after nearly 10 years against powerful, government-funded special interests.”
“In other news, @CtrMedProgress has been quietly working on a big new project to release soon!” he added.
Daleiden and Merritt released undercover videos in 2015 of Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation (NAF), and biomedical research companies regarding the alleged trafficking of aborted baby body parts. In 2017, and in addition to earlier legal action, the California Department of Justice filed an arrest warrant against them, accusing them of violating a state recording law. By the time of the settlement in 2025, seven of the 14 video recording charges initially brought in this case had already been dismissed, CMP noted at the time.
“In my five decades as an attorney, 40 years of which were as a prosecutor, I have never seen such a blatant exercise of selective investigation and vindictive prosecution,” Steve Cooley, Los Angeles County District Attorney from 2000 to 2012, who led Daleiden’s legal defense team throughout the high-stakes case, said at the time. “The California Attorneys General who initiated this case and pursued it for nearly ten years should be ashamed for weaponizing their office to pursue people who were merely exposing illegality associated with the harvesting and sale of fetal body parts.”
Liberty Counsel, which has defended Merritt for more than a decade, released a statement at the time saying the plea agreement “ends an unjust criminal case by dropping these baseless criminal charges without any prison time, fines, or other penalties.” Liberty Counsel noted that before this case, California had never criminally prosecuted undercover journalists “for surreptitious recordings made in the public interest.”
“Sandra Merritt did nothing wrong. She did the right thing by exposing the depravity of the abortion industry. This plea agreement ends an unjust criminal case by dropping these baseless criminal charges without any prison time, fines or other penalties. Sandra deserves to be applauded and acclaimed for revealing these horrors and then enduring this selective and vindictive prosecution as a result,” Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver previously said. “Murdering human babies to harvest their body parts for profit is evil and there is no excuse for Sandra’s political persecution. This is an extraordinary result for Sandra and the State of California deserves to walk away virtually empty handed.”
In stark contrast, Democrat California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the 2025 plea deal as a “felony conviction” and pitched it as a pro-abortion victory. Bonta also took a stab at President Donald Trump for pardoning nearly two dozen pro-life activists targeted, and some imprisoned, by the Biden administration.
“While the Trump Administration is issuing pardons to individuals convicted of harming reproductive health clinics and providers, my office is securing criminal convictions to ensure that Californians can exercise their constitutional rights to reproductive healthcare,” Bonta said in a statement at the time. “We will not hesitate to continue taking action against those who threaten access to abortion care — whether by recording confidential conversations or other means.”
Breitbart News reached out to Bonta’s office for additional comment on Thursday but did not receive a response by time of publication.
CMP’s videos, which include interviews and conversations with abortionists taped undercover, accuse Planned Parenthood of profiting from the sales of body parts of babies aborted in the group’s clinics. Abortionists in the videos also allegedly appear to discuss altering how they perform abortions in order to harvest specific intact organs and body parts. CMP alleges the groups violated a federal law that makes it a felony to sell or purchase human fetal tissue for valuable consideration. In December of 2016, the Senate Judiciary Committee referred Planned Parenthood Federation of America to the FBI and the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution after investigating CMP’s claims.
Planned Parenthood has denied the allegations and claims that CMP’s videos were edited to frame them (full, unedited versions of the videos are available to the public). The group and its affiliates have not been formally charged with wrongdoing, and fact-checkers also maintain that abortion organizations featured in the videos have behaved legally. The abortion organization did change its fetal tissue collection policy in October of 2015 in response to CMP’s videos, stating that Planned Parenthood no longer accepts any legal reimbursement for expenses related to tissue donation.
Two bioscience companies in CMP’s reporting reached a $7.8 million settlement in 2017 with the Orange County district attorney’s office following allegations they illegally profited from the sale of fetal tissue.
“This settlement seized all profits from DV Biologics and DaVinci Biosciences, which they acquired by viewing body parts as a commodity and illegally selling fetal tissues for valuable consideration. These companies will never be able to operate again in Orange County or the state of California,” Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas said in a statement at the time.
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Failed presidential candidate and former Vice President Kamala Harris (D) was California attorney general when the state first went after Daleiden and Merritt for their undercover videos.
Harris, who was California attorney general between 2011 and 2017 before leaving to fill a U.S. Senate seat, ordered a raid on David Daleiden’s Huntington Beach apartment on April 6, 2016, after charging him with violating a state recording law.
Harris directed California Department of Justice agents to seize Daleiden’s laptops, hard drives, and ultimately hundreds of hours of undercover footage from his nearly three years of investigating the abortion groups. Harris, whose political career has been propped up by major abortion organizations, never investigated Planned Parenthood for the alleged trafficking claims while she was attorney general.
Daleiden and his attorneys have alleged, citing billing records, that Harris met with several top California Planned Parenthood executives before the raid on March 23, 2016.
Daleiden recounted the raid in a 2020 article for Breitbart News:
The team of eleven armed agents overturned every box, file, and furniture item in my one-bedroom apartment. They seized all of my laptops and hard drives going back to high school. For the first thirty minutes, they refused to let me call my lawyers. Most damningly of all, they thumbed through copies of invoices from Planned Parenthood’s business partners for late-term aborted baby body parts, yet conspicuously left them behind. Apparently Kamala Harris had already decided that anyone selling body parts was innocent, and anyone exposing the sales, guilty.
Attorneys for Daleiden alleged in 2021 that new court documents revealed how Harris passed off his investigative materials seized during the 2016 raid to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), which at that time was waging a civil suit against Daleiden.
At the time of the raid, Harris had allegedly received thousands of dollars in funding from Planned Parenthood for her 2016 Senate campaign. Right before the raid on Daleiden’s apartment, Harris had also “sought to drum up support for Planned Parenthood,” The Los Angeles Times reported at the time. Her campaign website included a page that asked supporters to sign a petition “to defend Planned Parenthood,” according to the report.
Harris’s involvement with Planned Parenthood and other abortion organizations prompted pushback from pro-life organizations at the time, who accused her of having a conflict of interest and called for her to resign from her role as attorney general and call off her Senate campaign.
Planned Parenthood and others ultimately sued Daleiden for damages, for which a judge awarded the abortion group $2.4 million in damages and more than $13 million in attorney’s fees. The Supreme Court declined to take up that the case in 2023.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
