The secretly filmed video of a young woman who works at a Missouri Planned Parenthood clinic ends with an image of crosshairs and a call to “Be Brave. Do Something.” 

Project Veritas is a far-right organization that surreptitiously films employees of organizations that it opposes, deceptively edits the videos, and then uses them to direct public fury at its targets. By the time their lurid allegations get debunked, it’s too late.

Sometimes there’s an official investigation that clears the target of wrongdoing, or reporters apologize after falling for a stunt, or a victim successfully sues for defamation. Too late. Reputations have been ruined, jobs lost, rape and death threats sent, organizations defunded or shuttered.

Project Veritas’ tactics have been adopted by its associates in the anti-abortion movement, including David Daleiden, who used doctored videos of Planned Parenthood employees to push the “selling baby parts” lie that led to twelve people being shot, three fatally, by a deranged man repeating it.

That day in 2015 when Richard Dear took his rifle to the Planned Parenthood in Colorado is not one I will ever forget. And I remember shortly thereafter watching angrily as the bullet proof glass went up at my office at a reproductive rights organization because I’d known it was inevitable something very bad would come from those videos.

Missouri AG sues Planned Parenthood over Project Veritas video involving fictional girl

When I saw Project Veritas’ Missouri video three months ago, I wanted to write about it, but decided I would only make things worse by giving it attention. I try to censor my fears of violence because I don’t want to exacerbate those of others, or give anyone ideas.

And anyway, Project Veritas was a dying operation due to the defamation settlements, the financial scandal, and the fact that everyone knows at this point that it is a purveyor of dangerous lies. 

Enter Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.

Last week, Bailey reinvigorated my fear of Project Veritas-inspired anti-abortion violence by filing a lawsuit against Planned Parenthood based entirely on the edited video. Bailey cannot win this lawsuit for reasons I will explain below.  What he can do is vilify abortion providers and amplify and legitimize the call to “Be Brave. Do Something.”

The video features a male voice asking a clinic worker about whether a thirteen-year-old can get an abortion at a Planned Parenthood in Kansas without her parents knowing.  The clinic worker offers information packets and repeatedly tells him the clinic in Kansas can help.

The male voice is creepy and it appears Project Veritas is implying that the worker should have taken him to be an adult abuser who had impregnated a child. I’m doubtful what Project Veritas is showing us on the video is an accurate depiction of what happened, but let’s pretend for the sake of argument that the worker should have suspected him of impregnating a girl who is not present.

What should she have done then?

Anything she could to get that girl to a doctor. 

This fictional girl needs medical care immediately, whether or not she wants an abortion, and that medical care is an opportunity for other interventions. It doesn’t help the girl to spook the suspected abuser and cause him to seek an abortion outside of the medical system or leave the girl to stay unwillingly pregnant. The smart move is to reassure him that if the girl sees a doctor it will be fine.

In Kansas, getting an abortion would necessarily involve intervention because the “bypass” of parental consent that Bailey tries to make seem illicit is the judicial bypass that a minor must obtain in lieu of parental consent. 

It might also be wise for a worker encountering a creepy man at her Planned Parenthood clinic to consider her personal safety, smile, and tell the creeper that everything will be fine until he goes away.

Yet Bailey, who says he wants to “eradicate” Planned Parenthood, makes the inflammatory and inciting allegation that the video is evidence of “trafficking minors.”

Bailey claims that giving out information about abortion in Kansas violates a Missouri law that gives parents and prosecutors a right to sue someone who “aids or assists” a minor in ending a pregnancy without parental consent. On that basis, Bailey is seeking to enjoin Planned Parenthood from telling minors that abortion is available out of state.

You don’t need to be a lawyer to think that sounds like a First Amendment violation. 

It is — the Supreme Court of Missouri has already said so in regard to this very statute. 

In a 2007 decision, the Court said that “aiding and assisting” as used in the statute cannot include speech.  

The court also explicitly stated that the statute cannot constitutionally apply to out-of-state conduct, specifically that of clinics in Kansas. There is nothing illegal about sharing the information that help is available from out-of-state. 

Furthermore, the court affirmed a lower court judgment that set out an incredibly high burden for proving liability.

A defendant must have acted with the specific intent to violate the statute, had general knowledge of Missouri parental consent law, actual knowledge that the person is a minor, actual knowledge that the minor doesn’t have parental consent and isn’t likely to get it, and the minor must have actually obtained an abortion. That would be a high bar to meet in any case, it’s an impossible one where the minor never existed.  

Bailey is aware of the court’s decision because someone in his office is capable of rudimentary legal research. Yet he fails to cite it and make any attempt at arguing that it doesn’t doom his effort against Planned Parenthood.

This is because Bailey’s lawsuit is not a genuine attempt to get an injunction. It is a messaging document in the style of a Project Veritas video in that it identifies and vilifies real people with misleading or false information presented as fact.

It starts with mischaracterizations of what was found in previous litigation with Planned Parenthood. It lies about a doctor who has nothing to do with his case. It names the clinic workers whose faces Project Veritas is spreading all over the internet.

What it does not do is present evidence that what is left of Missouri’s “aid or assist” law has been violated. It doesn’t even say Bailey has bothered to obtain and review an unedited version of the video that is his only evidence of something.

Bailey doesn’t actually believe the video shows evidence of “child trafficking” or he would have taken action when it came out three months ago.  Andrew Bailey has decided it is politically useful for him to aid and abet Project Veritas’ attempt to put crosshairs on abortion providers, despite the history of those metaphorical crosshairs becoming deadly literal. 

Mr. Bailey, you are endorsing violence, and I’m begging you to stop.