A San Francisco County judge dropped the final remaining charge against pro-life activist David Daleiden on Wednesday and ordered the entire case expunged, closing the book on a prosecution that began nearly a decade ago under then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris. The ruling by Judge Brian Ferrall ends one of the most politically charged legal sagas in the modern abortion debate, a case that critics long called a textbook example of selective prosecution aimed at silencing investigative journalism.
Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, had faced 15 felony charges for recording undercover conversations with Planned Parenthood leadership and doctors. Those videos, first released in 2015, purported to show abortion providers discussing the sale of fetal body parts. The footage set off a firestorm that reached Congress, but the legal machinery of California turned not on the abortion industry, but on the man who held the camera.
Now, after years of legal proceedings, a settlement, and what Daleiden described as a last-minute attempt by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation to block the agreement, the case is over. No jail time. No fines. No probation. No admission of wrongdoing.
The timeline tells the story plainly enough. In 2015, Daleiden and fellow undercover journalist Sandra Merritt released a series of videos showing themselves posing as buyers of fetal tissue and engaging Planned Parenthood officials in recorded conversations. The videos were explosive. The Senate Judiciary Committee called on the Department of Justice to investigate the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
No charges were ever brought against the nation’s largest abortion provider.
Instead, Harris’s office opened an investigation into Daleiden and Merritt for violating California’s recording law. In April 2016, the California Department of Justice issued a search warrant and raided Daleiden’s Huntington Beach apartment. Harris left the attorney general’s office in January 2017 after winning election to the U.S. Senate, but her successor, Xavier Becerra, picked up the case and filed 15 charges against Daleiden and Merritt that same year.
The pair faced up to ten years in prison, as National Review reported. What followed was years of legal proceedings in which the state pursued two people whose apparent crime was recording conversations that embarrassed a politically favored institution.
In January 2025, Daleiden and Merritt each pleaded no contest to one felony count under a settlement with California. The remaining charges were dismissed. Under the terms of the deal, the single remaining felony recording charge was converted to a misdemeanor, and the no-contest plea was entered as a not-guilty plea, a procedural step designed to lead to full dismissal and expungement.
The agreement required no jail time, no fines, no probation, and no admission of wrongdoing. Daleiden and Merritt were required to have no contact with, stay away from, and not name the individuals in the recordings, and to obey all laws, including by not making additional unlawful recordings.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta nonetheless cast the plea deal as a win. In a January 2025 press release, Bonta stated:
“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 added that his office would “not hesitate to continue taking action against those who threaten access to abortion care, whether by recording confidential conversations or other means.” That framing, equating undercover journalism with threats to abortion access, tells you everything about the political character of this prosecution.
The broader fight over abortion-related policy continues on multiple fronts, including Senator Hawley’s recent probe into mifepristone makers over safety concerns.
But even after the settlement was reached, the case did not close quietly. Daleiden said on X that Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation made what he called “a truly bizarre last-minute ‘April Fool’s’ attempt” to overturn the state’s agreement. The effort failed. On Wednesday, Judge Ferrall dismissed the final charge and expunged the case.
Daleiden did not mince words about what the case meant to him. Fox News Digital reported that Daleiden tweeted Wednesday:
“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.”
In a prior statement, Daleiden had described the end of the case as “a huge victory for my investigative reporting and for the public’s right to know the truth about Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby body parts.”
Defense attorney Steve Cooley offered an even blunter assessment. Breitbart reported Cooley’s statement:
“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.”
That assessment is hard to dismiss when you look at the full picture. The man who exposed potential misconduct by an abortion provider was raided, charged with 15 felonies, dragged through nearly a decade of litigation, and ordered in a separate 2019 civil case to pay $2.4 million in damages and more than $13 million in attorney’s fees. The organization whose conduct he exposed? Never charged.
The legal architecture of this case was built on California’s recording law, a real statute with real applications. But the selective deployment of that law is what made the Daleiden prosecution so corrosive. Undercover recordings have been a staple of American investigative journalism for generations. News organizations routinely use hidden cameras and secret recordings to expose fraud, abuse, and corruption. When the target is a meatpacking plant or a nursing home, the journalist is celebrated. When the target is Planned Parenthood, the journalist is indicted.
Harris’s office initiated the investigation. Becerra filed the charges. Bonta framed a no-jail, no-fine, no-wrongdoing settlement as a triumph for reproductive rights. Three successive attorneys general kept the weight of the state on two people for the better part of a decade.
And what did the videos actually show? Daleiden and Merritt recorded conversations with Planned Parenthood leadership and doctors, conversations that prompted the Senate Judiciary Committee to call for a federal investigation into the organization. The videos raised serious questions about whether fetal tissue was being sold for profit, a practice prohibited under federal law. Those questions were never fully resolved through prosecution of the provider. The federal government brought no charges against Planned Parenthood.
Fox News Digital reached out to Planned Parenthood, Harris, Daleiden, and the National Abortion Federation for comment on the case’s conclusion.
Strip away the rhetoric from both sides and the facts are plain. Daleiden and Merritt conducted undercover journalism. California prosecuted them under its recording law. After years of litigation, the state settled for a single misdemeanor plea with no punishment and no admission of guilt. That plea was converted to not guilty. The charge was dismissed. The case was expunged.
The state spent years and untold resources pursuing a case that ended with nothing, no conviction that stuck, no prison time, no fine, no finding of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the subjects of Daleiden’s investigation were never criminally charged.
Bonta’s January 2025 press release boasted of “securing criminal convictions.” By Wednesday, even that claim had evaporated. The conviction was gone. The record was clean.
The message California sent over nine years was unmistakable: expose the wrong people, and the state will make you pay, not through a conviction, but through the process itself. The raid, the charges, the years of litigation, the millions in civil liability, all of it functioned as punishment long before any verdict.
David Daleiden’s record is now expunged. The record of how California treated him should not be.
By signing up, you agree to receive our newsletters and promotional content and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time.