California gave up on prosecuting a protester for posting a video criticizing Planned Parenthood, the defendant’s activist group announced Wednesday.
A San Francisco County court dropped charges on Wednesday against Anastasia Rogers over the roughly 14-second Instagram video that got her arrested in December, Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust said in a statement. The court granted Rogers a diversion program in June, which opened the possibility of the charges being dropped after jurors deadlocked in a trial weeks earlier, court records show.
Rogers’s August video showed a Planned Parenthood employee outside a local abortion facility with captions arguing that abortion supporters want to “unalive them,” meaning unborn babies, the Daily Caller reported. The video played a pop song with the lyrics, “Hey, is this illegal? Hey, it feels illegal,” copying a TikTok trend.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’s office took Rogers’s message as a threat against Planned Parenthood workers under California’s Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Officials later arrested her on a sidewalk and issued a protective order restricting her abortion-focused sidewalk outreach, the Survivors group said.
“Today, ALL charges against Anastasia have been dropped and the protective order has been terminated!” Survivors wrote. The organization also thanked the Life Legal Defense Foundation for defending Rogers in court.
California’s FACE Act, modeled after the federal law of the same name, criminalizes behavior meant to block or intimidate someone from accessing abortion services. The Biden administration’s Department of Justice used the federal FACE Act to put several anti-abortion protesters behind bars until President Donald Trump pardoned them during his first week back in office.
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A December video posted by Survivors showed Rogers defiant as she sat handcuffed in the back of a police car.
“Equal rights for all, baby-killing for none,” she said before being driven away. “Tell your friends.”