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Dec. 2, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:38:56
20211202_jussie-smollett-ghislaine-maxwell-and-abortion-bef
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Megyn Kelly Show Intro 00:03:43
Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to the Megyn Kelly Show.
We've got a big show on some of the hottest legal cases in the news.
Today.
We're going to be taking a look at the historic Supreme Court arguments on abortion rights a little later this show with Lila Rose.
I'm so interested in this, and I have strong feelings on how it went yesterday.
This is truly a watershed moment in abortion jurisprudence.
So we'll get into it.
But first, jury selection right now is underway in the trial of a former police officer who says she mistook her gun for a taser when she killed a black man.
We'll get to that, the case of Kim Potter.
Also, actor Jussie Smollett is fighting allegations that he staged his own race based attack by two guys who claimed he was in MAGA country in the middle of Chicago a couple of years ago.
As one of the brothers accused of helping him takes the stand and puts the lie to Jussie's allegations.
A Jeffrey Epstein accuser in another case detailing horrific abuse, not just by Epstein, but by his girlfriend and helper, Ghislaine Maxwell.
And the witness named celebrities that she met throughout her ordeal in the trial as we watch this sort of icy woman sit at defense counsel or defense table and stare down this now 40 something year old.
That case, it's an interesting one because her defense lawyer is basically saying they're trying to blame Ghislaine for all the sins of Jeffrey.
But so far, these witnesses are saying Ghislaine herself was an abuser.
And then finally, Elizabeth Holmes is on trial explaining how her multi billion dollar company imploded.
Well, it's actually not the final one.
We're going to get to Alec Baldwin, too, because he broke his silence saying he did not actually pull the trigger when the gun went off in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer.
Do we believe him?
We got a lot to get to.
We have two of my favorite lawyers from back in the Fox days.
Jonas Bilboa is a criminal defense attorney licensed to practice in New York, California, and D.C., and founding attorney of Jonas Bilboa Law.
And Lise Wheel is a former federal prosecutor and a prolific author.
Her latest upcoming book is A Spy in Plain Sight, the inside story of the FBI and Robert Hansen, America's most.
Damaging Russian spy.
Ooh, that sounds good.
Welcome, ladies.
Great to have you back.
Great to be here, Mikey.
Okay, so just so people know, the three of us have been doing it.
It started as this is how long we've been together.
When we first launched these legal segments together, it was Kendall's court.
I was still married to Dan.
I hadn't even met Doug, and I hadn't gone back to my main name of Kelly.
So that's how long.
I mean, I think we look pretty good, all things considered.
A lot of shit's gone down.
A lot.
A lot.
And it's so great to be back with the original gang.
This is so much fun.
This is where it all started.
And the Kelly's Court, Kendall's, and then Kelly's Court segments got so hot and always popped so much in the ratings that we then went five days a week.
I kept it going my entire career.
And anyway, it's all thanks to you two.
So, perfect panel to have here to kick things off today.
All right.
So, we're going to kick it off with Kim Potter.
And so, our viewers remember this happened not that long after George Floyd was killed, a black man in Minnesota by a white cop.
And this too happened in Minnesota.
So, the whole area is already very, Fraught as the entire law enforcement community has been since that event.
And Kim Potter, for better or for worse, this moment was caught on camera.
She was a veteran of the force, I think, 26 years.
Kim Potter Case Details 00:12:08
And they pulled over this man for, they said he had air freshener hanging, okay, and then also expired license plates.
That's legit.
They pull him over, and our viewers may remember that she had what you hear her saying as he gets back into his car and she would say attempts to flee.
She yells, Taser, Taser, Taser, and then she shoots him, not with a Taser, but with a gun.
Let's play that tape so the audience knows what we're talking about.
Oh, awful, awful, awful, awful.
So, I mean, Lease, you're the former prosecutor, and you tell me because what happened here is.
Keith Ellison, the attorney general there, who's definitely a political guy, he stepped in and tried to jack up the charges against her and also wants to jack up the sentencing if she's convicted.
So, what is he charging her with and what do they need to prove to put this cop behind bars?
Right.
I don't think it's jacking up the charges, though, Megan.
I mean, she's charged with two degrees of manslaughter, first degree and second degree.
And for the first degree, they've got to remember, manslaughter just means it's not, you know, it's not.
Premeditated.
She didn't go out that day thinking she was going to kill this guy, right?
Over an air freshener.
Come on.
So it wasn't premeditated, but she's culpable legally because of how she acted with the firearm.
And they're saying, look, for the first degree manslaughter, you've got to show that she's already committing another crime and hear a misdemeanor in recklessly handling that firearm.
I would say when she shoots the guy dead that she's recklessly handling her firearm thinking it's a taser.
So they have to say, look, there's a misdemeanor going on.
While she commits the homicide, while she's culpably negligent.
If the jury doesn't buy the first degree, they can go with second degree, which is a lesser included.
And that just means that the misdemeanor doesn't count within the charging.
And it's just, again, culpable negligence.
I mean, that results in this guy's, in Dwayne Wright's death.
And, you know, the facts absolutely support this, Megan.
Yeah.
Well, so, yeah, Dante, right.
So he was, I think, 20 years old.
She was 48 when it happened.
She's married to a retired cop.
They have two adult sons.
She had been through much, much training, but the elements of the crime, Jonna, seem simple to meet.
As much as I don't agree with this, Keith Ellison's, I do think he jacked it up because it was second degree murder.
He stepped in and he jacked it to first degree manslaughter.
I mean, second degree manslaughter.
He jacked it.
This is how I read the element it says first degree manslaughter.
Prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Potter caused Wright's death.
Well, yes, we know that.
While committing the misdemeanor offense of Reckless handling or use of a firearm.
I mean, if that's all they have to prove, really, then reckless handling or use of a firearm, she's in trouble.
Yeah, except, you know, when I look at this case, when I listen to the video that you just played, when she accidentally, and that's the key word here, shoots Dante Wright, that is real, that is raw.
I don't think she's faking it.
She's not, she wasn't intending to do it and make it look like it was an accident.
And the question from the defense standpoint here is, When is a tragic accident simply a tragic accident?
Now, you know, cops shoot people for a living, at least they have the license to do so.
They often have to make these critical life and death decisions.
On the fly.
Now, if this had happened at a time, maybe if George Floyd never happened, or if it happened prior to, or maybe if it happened 10 years from now, would it be charged at all?
Like, when do we take, when do we give cops a break and realize that they are also human and mistakes, even tragic ones, can be made in a split second?
If she honestly thought, Megan, if she honestly thought that she was reaching for her taser, she's not looking at the gun.
When you're in that kind of posture, she's looking at the person.
If she thought that was her taser, honestly, and it wasn't, is that a crime?
I mean, that's the question that the defense is going to pose to the jury.
Or is it an accident and we should all go home?
And I agree with the defense standpoint of this.
It's tragic, but we got to let police be police and human beings at the same time.
At least to me, you can analogize it to a surgeon at an operating table who, if he commits malpractice and, you know, Cuts off the left leg instead of the right leg.
There's no question it's malpractice and he's going to face a massive civil lawsuit.
But we wouldn't charge him with a crime saying his recklessness caused a massive injury.
That would be extraordinary.
You have to prove there was something wrong with him, that he took drugs before he went in there or something in order to elevate that criminally, usually.
Well, let's look at the facts of this case because that will give you everything you need.
She had two firearms, right?
A taser and a handgun.
And they were on both, either hip.
She so she knows what where you know one is and one and the other is, and she pulls out the handgun, which doesn't have a safety, it's a completely different color.
The taser is yellow with black.
I mean, it's you know just an absolutely different animal.
The taser has a locking mechanism on it, so she would have to unlock the safety and then point, and then the taser would go off.
She doesn't do any of that, she grabs the handgun instead on a different hip.
I mean, she had training on this just six months prior.
Two trainings on Taser.
She's 26 years in the police force.
And what we didn't hear in that audio that we played is that after she says that, she says, after she says, I shot him, she says, I'm going to prison.
I mean, that's consciousness of guilt.
She knows what she did was wrong, even in that moment.
Well, you might say that even if you made a terrible mistake, like, oh shit, you know, like, oh my God.
I don't, why?
So, what is the theory then, Lise?
Is the prosecution going to argue that she intended to kill him?
You know, that she, this is all a ruse, the Taser, Taser, Taser?
No, no, that's the whole point.
No, it's not a ruse.
And I agree with Jonna.
I agree with you.
That is in the moment that she said that.
Again, she says she's going to prison.
But you don't have to prove premeditation.
That's the whole point of a manslaughter charge instead of a premeditated murder charge.
She didn't go out.
She didn't set out to kill him even in that second.
But what she did was a mistake that we have to elevate.
Otherwise, we're going to have cops pulling people over for air freshener violations and they get shot.
I mean, that can't happen in this country.
I mean, how?
We didn't used to treat every mistake as a criminal matter.
This is definitely a post George Floyd situation.
This is more than a mistake.
I don't know if it is.
I mean, I think it's obviously a mistake.
And I think we watched the mistake unfold before our very eyes.
If this woman, I'm all for holding bad cops accountable, Jonna, but you tell me, because I think the videotape, for once, is on her side.
The videotape's on her side because you can hear she thought she was going to discharge her taser.
You can hear her.
Instant regret and sadness and panic that she fired the wrong weapon.
I mean, I see Lisa's point.
Like the gun is on the right hip, the taser's on the left hip.
They are discharged differently.
You have to do more to discharge a taser than you do, apparently, to discharge the gun, according to what the information is.
And she didn't, you know, so in other words, she had to handle the taser much differently than she would have handled the gun.
So she should have known that that was a gun in her hand and not the taser.
But I don't like how do you find a jury?
And by the way, the jury, it's not, you know, for what it's worth, it's not a particularly diverse jury so far.
They've got, I think, at least nine jurors seated, four jurors seated, white man in his 50s, white woman in her 60s, white man in his 20s, Asian woman in her 40s.
And they had five additional jurors.
And so on.
It's a mostly white jury so far.
Not that that necessarily means anything.
We saw a white jury convict those white guys in the Ahmad Armory case.
But you tell me what their best chance is as the defense.
You know, I wouldn't want to be prosecuted by Lise because she makes some very good arguments here.
We have to remember a couple of things.
First and foremost, Dante Wright was not seated in his car with his hands at 10 and 2 when this traffic stopped happening.
Yes, it was because he had something hanging from his mirror, which is a legit reason to pull somebody over.
But what elevated this is they figured out from pulling him over that there was also a warrant.
And then he made some furtive movements.
That is what compelled this police officer to act like a police officer.
So that's argument number one.
Argument number two is I guarantee you, police officers spend a heck of a lot more time practicing drawing their actual firearm than they spend practicing drawing their taser.
And there could have been a little element of muscle memory going on here, for lack of a better term.
And then when you combine that with the fact that we do have video where this woman.
Is not faking it.
She is not faking the realization that she just took a life and didn't mean to.
You can get that from her affect and from her voice.
A jury is going to really have to analyze all that and decide when an accident is an accident and when an accident is criminally negligent.
What's up, Lise, with?
Because the sentencing guidelines are first degree manslaughter carries a max of 15 years in prison, second degree manslaughter.
10 years in prison.
I mean, for a 48 year old mom who she doesn't have some history of, as far as we know, nothing in the papers at least, of harassing defendants or a bunch of complaints against her, like we saw in Chauvin.
She doesn't have that.
You're going to put her in jail for 15 years?
Keith Ellison says no longer.
The prosecutors have filed a notice to say they'll seek a longer sentence than the recommended guidelines if Kim Potter is convicted.
That's effed up.
Well, and we don't know what additional information the prosecutors have.
I agree with that one.
I don't understand why they would go higher than the sentencing guidelines.
And you'd have to convince the judge to do that.
So we're a long way from going there.
And also remember when the prosecutors charge this, they charge first degree manslaughter and second degree.
So the jury can always come back with the second degree, which is going to be easier to prove because you don't have to have the pylon of the misdemeanor going on at the same time, which might be confusing to a juror.
But I can see jurors absolutely saying, look, This was an accident, but it was absolutely preventable.
This woman had 26 years on the force.
She had been trained in tasers multiple times at a time close to and proximity to this incident.
She should have known better.
We're not charging her.
It's so important to remember this is not premeditated murder.
She didn't set out to do it, but the culpable negligence, we have to hold cops, doctors, everybody to some level of.
Of negligence.
We don't want cops out there who are going to shoot people when they're just pulling them over for a minor traffic incident.
I don't know.
What else could she have done?
She did all the training, 26 years on the floor.
She's not a newbie.
I know, but it's like holding her accountable isn't going to make other cops behave differently.
You go through the training.
Accidents do happen.
People screw up.
They're still humans, even if they're cops, even if they're surgeons, you know, whatever they are.
Judge Condo Protests 00:02:04
Let me ask you this this case is going to be a little similar to the Kyle Rittenhouse case, to the Chauvin case, where you're going to have national eyes on it, hence why we're covering it.
There's already been an attempt to influence, I would say, the judge.
The jurors are still being seated, so I'm sure they're next, although they're being kept anonymous.
But, you know, look what happened in Rittenhouse.
We had MSNBC following the jurors home to their houses.
Protests have taken place at the judge's condo complex.
The judge is named Regina Chu, 4th Judicial District, Hennepin County, has been on the bench since 2002.
Three weeks ago, protesters outside of her home.
One person, one protester, went all the way to what they believed was her front door.
It was live streamed by the activist who did it, Cortez Rice, went to the door and was excited to say, We got confirmation this is her house.
The judge is staying in this nice, predominantly white neighborhood in this nice little white building.
We've got some tape of that.
Take a listen.
I think this is her crib right here.
Predominantly white neighborhood.
Look at this shit.
The judge staying in this nice, predominantly white neighborhood, this nice little white building.
Wow.
I mean, that's another factor, right?
The jurors, the judge, they're going to be under unusual pressures, Jonna, from the public that's very loud on cases like this.
And that is so scary because that really divests judges and juries of their responsibility.
You can't have them making decisions or rendering verdicts.
Because they don't want their house burned down, because they don't want their children run over on the way to school, because they don't want to be harassed by the court of public opinion and the public in general based on what they're doing.
When they are there, they are the ones who will have all the evidence presented before them.
They have a civic duty, they have a job to do.
And the outside influences and the threats, most especially the threats, should not be allowed to take place.
And that just scares the hell out of me.
Yeah, me too.
It's so wrong.
And these judges, people misunderstand, they don't walk around with security unless you're a Supreme Court justice.
Jesse Smollett Conspiracy 00:14:55
You're not walking around with security.
You know, you're very vulnerable.
We've seen attacks on judges and their families that have proven very deadly.
This is so far beyond the pale.
Okay, let's turn the page to Jussie Smollett.
Jussie Smollett, who the DA in Chicago, Kim Fox, a George Soros supported candidate, far left, decided to drop the charges on, even though he completely faked his own attack.
I mean, that's, I'll just give you my opinion up front.
I'm not an impartial judge here.
He faked his own attack, a race based, Attack, which turned out to be a total hoax.
This is the guy who said he was walking through Chicago at two in the morning to get a subway sandwich, and somebody in the middle of Chicago, very, very blue city, attacked him and said, This is MAGA country.
Put a noose around his neck, threw bleach on him.
On and on it went.
It was in the middle of the polar vortex.
Like, I've lived in Chicago.
Nobody even goes outside at 2 a.m. in the polar vortex in Chicago.
You can't.
You'll be dead soon because it's so cold.
Anywho, he got caught.
Kim Fox dropped the charges because she's a political animal, too.
And, um, Then the state stepped in and appointed a special prosecutor, Dan Webb, who's a big time former federal prosecutor out there.
He's like a star.
So, Lise, what's the theory of his case?
And why is he only charging Jesse Smollett with disorderly conduct?
That seems like a weird charge for this.
Yeah, I agree.
Disorderly conduct and lying to the police.
Well, the lying to the police is the best charge.
And they're all misdemeanors.
And he probably is not going to face much of any prison time because he's got no criminal history.
And, you know, so it's a low bar.
But This case, and the prosecutor said it, was just despicable.
I mean, what Jesse Smollett is accused of doing, if true, and I believe it is, is absolutely despicable.
I mean, he, if you remember, Back at the time, the whole country was involved in this case and following this case.
And at first, he was believed, right?
This has all happened to him that a horrible note had been sent to him and threatening his life.
By the way, he thought, I'm not being paid enough attention to.
It was all about getting more money, more fame for himself, and to set this thing up.
And they've got surveillance, Megan, of them doing a quote dry run, getting ready for this thing.
I mean, you can call the brothers liars all you want, but I think you're going to.
Get them on the stand.
They're going to be believable.
You've got the video to back it up.
And you just got Jesse Smollett's actions.
He shows up with a noose still around his neck when the cops arrive.
Is that a stage?
Come on.
I know.
He's like, I just wanted you to see it.
I know.
That's what the thing was about.
If I had a noose around my neck, that thing would be off.
Yeah, here's the video of them showing up.
So when I told Jonna, when I told Abby, my assistant, about the dry run that was on video of Jesse going by, she said, oh my God, secondhand embarrassment.
I'm secondhand embarrassed.
It is humiliating because he's still, his defense is still, no, it was legit.
I did not, don't believe those two brothers.
I didn't pay them anything to attack me.
I didn't do a dry run.
I didn't do it.
I was legitimately the victim of a race attack.
Yeah.
He's got no choice, Megan.
He has doubled and tripled down.
And I don't know whether it's because the prosecution has not offered him any plea deal because they were so disgusted by the fact that he cost the city $130,000 that he went on.
Mainstream media, and you know, basically said that he wasn't lying when he was lying.
So, his hope I think his defense is basically let's hope that there is one bleeding heart liberal on that jury who is not going to follow the law, who's not going to, who doesn't care that he faked his own uh crime and is just going to sit there and hold out, you know, hands across their chest until this ends up in some sort of mistrial.
If not, so Johnny, you're calling for jury nullification where the jurors, at least one juror, just says.
I've seen all the evidence.
I just choose not to believe it because I'm such a fan of Jesse Smollett.
Yeah, we're not on it.
You wouldn't take it.
Well, let's not forget, this doesn't follow along clear racial lines here because the black police chief, I mean, I'll never forget how mad he was when he found out he was like, as a black man, this is disgusting.
This undermines legitimate claims of, you know, race based violence.
He wanted to throw the book at Jesse Smollett, and he wasn't the only one.
That's why Kim Fox was overruled.
They brought in the special prosecutor.
So this isn't just about like, And by the way, the two guys who he hired to hurt him are black.
I mean, what a weird, shitty scheme.
Like, if you're going to complain that you were the victim of a white supremacy MAGA based attack, why would you hire two black guys to attack another black guy and get your dry run on camera?
He's a terrible criminal.
Yeah, what he says when he's asked to identify, he says, I think one of the guys looks white.
I mean, look white.
Come on.
Why don't you just hire two white guys?
Commit.
And now his defense lawyer seems to be trying to turn at least into a.
It was a homophobic attack, too, because Jesse is gay.
And he's trying to say, I think he's trying to leave open, like, yes, he hired them.
It was a fake, if that's what you want to conclude.
But it turned into a real attack because a third guy might have come and they really hated Jesse secretly because he's gay.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
And where's this third guy?
We'll be searching for him forever.
I mean, come on.
What this does is it just, I mean, it delegitimizes people who have, you know, this really happens to because there are race based claims and hate.
Crimes every day in this country, and there are homophobic crimes every day in this country.
So, I mean, you know, it's like a rape victim saying they've been raped when they haven't been.
I mean, it's the worst to do this because it hurts other people coming down the road.
That's right.
There's no defense on this one, Jonna.
I'm glad you agree with me, Jonna.
She's like, go for the nullification.
Well, this is the same, of course.
This is the same story in which, like, Kamala Harris and virtually every media personality, I remember watching them do it.
They're like, this is disgusting.
This is horrible.
And it's like, can you slow your roll?
Because we don't know what's what.
And it smelled right from the start, right?
It smelled right from the start.
It was like, I don't think so.
But every was so desperate to prove their woke bona fides that they were like, oh, my heart.
Poor Jussie.
Like, you just wait.
Maybe poor Jussie, maybe not.
And as it turns out, Jussie did more to hurt the legitimate claims of actual victims in race based attacks than anybody else has in a long, long time.
All right, so much more with the ladies.
I'm so enjoying this.
We're going to get the latest on Alec Baldwin on the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
That's right after this quick break.
Stay with us.
All right, so let's talk about Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's lover, sort of life partner.
And co conspirator and potential abuser, depending on who you ask.
So she's on trial right now for crimes related to his several decade long sex abuse scandal.
And the main defense of the lawyer of the defense is you can't blame her for what Jeffrey did.
Everyone's frustrated Jeffrey is no longer here, but you can't work out that frustration by blaming her.
And the prosecutors are saying, oh, we're not.
No, no, that's not at all what we're doing.
She's independently responsible for her own behavior, which was also criminal.
By the way, before we get into Maxwell, can I just add this final addendum to Jesse Smollett?
Because apparently, the one brother, you know, the two guys he hired, I just had to add this.
He testified yesterday that Jesse, they went over the attack.
Jesse wanted me to pull the punch so I don't hurt him, give him a bruise.
Oh, Jesse, he wanted the bleach and the rope, but not the bruise.
Final part of the plan would be to pour bleach on him, then he would run away.
Then he said he would use the fake attack, our camera footage for media.
And he said, then Smollett instructed him to write a letter in the days after the reported attack in an effort to show sympathy.
I was supposed to send him a condolence letter.
I'm sorry, but Jesse Smilett's a lunatic.
He's crazy.
You know, but Jonathan, have at it because I'm telling you, you wouldn't take this case.
She's unusually quiet.
Yeah, she is.
I would need a lot of money.
A lot of money.
Okay, so, oh, by the way, he has it.
He was getting something like $65,000 an episode for Empire, his Fox hit.
And apparently, this whole thing was based on the fact that.
He claimed he got a letter threatening him in race based terms, and he didn't like the fact that the studio wasn't responsive enough.
By the way, they never found who sent the letter.
What a shock.
Let me guess.
Is it Lussie Smubbett?
By the way, Megan, the feds could come in if they can ever figure out on the mail.
I mean, if he sent that to himself, which we think he did, you've got a federal crime there of using interstate mails to further.
Criminal conspiracy like this.
So I don't know.
I think the FBI should be stepping in.
I'm sure Dan Webb is going to.
I was wondering whether he's actually going to do jail time because this jury might be mad that they have to sit through a trial when they come to a very quick guilty verdict.
Since, you know, everybody, the public loves a good apology.
And if he had come out and said, listen, I, instead of doing this, I should have just hired a better agent or a better lawyer to get me a better deal on Empire and apologize, we probably wouldn't be in this trial right now.
He might see the inside of a jail cell.
That's my prediction.
It's so true.
And if he came out and was like, I've had all this race based stuff and I haven't known what to do with it.
And it's just a stupid way of working out my, you know.
Frustrations as a black man.
I mean, that might play with a jury in Chicago in today's day and age.
I don't buy it for one second.
Okay, so back to Ghislaine.
Lise, you tell me whether they've got an uphill battle.
Because when I listened to the testimonial of Jane, the first alleged victim, we didn't listen because there's no cameras or video audio in the courtroom, but we read the account.
It was very moving.
But then, of course, the defense gets up and it's less so.
Now, I think you've got, she's not the only one.
Jane's not the only one that's going to testify.
You've got at least four victims that are going to come forward and say, Look, it wasn't just Epstein.
It was that she got us involved.
And it's the worst kind of enabling.
I mean, it's criminal enabling, if you will.
I mean, just think about these young girls as young as 14.
You know, she coddles up to them, she takes them out shopping, asks about their lives, you know, if they come from a troubled past or they're even better prey.
I mean, it's really talk about despicable.
We talked about despicable in the last case.
This is despicable plus.
I mean, The fact that she would just bring these women in, and then not only did she hand them over to him, but she would engage in some of these orgies and things like that.
And we're going to hear, the jury's going to hear more of that testimony in the coming days.
I think it's going to be absolutely devastating to her case.
So, Jonah, so far we've heard from the pilot of the so called Lolita Express, Jeffrey's private plane.
And the pilot was basically like, I never saw anything.
I'm glad the cockpit door was closed.
I never, never.
But he's been paid very handsomely over the years by Jeffrey Epstein.
Although, you know, so far we've heard a lot of big names like Bill Clinton was on the jet.
Donald Trump before he was president.
Prince Andrew was on the jet.
All these, you know, you're like, hmm, Kevin Spacey, you know, some with their own problems.
So it's like, hmm, that's not good.
But anyway, Jane gets up there and says, Ghislaine and Jeffrey met her while she was at her damn summer camp.
She was a 14 year old in Michigan at singing and acting camp.
And they were up there for some reason, walking by, took a shiny tour, get her name.
Turns out she's from Palm Beach as well, Jane, a pseudonym.
And when she goes back home, they call her and her mother, and Jeffrey Epstein does the oldest, according to Jane.
I'll make you a star.
I know everyone in the business, you know, but you've got to be ready.
You've got to be ready.
The next thing she knows, he's pulling his pants down.
She says she's never even seen a man naked before and abusing her, and that Ghislaine was part of it, was actually in the room abusing for part of it.
But then when the defense got up there, they started poking holes in her memory.
This is 1994.
Been a long time.
She's 41 years old now.
Yeah.
Guys, I got to tell you, I have really strong opinions about this case.
Probably opinions that are unpopular with the masses because I know the allegations are salacious, right?
Nobody is, I would never defend a sex trafficker.
But what I feel I am doing in this case, and I've studied it from the day that she was arrested back in July of 2020.
And the first thing that made my fine hairs go up was the fact that they would not release this woman on bail when every other high profile, high net worth defendant of late does get bail.
Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Steve Bannon, Laurie Laughlin, people who could equally have flown the coop, given bail, they got bail.
Something just told me this wasn't right.
And I am in the camp of the defense here is basically going to say, hey, wait a minute.
These charges, as salacious and awful as they sound, were invented after Jeffrey Epstein, who is the real target, died.
And you can't just take, defendants are not fungible.
You can't replace one with another when something happens to the main person.
Who they never really got to take to task.
And that was Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, he was taken to task a little bit back in 2008.
Why were any of these charges brought up back then?
Why weren't they brought up in the 90s?
Why weren't they brought up in the early 2000s when Jeffrey Epstein was taken to task?
He was connected.
He was on the plane.
He was good friends with Prince Andrew.
He went to Prince Andrew's, Princess Beatrice is his daughter.
He went to her 18th birthday.
I read, I don't know if it's true, but the Queen was there.
This is Jeffrey Epstein.
You know, he's hanging out with guys from MIT.
He was hanging out with Bill Clinton, former presidents.
Like people, he was connected.
That's why he got a slap on the wrist back in 2008.
And just to answer Jonathan's point, she has a French and American passport, both passports.
So she's a flight risk.
And that's why she didn't get bail.
Nothing more than that.
And all those other things.
$30 million and her passports, and she still got denied six times.
And Epstein, when he was charged his last time before he died, was charged with co conspirators, unnamed.
She's one of the co conspirators.
So they had this in mind, the prosecution had this in mind way before Epstein's untimely death.
I mean, it's not that she's a scapegoat.
She was absolutely involved.
It reminds me of, remember Alison Mack in the Keith Rainier trial, the Nexium trial a couple of years ago?
Epstein Accuser Credibility 00:05:29
She was the actress.
And Alison Mack, you know, I think she was on Smallville or something like that.
But anyway, she was convicted.
I think she got three years for her aid with Keith Rainier in exactly doing the same kind of thing that's going on here.
She was grooming these women.
Look, if Jeffrey Epstein, with all his connections, whatever, comes up to you and you're 14 years old, you know, you may run away.
If she comes up to you and she's nice and sweet and speaks French or whatever.
I mean, I'm making this up.
But no, but it's true.
And she was an internationally connected person.
Her dad, you know, he, Apparently, he died on some yacht.
He was like allegedly a spy.
Some people believe she may have been some sort of a spy.
I mean, the whole thing's full of intrigue.
But when I looked at the cross examination yesterday of Jane, whose direct testimony was very compelling, the defense was pointing out Jane is now a professional actress.
Jane acts on a soap opera.
And they were basically saying, You've had a long career in acting, haven't you?
The defense attorney, Laura Menninger.
There's no melodramatic role you haven't played, is there?
Can you cry on command?
Jane said, That's not really how it works.
Melissa Francis, my pal who used to star on Little House on the Prairie, would disagree.
She's very proud of her ability to produce the waterworks on demand.
Her kids will fake cry to her and she'd be like, oh, please.
If I don't see a tear, I'm not listening.
Then the defense got up there and pointed out, and this has been the case with a lot of the Epstein accusers who have accused a slew of men, not just Epstein.
She apparently told law enforcement agents she wasn't sure if Ghislaine Maxwell ever actually touched her.
She didn't remember Ghislaine Maxwell ever being present.
For any sexual activity between her and Epstein, she repeatedly said, Jane did, that she didn't recall if she had actually said that to investigators.
But this is what the defense is going to do over and over because none of these victims is, quote, a perfect victim.
And they have a lot of conflicting prior testimony.
And this case and similar cases often come down to one thing, and that is the credibility of the accusers.
And why is that?
Because a lot of these crimes, obviously, they don't happen in front of people, right?
So it lends itself to that.
So, it's very important and actually probably the most difficult part of a defense attorney's job because nobody wants to attack somebody who claims to be a victim.
But on the other hand, if they are truly not victims, I'm saying if, what if you guys take Ghislaine Maxwell, take Jeffrey, take the big names out of it for a second.
What if and what stops people in the accuser's positions from inventing facts for some other game?
I'm not saying it's happening here.
I'm saying it's possible.
But there is a pool of money, Jonna.
There is a pot of money.
There's a ton of money, right?
And that was my next point.
When you are incentivized by millions and millions of dollars, and all of these accusers put their hand out and they got.
Between one and five million dollars from the Jeffrey Epstein Fund, which eventually ran out of money because 135 people made claims to that fund.
They paid out over 125 million dollars.
I would love to know what the criteria was for that, but that's an aside.
When you have that kind of incentive, you can adopt and really believe what your story becomes.
And that's dangerous, not just in the Glenn Maxwell case, it's dangerous in any case where anybody points a figure and says, This happened to me.
Under the cover of darkness with nobody else in the room, but it's a crime and I want my pound of flesh.
That's what scares me.
And I get that, Jonna.
And maybe you could say that for one victim.
But you stack all these victims up, plus you have all the public knowledge about her being together with Epstein for all these years, as being his girlfriend, lover, whatever.
I mean, you've got all of that.
And I'm sure the prosecution is going to show it.
So it's the accusers, multiple accusers.
And yeah, okay.
So their memory might be a little bit flawed on some things.
But that actually can work the other way and help the prosecution because we know when people are lying, straight out lying, they have a story.
It's in balance.
You wrote a book about it.
You know how to tell a liar.
You wrote a book about lying, about not telling lies, right?
And about how to detect when people are lying.
And it's so detailed.
So it's actually more realistic that because some of these crimes happened so long ago, that the memory is fuzzier on this point or another point or not so sure.
That actually adheres to the benefit of.
Yeah, but these are big ones.
This isn't like, oh, you said she was wearing a red dress, and now today you say it was yellow.
This is, you told investigators at a point in time much closer to the alleged incident that Ghislaine Maxwell never touched you and that you didn't remember Ghislaine Maxwell ever being present for any sexual activity between you and Epstein.
And her only response is, I don't recall whether I said that to the investigator.
And that's not compelling for her.
Now, I don't, you know, I don't know.
Maybe it's one of the frustrations of covering this is we can't see her.
You know, it's not like Kyle Rittenhouse.
We assessing the credibility of the witness, especially on a cross like this, it does require your eyes and ears.
That's how you kind of determine credibility, right?
Like you get a gut feeling, body language, and so on.
So we're all kind of fighting with a hand tied behind our back and trying to assess how this will go.
But it's fascinating.
We'll continue to follow it.
Alec Baldwin Trial Drama 00:09:17
All right.
We got a couple more we're going to get to right after this, including Alec Baldwin in tears with George Stephanopoulos.
Do we buy that?
And then there's an update in Kyle Rittenhouse, too, as they're trying to kick him off of this online campus.
It's not even a real campus.
They want to kick him off of the online campus.
So we'll take that up in one second after this quick break.
Don't forget, folks, you can find The Megan Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
And the full video show and clips when you subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.comslash Megan Kelly.
Or if you prefer an audio podcast, simply subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And do it now because we're going to have more on Jeffrey Epstein.
Coming soon.
All right, so we're going to kick it off with Alec Baldwin and this shooting on the set of his film, which resulted in the death of the cinematographer.
Alec has chosen to give you tell me whether it's a dramatic performance or real, an interview to George Stephanopoulos.
ABC is making the most of it.
It's going to air tonight, but they've released this advanced clip of Alec claiming he did not, did not point the gun at.
Helena, the cinematographer whose life he took, he says completely inadvertently.
Take a listen.
Wasn't in the script for the trigger to be pulled.
Well, the trigger wasn't pulled.
I didn't pull the trigger, so you never pulled the trigger.
No no no, no.
I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them never.
What did you think happened?
How did a real bullet get on that simp?
I have no idea.
Someone put a live bullet in a gun, a bullet that wasn't even supposed to be on the property.
Okay well, there's other uh, like a promo of showing him sobbing, um.
So, in any event, maybe I need to correct myself, not that he didn't point the gun, but that he didn't pull the trigger, because you can hear him there saying, I would never do such a thing.
The latest in this case, Before I get to the Baldwin interview, the latest in this case is interesting to me, okay?
Because everybody's been pointing the finger at the armorer, which is a term I'd never heard before in this case.
It's the person responsible for the guns on a movie set and potentially the ammo.
And she's a young woman.
She's 24 years old.
And to me, it's very interesting because all these very powerful, very well connected people, Alec Baldwin and others, are like, it was her, And maybe it was her.
Time will tell.
But this is a young woman of no means.
She's obviously doesn't have any money.
They have shots of her house and so on.
She's not well connected.
Or, well, represented so far as I can tell.
I mean, she's got a lawyer, but I'm just saying she doesn't have unlimited funds.
And I just wonder, my spidey senses are up, right?
Because she's an easy person to dump it on.
Maybe because she did it.
We'll see.
No one's really claiming there was intent here, but somebody screwed up massively.
But the latest is that there was actually a different guy, a guy named Seth Kenny, who apparently told detectives that he was hired to supply Rust with the guns, the dummy rounds, and the blanks, and that he was the one responsible.
For the ammo that was on that set.
And she would oversee it ultimately with the guns and load it and all that.
But like he was the guy.
And so the big question in this case is who put live bullets into a box that was apparently labeled dummy rounds?
That's what she was supposed to put in there.
Dummy rounds don't even go off like a blank does, they don't even make smoke.
They're just for show.
They're just like a model of a bullet.
But real bullets got in there.
That's how this happened.
And the big question in the case is who put live rounds in that box?
I'll give it to you, Lise, on how the sheriff's office and the prosecutors out there in Albuquerque are ever going to figure that out to make a case.
Yeah, it's going to be tough because you have two different accounts.
And I agree with you about this young woman.
It sounds like I don't know if she's being a scapegoat, but we don't know what involvement she had.
But you've got two different accounts of, at least two different accounts of how that bullet got there.
And so they've got to ferret that out.
And that's going to be tough.
You know, they're going to be having to talk to both of the people that have claimed.
Different accounts of what happened.
And they've got to get to the bottom of that.
They're also, I'm sure, looking at Baldwin.
And that's why he got out in front of this.
And it's, you know, doing the interview.
It's purely to make sure that he's out, he's getting his story out there, right?
And he's crying those crocodile tears.
And I believe part of it, maybe, you know, that he didn't know that the firearm was actually loaded with a real bullet.
But when he says, I didn't pull the trigger, I, I, that's where I'm sort of what I have to suspend belief here at this point.
I mean, that's maybe going too far in the account.
I mean, right up to then, I was with him, and then I'm like, wait a second, dude.
I mean, how did he, the woman's dead.
She got shot.
So somebody pulled that trigger.
I agree.
And no one's been looking at him saying, you intentionally murdered her.
I mean, no one's saying that.
We all understand that this was a terrible accident, you know, again, but we have to figure out for, you know, who is responsible and what level was, The culpability, right?
Because as we talked about earlier, it can be pure accident where nobody's held responsible criminally, or it can be recklessness where somebody is.
And he, Jonna, he understands number one, he is not supposed to point a gun at another human on a set.
That's very clear.
According to the rules on a movie set.
And lots of people have said that you don't point a gun at a person, period, just because you just never know.
Still a gun.
And so he's not denying that.
And I don't think he can, given the eyewitnesses.
He's denying that he pulled the trigger, which I don't know.
I don't think it passes the smell test.
Obviously, the trigger went off.
How?
It was all some massive accident, not his fault, no part of it?
Yeah, guns don't shoot themselves.
And early on, I had a problem with the term prop gun on this case.
When it first happened, oh, a prop gun, it wasn't a prop gun, it was a real gun.
With prop ammo, or what was supposed to be prop ammo, but here's what's happening this is my take on what he's doing now.
He sat in his lawyer's office undoubtedly because even though he's probably safe from criminal responsibility, there's still the civil liability that there's going to be checks written, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of how much.
And he probably sat in his lawyer's office and his lawyer said, Okay, Alec, now it's possible you didn't really have your finger on that trigger, did you?
When you were on that set, right?
And now he's taking a cue from that and he's coming out with this story, which He is so detracting from his own credibility.
It's not even funny.
What he should be doing instead of saying, I don't know how the gun went off, just shut up.
Yeah.
Just shut up, Alex, and let the sheriff do what they're going to do.
You lay back.
You're going to have to write a check.
Your production company is going to write a check.
That's what you have insurance for.
Shut up.
Right.
And now he's on tape on this, right?
So if it ever gets, you know, again, eyewitnesses, as we talk about it, saying, well, no, actually, you did point the gun and you did pull the trigger.
We saw it.
We heard it.
All of that.
I mean, he's just made it worse.
So he's made it worse for the defense lawyer, John.
I don't think, because sometimes you can't control your client.
But I guess, you know, you get to build a lot more.
But he's used to being the star in command and used to being able to fool everyone into thinking he is whatever role he's playing, right?
Like, he is a great actor.
I mean, no one's going to take that away from him.
And that's the problem for someone like him talking to George Stephanopoulos.
We know he's a great actor.
We know he, like, but is the claim credible?
You know, that he's just what an unfortunate victim.
He, unlike most actors, there's been reports this week about the other stars coming out and saying, I never took a gun on set without checking myself to see whether there were bullets, you know, in the, like live bullets in the chamber.
Now, I don't know whether you've been able to see that here, but, you know, if the armorer couldn't tell the difference between the dummy rounds and the live rounds, I doubt Alec Baldwin could have.
But anyway, he didn't check personally.
He was told it was a cold gun in his defense.
But are we supposed to believe that he was this unfortunate victim who got handed a hot gun, meaning live rounds in it, when in fact it was a cold, and then they said it was a cold gun?
And that, He broke a rule saying don't point it at somebody, and then so bizarrely, the gun then went off.
This gun had a mind of its own, it was making independent decisions.
No, exactly.
You know, I do feel a little bit for Alec because of this one thing.
I don't think he's criminally responsible, but guys, he killed somebody, right?
He will live with that for the rest of his life.
His actions caused the death of Helena Hutchins, and that is so tragic and so unfortunate.
I don't know if I would be able to live with myself.
And I use that, I have a concealed carry permit, I practice with guns all the time.
I've had hair trigger guns that went off when I didn't think they were going to, but they were always pointed at a target and not at a person.
I hope I never have to aim my gun at a human being.
Okay.
But I have one.
So, you know, I feel bad that he took a life.
You live with that forever.
It's a terrible thing, I can imagine.
Almost out of time.
We only have a minute left.
So I'm going to squeeze in Rittenhouse.
We'll save Holmes for another time.
Rittenhouse now, there's protests.
They had a protest trying to kick, quote, Killer Kyle off our campus at Arizona State University, a place he's attending online.
He's not even going.
And he already.
Abortion Rights Debate 00:15:56
SETI's not going to go this semester, but he does plan to re enroll.
So you tell me whether.
These people are off their rockers calling him a killer, a mass murderer.
You've even had professors at other universities saying, Yes, he should never be allowed because he's a mass murderer.
Jonna?
I can't believe the level of stupidity we are raising in our college age students today because they obviously don't understand the justice system, what the jury system is about, how law and justice work.
If this is what they're saying, I think it's horrible and they're stupid.
They should focus more on their own studies and not on his.
Go ahead, Lise, give me the last word.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's over the line.
You know, he wasn't.
He's found to be not guilty in the eyes of the law.
The only thing I would say is if he does come back to campus and he's sitting in a small seminar with, you know, 10 other students, if I were a mom of one of those other students, I'd be like, yeah, I don't know.
I'm kind of nervous about it.
Oh, man, I wouldn't.
No, I disagree.
He's fine.
Like, this is, he's not some career criminal.
You guys, such a pleasure to be back together.
Thank you for being here.
Up next, we're going to break down the latest Supreme Court case, how it went yesterday on abortion.
Is Roe going away?
Lila Rose is here.
A potentially historic case is before the U.S. Supreme Court this week on abortion.
This is huge.
And the comments from the justices may, may give us a clue where this is headed.
Joining me now to discuss it is Lila Rose, president of Live Action, a pro life advocacy group and author of Fighting for Life.
Lila, it's so great to have you here.
Thank you for coming on.
Thanks for having me, Megan.
This is it.
I mean, this is the big one.
Unlike the Texas six week abortion ban and so on.
Which played out a little bit at the Supreme Court.
That was not it.
That was decided on procedural grounds.
The Supreme Court said we're not going to get into that yet.
But this is the one where conservative activists and others who have been trying to get Roe versus Wade overruled for a long, long time said it's our chance.
We have six conservatives on the court, we have three liberals on the court, and now's the time.
And so this law in Mississippi was crafted with an eye toward bringing the challenge at this point in time.
For a long, long, I mean, since Roe was decided in 1973.
The pro life advocates and citizens have felt it was a legal atrocity.
Forget that it found a right that people disagree with.
Just as a legal matter, that it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.
Even storied liberal lawyers like Lawrence Tribe have said that, right?
So it's not a good case.
It's just not.
It's just based on nothing.
They made up a right that didn't even arguably exist.
And so the real debate now is whether.
Well, they did it.
We've been living with it for 50 years.
And so, you know, you can't really pull that rug out from under women, is what the liberals say.
And the other side saying bad laws, bad law, and it should be overruled when you're given the chance.
Is that basically the nut of it?
That's exactly it.
And, you know, they've changed over the last decades the argument for why abortion should remain not just legal at the federal level effectively, but it should be somehow enshrined as a constitutional right when the Constitution says nothing about.
Abortion.
It doesn't even say anything about the privacy that they claim should be the justification for abortion, at least one of their initial claims.
What it does say under the 14th Amendment is that there should be equal protection for all persons under the law and that the state should not deprive anyone of their life without due process.
And that is actually a case for against abortion for why states have an interest in protecting innocent human life.
And also, you shouldn't be depriving the preborn of their lives without due process and you should be giving them equal protection.
So, yeah, there's a lot of bad case law, decades of bad case law.
And now finally, there's a chance to rectify that.
And the court may actually do that because you have six, you could call them more conservative or call them more originalist, but six justices who have indicated.
Even by taking on this case, even by agreeing to hear the 15 week abortion ban from Mississippi, I've indicated that they're, you know, I think it's a, I dare say, likely chance that they're going to uphold this law and that's going to deal big damage to Roe v. Wade and other abortion case law.
Yeah, explain that because Mississippi did something we've seen many states do many times.
And, you know, the Supreme Court always denies the appeals on these cases because what normally happens?
Normally, what happens is these laws get struck down.
So basically, any Any law at the state level that tries to ban abortions on babies before around 21 weeks, which is this moving line of viability.
So, KCV Planned Parenthood was this 1992 case that basically said it was another kind of explainer of Roe and trying to create more justification after Roe was so tenuous in how it even argued for abortion.
But KCV Planned Parenthood basically says that if you're a state, you have an interest in protecting fetal life before viability or after viability because the baby is old enough.
So, all of a sudden, the baby has enough.
You know, there's enough reason to protect that baby, but before this arbitrary line of when the baby can survive outside the womb, then the state can't ban abortions.
And so, what has happened over the last two decades, and particularly in the last two to three years, there's been this wave of pro life legislation attempting to protect children before this arbitrary line of viability.
If you're a baby at 21 weeks deserving of legal protection, why not 20 weeks?
Why not 19 weeks?
Why not 18 weeks?
Really, there's no reason why the baby shouldn't deserve protection and not be killed at an earlier age.
So, Mississippi.
Does 15 weeks.
One of the reasons I think they chose that is because most Western countries, most of our allies, most of Europe bans abortion after the first trimester.
So they're kind of using that very rough trimester framework to say, okay, let's try banning at 15 weeks.
So after that, right after the first trimester.
And this is, of course, challenged.
But this time, the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case.
And this time, you've got six justices potentially on the Supreme Court who might uphold this law when in passports, of course, we've had not enough votes to uphold a pro life law.
So that's why.
This is a huge deal.
And many people are saying this may be the end of Roe v. Wade, at minimum, the end of Roe v. Wade and its power to not prohibit states from doing basic legal protections.
I mean, you can argue a state's rights argument for why states should have, you know, their people, their democratically elected leaders should be able to pass pro life protections.
But, you know, my argument here is, and I think that the ultimate pro life argument is nobody has the right, whether you're a democratically elected legislature or you're the Supreme Court, you know, of the United States, nobody has the right.
To say that because you are pre viability as a human being, because you're only six weeks old with a beating heart, the very early beginning of human life, you don't have legal protection.
I mean, we don't have the right to draw arbitrary lines in the sand and say you're human now, worthy of life.
And now, just days earlier, you're not a human.
That's illogical.
It's immoral.
It's unjust.
And that's the ultimate pro life case to say if you're human, you have human rights.
Human rights are universal.
If you're human, you have human rights.
Of Justice Kavanaugh's comment yesterday on the bench, because he was getting to that.
You know, the fact that if you have a mother that wants to abort her baby, there is an inherent conflict in the rights of the woman and the baby.
It's so uncomfortable to even think about, really.
It's like mother and child are divided when it comes to what they want and what's best for them.
You know what I mean?
Like there's an assumption that the child belongs, it has a right to live, it has a right to be here, and the mother wants it.
Not to be.
And he kind of, let's listen to the Justice Kavanaugh side, it's sound bite 12.
I think he gets right to the heart of it.
In your brief, You say that the existing framework accommodates, that's your word, both the interest of the pregnant woman and the interest of the fetus.
And the problem, I think the other side would say, and the reason this issue is hard, is that you can't accommodate both interests.
You have to pick.
That's the fundamental problem.
And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time.
When you have those two interests at stake, And both are important, as you acknowledge.
Why should this court be the arbiter rather than Congress, the state legislatures, state supreme courts, the people?
I mean, I've never heard a justice dealing with abortion rights get right to the heart of it.
He's raising the point you were raising, which is you're talking about that.
Shouldn't the people's representatives be in charge of the decision of weighing those two competing interests?
Why should nine judges in robes?
Have that power.
Right.
And that's Mississippi's case.
I mean, that's what their Solicitor General was arguing.
Give us the right to protect children in our state.
I mean, our people want this.
Why can't we do this?
But, you know, it's interesting.
Justice Kavanaugh's comment about, you know, these rights are in conflict and someone's rights are going to have to prevail.
And why does the, he's basically saying, why is it after viability all of a sudden the child gets to live and their rights prevail, but before viability they don't?
I mean, again, it's going to the arbitrary standard, which was drawn in KCB Plank Parenthood.
And I would say, listen, I, I disagree as a woman and a mother myself, this framework of saying that a woman's interest is to have an abortion.
And I think that's one of the greatest lies that we have just bought as a society, even to the degree where the pro abortion attorneys yesterday were arguing that we need abortion as back of contraception.
I mean, they said that straight up.
They said that 10% of women who are 10% of contraception fails.
They even admitted that.
And so we need abortion as back of contraception.
And so this framework.
Framework that we're operating in now legally, which says that the child has as an interest a right to live, but this woman has the right to kill the child because they're dependent on her.
I don't think that's actually in a woman's interest.
So I would go a step further and say it's not in our interest as women to accept the paradigm that we need abortion to be empowered.
And if we develop a designer society where we need this trap door of abortion to get out of tough situations, or we Basically, live a sexual ethic or lack a sexual ethic.
And so we put sexual pleasure on this pedestal and say, we have a right to sexual pleasure without consequences.
Therefore, we need abortion as backup birth control.
I don't think that's a healthy society.
So I think there are actually bigger ramifications for this whole legal discussion, bigger questions we need to be asking ourselves, both as a society and for our public policy.
I mean, that's a moral question, but it fits in because they necessarily are dealing to some extent with morality inside that.
Courtroom.
The other side, of course, says that women need to be able to make their own choices about how their life is going to go.
And if they become pregnant, you know, by accident, unintentionally, that they should have the right to not be forced to carry a child to term, to raise a child.
And I thought that it was like the big question was as I understood it yesterday Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch seemed very much in the camp of Roe is going away.
That's the big ruling because they could rule Roe versus Wade.
Is no longer good law.
We are no longer recognizing a fundamental right to abortion.
They could rule we're not doing that.
We're not reversing Roe, but we're going to say this 15 week ban is fine, even though it's pre viability, which would open the door for all states to move the line much earlier in a woman's pregnancy.
Or they could uphold the Mississippi law.
I agree, they're not going to uphold the Mississippi law.
They wouldn't have taken the case.
The lower court struck down the law.
If they agreed with that, they wouldn't have taken the case.
So it's going to be one or two.
And I thought it was interesting in sort of getting to, well, which camp are the other conservatives in, right?
Where's Kavanaugh going to land?
Where's Amy Coney Barrett going to land?
John Roberts seems to be in the middle camp, of course, always, right, of the 15 weeks.
But Coney Barrett and Coney Barrett.
Kavanaugh, you know, we don't know.
Coney Barrett was focused on the argument by the pro choicers that you can't impose this burden on a woman.
Okay, so speaking to the argument I was just making on the other side's behalf, you know, it's too much of a burden to make a woman do this, right?
They have rights too.
And Coney Barrett looked at society, which you're allowed to do, and said basically things have changed a lot since 1992, since 1973, when it comes to A woman's options.
Listen to this.
This is Soundbite 11.
It seems to me that the choice more focused would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks or the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion.
Why didn't you address the safe haven laws and why don't they matter?
I think they don't matter for a couple of reasons, Your Honor.
First, even if some of those laws are new since Casey, the idea that a woman could place a child up for adoption.
Has, of course, been true since Roe.
So it's a consideration that the court already had before it when it decided those cases and adhered to the viability line.
But in addition, we don't just focus on the burdens of parenting, and neither did Roe and Casey.
Instead, pregnancy itself is unique.
It imposes unique physical demands and risk on women, and in fact, has impact on all of their lives and their ability to care for other children.
So what about that argument, Lila?
But basically, even if you were to assume this, thanks to the safe haven laws where you could drop off your baby after you have it anywhere and someone else will take care of it and there's no criminal prosecution of you, the mom, the lawyer for the pro choicers was saying pregnancy is an undue burden.
An unwanted pregnancy is burden enough.
Well, let's break it down.
I mean, first of all, she kind of acknowledges the pro abortion attorney, I think that was Julie Rickelman, that yes, parenthood, you're right.
Argument from or this justification early on for abortion under Roe that parenthood is an undue burden.
Yeah, we can kind of do that way with that with adoption.
So, yeah, oops, you know, we kind of maybe lost some of that ground, but then she kind of relies on stare decisis, saying, well, the court knew about adoption back then, so they must have already considered it, so we don't need to consider it now.
That's basically what she's saying.
And stare decisis is this concept, this principle that if the court addressed something in the past and they settled it, then it settled law.
The court can overrule and has done that many times.
And these are some of the biggest cases and most consequential cases is when they do overrule a past ruling because they realize, oh, we did this wrong.
That does happen.
But to address this specific question of the burden of pregnancy, I think it goes back to this idea that the state might force a woman to remain pregnant.
Pregnancy, it's a curious way to even talk about pregnancy, Megan, I think, because pregnancy is a biological process.
It continues on its own unless you are forcing it to stop.
Unless an abortion is forcing birth of a child that would lead to its death, ultimately to deliver a dead child.
So, even our paradigm to talk about pregnancy right now, I think is flawed, deeply flawed.
It's unnatural.
Pregnancy Burden Discussion 00:07:57
Pregnancy is natural, but to forcibly interrupt it is an unnatural act.
I think we should all acknowledge that pregnancy involves responsibilities and burdens.
I mean, you know, being pregnant is not easy for most women and it can be very, very challenging.
But again, it goes back to what Kavanaugh was talking about.
Does my natural responsibilities being pregnant to this developing child exist?
Do natural responsibilities exist?
Yes, they do.
That child deserves to live.
And so that really has to, in the end, trump, you know, the discomfort and even the challenges that women may face.
And instead of Looking at it as a negative.
And again, that's a societal problem, I think, right now, where we look at motherhood in this negative light and pregnancy in this negative light.
We should instead work together to make it better for women, both pregnancy and motherhood, and stop, again, using abortion as this kind of trap door of saying, if there's a tough situation, let's just kill off the child.
So, you know, I think acknowledging that there are burdens involved, that there are also responsibilities involved, that those are natural, and that the real forced action is abortion, not pregnancy.
The, um, The other side continues to raise socioeconomically disadvantaged women as those who will bear the biggest brunt of this.
And they talked a lot about domestic abuse, you know, women who become pregnant thanks to abusive husbands and the emotional trauma, the physical trauma that that imposes on these women who already have a difficult time getting access to health care in general.
You know, it's like for people who have means, it's like, why don't you just get the thing in your arm so you never get pregnant?
Oh, that's not that so easy for everybody, right?
And so it doesn't always say.
I mean, they even, it doesn't say that.
So they're basically saying, you know, The people who are going to bear the brunt of this are not, you know, the Megyn Kellys or the Lila Roses of the world.
Not that we would do this, but it's sort of people who have no means and no real ability to come into this court and represent themselves and fight.
What do you make of that?
Well, listen, I think this idea that if you're poor or if you're a minority or if you're young, then the obvious thing for you to do is to have an abortion.
You know, you need an abortion.
Let's make sure you get one.
I think that's terribly wrong and offensive.
Why is it that if you're poor, an abortion is somehow going to Advance you in life and make you better.
No, if you get an abortion and you're poor, you're still poor afterwards.
And now you're the mother of a dead child.
Now there's a dead family member in your history.
And there's a lot of post abortion trauma.
We could talk about that, that was not acknowledged whatsoever yesterday.
I mean, that's a whole flip side of this is that there's real traumas associated with abortion.
Some studies say that 100% more likely the year after having an abortion to commit suicide.
The depression, the anxiety, the substance abuse that's added on to The emotional pain of having an abortion.
So there's that.
But then the other piece of it too is we should be focused on lifting women out of poverty, right?
We should be focused on preventing unplanned pregnancies.
We should be focused on helping women care for their families or choose adoption or make other choices that are pro life choices ultimately, as opposed to, again, saying, well, let's just kill off the child.
That's the solution.
And that's the big flaw in all of this that they're assuming abortion is killing your child.
Is a path to empowerment when it actually leaves the woman in the same state as she was before, but now she's the mother of a child who's dead and she has the traumas associated with that.
And she, you know, we haven't done the work to actually authentically advance her.
You have all these amicus briefs, friends of the court briefs from people like the women's soccer organization.
I think it was the WNBA or, you know, professional female basketball players saying, you know, don't overrule Roe.
And don't support this Mississippi law.
And I wouldn't have been able to do my career the way I did if I hadn't been able to have an abortion.
And the other side really frames it in terms of like a woman's liberty over her own body, the right to choose what's going to happen with her own body.
And I understand that, you know, I've heard the conservative side argue many times you made a choice to have sex, you know, assuming you weren't raped or the victim of sexual assault.
You made a choice to have unprotected sex, and everybody knows what the potential consequences of doing that are.
But the courts have recognized that you get to keep making choices after that choice, you know, and they've basically.
Recognized a sliding scale.
I mean, there's nobody who says it's okay to kill a two year old.
You know what I mean?
Like, you can't do that.
You can't, notwithstanding what Ralph Northram, outgoing governor of Virginia says, kill a baby on the table after it's been delivered because the mom has second thoughts.
In most states, you can't kill a baby in the third trimester unless there's a very, very severe medical justification to save the mother's life.
Although, in the bluer the state, the longer it's possible to get an abortion.
So, we're really kind of arguing over, well, where does the second choice, you know, like, Is there ever a second choice and at what point do we cut it off?
Yeah.
And Megan, the reality is, I would argue, I would dare to guess that most of those athletes haven't really thought very seriously about where they would draw that line personally because they don't know.
Some of them might just say, oh, yeah, till birth, I can abort for any reason.
It's my choice.
But most people are pretty, try to be moderate and they say, well, let's draw the line for abortion when this viability line, again, that changes because medical technology has changed.
A little boy was just born last year, Richard Hutchins, who at Hutchinson, who actually was born at just 21 weeks old.
It's crazy.
And he's now the youngest.
Another little boy was actually just born a few months after him.
And they share the world record for being born at the youngest age, less than a pound, and they survived.
So that age changes, viability changes, that standard.
But yeah, most people, they don't have a, nobody has a good answer of when before birth you draw the line where you can make the choice to kill before that, but you Can't make the choice to kill after.
And so some people just say, well, make it at birth then.
And then you even have some people like Peter Singer, a so called ethicist, you know, who says, a philosopher who says, oh, actually, for the first three months after birth, you should be able to take the life of the infant because they're so brand new, you know, they're so undeveloped in their brain.
Yeah, but he's a professor at Yale.
So he's not, or he has a professor at Princeton, excuse me.
So he's not, you know, it's not so loony.
He's up there teaching people ethics right now.
So, yeah, yeah.
So I think that, you know, the reality is, When you draw any line to separate some humans from being considered persons and say other humans are persons, and the people that aren't persons under the law, they don't get legal protection.
You can do what you want with them.
And the people who are persons, they deserve the full protection of the law.
You open the door to serious injustice.
That's how every past serious human rights abuse has taken hold.
That's how we got genocides.
That's how we got the Holocaust.
That's how we got slavery in this country.
They were considered less.
Than persons under the law.
And now we're doing it to children in the womb.
And it's convenient for us because they don't have political advocacy themselves, right?
I mean, we are talking about them.
I'm trying to advocate for them.
There's, you know, thankfully thousands of others advocating for them, but we're born already.
You know, we have legal protection.
My right to life isn't under threat right now.
Megan, yours isn't.
And these children have no voice, but theirs are.
And so I think, yeah, the arbitrary line, we have to stop doing that because.
Bad logic will make bad law, will make injustice.
Sotomayor Supreme Court Question 00:08:02
A quick question before we squeeze in a quick break.
Do you know the number?
What is the number of abortions that take place every year in the United States?
Yeah.
So the number is nearly 1 million abortions, 2,363 abortions every single day.
It's the leading cause of death in America, beating out COVID deaths, heart disease deaths, cancer deaths.
About one fourth of all pregnancies, nearly one fourth, women are choosing abortion.
Abortionists are killing those babies.
And that's 2,300 abortions every single day.
Whoa.
Whoa.
That's big.
I want to pick it up right after this break with what Justice Sonia Sotomayor said on the bench about eight.
Stench that's getting a lot of attention today.
We'll be right back with that and with our predictions on how this is going to come out.
So, right now, there are only three more liberal jurists on the court Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor.
And Sonia Sotomayor, I mean, there's no question they're going to be voting to strike down the Mississippi law and voting to uphold Roe based on stare decisis, this, you know, precedent.
You follow precedent, basically, adherence to precedent for the stability of the court.
For the predictability of the nation and so on.
So, this is what she argued, or this is the question she asked that is getting some attention today.
This is Soundbite 4.
Sponsors of this bill, the House bill in Mississippi, said, We're doing it because we have new justices.
The newest ban that Mississippi has put in place, the six week ban, the Senate sponsor said, We're doing it because we have new justices on the Supreme Court.
Will this institution Survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts.
Your thoughts on it?
I mean, Justice Sotomayor could say the exact same thing about Brown v. Board of Education, about Lawrence v. Texas, about any number of other cases that overruled precedence.
Some of the most consequential Supreme Court cases in history have overruled precedent.
She's basically saying just because they're overruling precedent's politicization and therefore there's a stench, you could say that it applies to any other number of cases that overruled precedent.
Yeah, if they hadn't done that, we'd be stuck with Dred Scott, we'd be stuck with Plessy versus Ferguson, separate but equal, you know, all these terrible Supreme Court rulings that later they saw the light on.
What's really happening here, Megan, I think, with Justice Sodomayor saying that, and with so many questions coming from Um, the you know, you could say the left leaning justices, whatever you want to call them, Breyer and um, Kagan, they're the New York Times calls them moderates, Lila.
The New York Times refers them as moderates.
We've got some moderates, I'm waiting for the moderate decision from one of them.
But um, you know, what they're really doing here is they're dodging the really tangling with the the real arguments at hand.
They're saying, well, they're settled law, they're settled law, and the pro abortion attorneys did that multiple times when they were asked tough questions by the other six justices, uh, where they were just Go back to Stari Decisis, basically saying, well, the court already decided this.
They already addressed these questions.
I mean, we talked about that with Coney Barrett's question about safe haven laws.
And the answer almost immediately, rapid fire, was, oh, they knew about adoption back in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided.
So it's why are we talking about it now?
That's not a good argument.
That's not enough to just say, oh, the court ruled one way in the past, therefore it should always be that way.
And I think anybody with a mind who's engaging this question right now can see that.
You know, there's another way of looking at it, too.
This is what occurred to me when I heard Sotomayor's question.
And I think she might have been referring to something that was in the Casey decision, if I'm not mistaken, something about the stench of politics.
I can't remember.
But in any event, You could argue that this is a chance for the court to get out from under the pre existing stench.
You know, that the court never should have gotten involved in this, that this was always a matter for state legislators who are responsible to the citizenry.
And the court's decision in 1973 was not some landmark to be celebrated, no matter what your position on abortion, because they made up rights, you know, penumbras and conundrums.
I mean, the effort to expand what they had earlier found as a privacy right in Griswold.
To specifically cover abortion was a real legal gymnastic jump.
And so you could argue that since then, the Supreme Court's become unnecessarily political and a divisive force in American life in a way they might not have otherwise been seen.
And this is a chance to kick it back to the states and say, we are out of the business of legislating abortion.
No one elected us to do anything.
Well, and that was part of actually Solicitor General Scott Stewart's argument.
He basically said, enough is enough.
You know, he mentioned over 60 million abortions.
60 million children killed since 1973.
Like you're saying, Megan, one of the most hotly contested political issues of all time.
Why?
Why is it so passionately contested?
Because life is on the line, children's lives are on the line.
And so to let, again, the seven men in robes back in 1973 decide this for the nation, no, we're not going to let that happen.
Decide in the name of women.
I mean, that's the other thing that's so offensive here as a woman that was born after Roe, to be told that these men decided my women's rights for me in 1973.
Now, my most cherished right as a woman is to kill my child, is to kill a child.
Come on.
I mean, where did we first of all, it's on the Constitution.
If there's anything in the Constitution, it's equal protection under the law in the 14th Amendment for all persons.
And so, why exclude children from that?
You know, like you said, they basically look at a liberty right.
They say from there you get a privacy right.
And from that privacy right, we've gotten everything from abortion to gay marriage to, you know, the right to use birth control and so on.
Some people argue that those rights will then become in jeopardy if they overturn Roe.
That's not true.
No one's challenging Griswold v. Connecticut, in which they recognize the privacy right.
That's not getting reversed, even arguably.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a tremendous moral difference between taking an innocent human life via abortion and using a form of contraception that doesn't take innocent human life.
I mean, one takes an innocent human life and one doesn't.
And we could talk about the morality of contraception or how effective it is.
How helpful it's been for our population.
Those are all important questions to discuss.
But what's a question here is the fact that we have permitted 60 million deaths.
I would argue the murders of 60 million children since 1973.
And of course, this is hotly contested, Justice Sotomayor.
Of course, this is not settled law because this is the ongoing greatest human rights abuse, I would argue, that our country has ever seen.
And we're still dealing with it today.
So let me ask you something as somebody who, you know, Up until recently, it was immersed for the past 20 years in New York City liberals.
Okay.
Because virtually every single friend I have is pro choice.
And some of them are a little bit more right leaning, but also still pro choice.
You know, they, I don't think you can realistically argue about whether life begins at conception.
I mean, to say it doesn't is just anti science, right?
To steal a phrase, it's just like obvious.
We shouldn't be arguing about that.
I think the more honest argument is some people say, you know, I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with ending the potential for life or a very young life.
Because I just see it as a clump of cells.
I mean, this is what people say, right?
Newborn Value Argument 00:03:49
It's a clump of cells, and there's a difference between a clump of cells without a heartbeat or new heartbeat that's not identifiable in a womb as a human.
And an eight month old baby in the womb, right?
And that if you take a pill before a baby can feel pain and make it go away and save yourself a lifetime of heartache in having a baby you don't want or bringing a baby into a situation that the family doesn't want it, they're not going to treat it well, it's not going to have a good life, right?
This is sort of the argument that you hear that that should be up to the woman.
Like it should, it's a very personal decision, at least prior to the baby getting older.
And do argue about where that line is.
What do you say to that?
Listen, I mean, I think we have to look at the facts here.
Are these humans or are they not?
And to say, well, they're a very young human, they're a very dependent human, six weeks or three and a half weeks after fertilization, about six weeks, LMP, two different dating systems, the heart's already beating, but it's a very young heart that's beating, so it doesn't matter.
Yeah, you can say that.
I mean, people can say those things.
That doesn't mean that.
It's true.
It doesn't mean that just because they're young or less developed or just because they're wholly dependent on their mothers means that they don't deserve to live.
They don't have a future, too.
So it's a really hopeless ideology that says that these children don't deserve to live and they don't have a right to live because they're so young.
And it's an illogical ideology, too.
There's something called the sled test, Megan.
I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's a good way to think logically about this question because it can be so emotional, which is not.
Um, you know, not to say we shouldn't engage the emotion, but thinking about it logically are they human or are they not?
Um, their size does size determine your humanity?
You know, obviously, when you're a single cell embryo, you're much smaller than when you're a 10 week old embryo.
Um, no, because we don't say a two year old who's much smaller than a 20 year old is less valuable, right?
So, your size as a human doesn't determine your value.
And then that's the first letter in the acronym SLED.
Another letter is L for level of development.
Um, your development as a human being, you know, you're less developed.
Pre adolescence, you know, pre puberty, then post puberty, you're less developed as a newborn than you are at five years old.
But your development as a human being doesn't determine your worth.
It doesn't determine your value.
It doesn't, it shouldn't change your legal status, right?
The E in SLED, S L E D, is environment.
You know, they say, well, you're in the womb of your mother.
Therefore, you shouldn't, you know, deserve to live or you don't have the right to live just because I live under a different government.
I live in a different state.
I live in the body of my mother or because I'm a preborn child or I'm outside the body.
My environment as a human being doesn't also determine my value.
It doesn't mean I'm less valuable or more valuable.
Someone in China isn't less valuable than someone in the United States.
Someone in Florida isn't less valuable than someone in California.
And someone in the womb isn't less valuable than someone outside the womb.
And then that last D in the sled test to determine is this a human the same as another human is degree of dependency.
Your dependency on another human being doesn't change your value and shouldn't change your legal rights.
A two year old is totally dependent.
A newborn is completely dependent.
You know, if you leave a newborn alone, they'll die.
They need you for everything.
But that doesn't mean the newborn doesn't have legal rights or worse.
And same with a preborn child who's totally dependent on their mother.
That doesn't change their value or their rights.
So, whether it's their size, it's their level of development, it's their environment, it's their degree of dependency, these are the reasons that people use to justify abortion.
They're too small, they're less developed, and they can't feel pain, they're dependent, they're in the womb.
Public Opinion vs Law 00:15:16
None of those are logical reasons to accept abortion.
And so I would just posit the question: should human lives be protected?
Do they have human rights?
And if the answer is yes, humans have human rights, they have to extend to children in the womb.
Well, the law does recognize that in other circumstances, right?
There are some states, I think Ohio is one, where if you kill a pregnant woman, you'll be charged with two counts of murder or manslaughter.
So they do, the law does recognize the life of an unborn child, even early in the pregnancy, in some circumstances already.
I mean, to me, it's hard to believe that this court might overrule Roe.
But having listened yesterday, I think they might be getting ready to.
I mean, the headline from scotusblog.com, which I like and trust and have read for a long, long time, there's a woman there named Amy Howe.
She's been writing for them for forever, and she's a straight shooter.
You know, she'll tell you what she thinks.
I don't know what her political persuasion is, but she's a straight shooter.
She's predicting they're going to uphold the 15 week ban.
And I don't know that she foresees an overruling of Roe.
I think I'm in a more aggressive camp than she is.
I feel like what we heard yesterday, because no one seemed to be jumping on board the John Roberts.
How about if we just go for the 15 weeks thing?
John Roberts is always worried about the future of the court.
Don't be seen as a political body.
Oh, too late.
And I didn't see, let me play what he said, and then I'll just talk about it, because I just didn't see other justices circling around him, kind of jumping behind that logic.
This is Soundbite 10, John Roberts, Chief Justice.
If it really is an issue about choice, why is 15 weeks not enough time?
For a few reasons, Your Honor.
First, the state has conceded.
That some women will not be able to obtain an abortion before 15 weeks, and this law will bar them from doing so.
And a reasonable possibility standard would be completely unworkable for the courts.
It would be both less principled and less workable than viability.
And some of the reasons for that are without viability, there will be no stopping point.
States will rush to ban abortion at virtually any point in pregnancy.
So he's trying to say, why can't we live with 15 weeks to the people challenging the Mississippi law?
And you heard her saying, It's not going to stay at 15.
It's going to slide back to six weeks and so on, and there's no stopping it.
But no other conservative justice piped in, continued the line of argument, tried to run cover for him on it, tried to work on persuading other justices to come around to the 15 week point.
To me, it sounded much more like the Amy Coney Barrett, what about the safe havens?
And things have changed now since 1973 and 1992, and the world looks very different now.
So, what do you think?
I know what you hope, but what are your circles saying about predictions?
Well, first of all, I mean, how can the court uphold the 15 week ban, so the pre viability ban, which basically undoes the viability standard of KCV Planned Parenthood without effectively overruling Roe v. Wade?
I mean, it's a really hard legal maneuver.
I don't know what it would even look like to do that.
And there were some questions from some of the justices about, and certainly in the briefs in advance, in the prepared arguments in advance, you know, what is the legal standard we can We can use instead of viability.
If we're going to draw a line in the sand and if there's going to be an arbitrary line, it's not viability, what is the arbitrary line?
And just quickly, there you heard the lawyer for the one Mississippi abortion clinic who's arguing against this ban saying, no, we don't want that.
Even she's not saying settle on the 15 weeks.
He's like the only one who's like, well, I'll just leave it there.
Even Mississippi in crafting the law didn't really want 15 weeks.
They'd love to see Roe v. Wade.
The whole thing was crafted to get Roe overturned.
So you've got Chief John Roberts, Chief Justice, saying, how about that?
Let's just settle where they left it.
And to me, it seemed like the rest of the participants were like, that's the worst option.
Well, I mean, I think it's, I hope it's very clear to Justice Roberts that it's an arbitrary line of viability and that, you know, it's been badly decided.
These cases were badly decided.
Even pro choice legal experts say that about Roe.
And I hope that he has enough intellectual honesty and just enough courage to at least co sign onto something that one of the other justices says in advancing justice here.
Well, they don't need him.
They don't need him.
They're six conservatives.
For his own legacy, Megan, I would hope that he gets off this fake fence he's straddling because there's not really a real fence to straddle here.
That's the problem.
That is the whole problem of abortion case law, it's because it's illogical.
Because the arbitrary line does change and can change, they're really inventing this right out of thin air.
And that is the whole problem of Roe v. Wade and the later campaign.
That is true.
I mean, listen, no matter what your opinion on whether you're pro choice or pro life, Roe v. Wade is an embarrassing decision.
There was no basis for it.
And really, it never should have been written, it never should have been decided that way.
But now we're stuck with it.
And the question is do we adhere to precedent 50 years old that's been reaffirmed as recently as 92?
Or have things changed in the country, or have we just gotten it?
Justice Thomas would say, I don't give a damn how long it's been on the books.
If it's bad law, you overrule it, i.e., Dred Scott and Plessy versus Ferguson.
Others would say, no, you've got to respect for precedent.
So we sort of know what we're dealing with when it comes to judge made law.
But if the circumstances in the country have changed enough, like viability, the point has changed, or the safe haven laws have changed, where people can safely, I don't know how else to say it, but get rid of, pass off a baby that's been born.
To others who want to love it and raise it, you know, maybe that could change the situation.
What about though?
Let's just, first of all, let's talk about this.
This is an important point.
If I had a nickel for everybody who thinks abortion will be outlawed in all 50 states if this case goes in favor of Mississippi, I'd be rolling in dough.
That's not true.
Oh, yeah, I was going to say, yeah, I don't, yeah, I think you'd be dirt poor.
Yeah.
If I had a nickel for everybody who believes it, that's what I'm saying.
Like, so many people believe this is like abortion becomes illegal.
If this court rules in favor of Mississippi and that's in all 50 states, that's not true.
Explain what would happen.
I think, yeah.
And I think that's a lot of that is ignorance about how abortion law even works.
I mean, a lot of people, they run these polls and they say, well, most Americans want Roe v. Wade, right?
There are these polls out there that say that.
And then you actually start to dig into it and they run other polls and most Americans actually want abortion restrictions, at least at the first trimester, which Roe v. Wade prohibits states from doing.
So it's really a lot of, Misinformation and ignorance about what these laws, what these cases have even done.
Roe v. Wade has forced states to permit abortion up until the point a baby can survive outside the womb.
That's what Roe v. Wade did.
And most people don't know that if they knew that, they would be against it.
So, yeah, there's just, I mean, what is happening in the court of public opinion is very different than what often happens in the court of law.
And right now, and my organization, Live Action, our focus is education in the court of public opinion because there is so much misinformation about.
Not just these laws and what federal law has effectively done to shut down any state protections after, before viability, but it's also just ignorance, Megan, about abortion procedures.
People think, okay, an abortion procedure is just sort of undoes the pregnancy, the baby kind of magically goes away, and we move on with our lives.
When people are actually educated about how these abortion procedures take place, even the abortion pill is starving that baby with a beating heart of nutrients, and then the second abortion Pill is a forced miscarriage and it's extremely, can be extremely traumatic for women.
It can be weeks of bleeding.
It can even lead to hemorrhaging and death.
When they learn about the abortion pill, when they learn about suction abortion in the first trimester, it's a powerful suction machine that rips a child into pieces.
This developing child that already often has arms, legs, internal organs.
The second trimester abortion, which is what they are arguing right now with the Mississippi ban at 15 weeks, is a second trimester abortion.
That's what they use on a 15 week old baby.
That involves using forceps with metal teeth to tear a child into pieces and remove it.
It's a live dismemberment process.
And you remove the baby piece by piece while they're alive.
Can feel pain according to most scientific studies on babies that age.
Well, let me challenge you on that.
Let me challenge you because I actually did look into that recently.
And what I read was that there's a group of surgeons saying that's impossible.
You cannot feel pain until the spinal cord is further developed.
And that is in the low 20s in terms of weeks.
Well, there's also studies that say that as early as nine weeks, the child can feel pain.
And that's why, you know, but your pain, your capability to feel pain doesn't determine your humanity, of course.
But yeah, I mean, there's scientific studies on both sides that say.
And that's why they give anesthesia to babies that are operated on in utero because of the ability to feel pain.
And yet we're still committing abortions in some states through all nine months, like New Mexico, for example, obviously without painkillers.
That child is.
But most people are against that.
I mean, you tell me, because the way I understand it, the vast majority of Americans don't like abortion, but they don't want to see it ruled unconstitutional, which again is not on the table.
The Supreme Court's not going to rule it unconstitutional.
The question is whether they abandoned a decision that said it is a constitutional right.
That must be recognized by all 50 states.
Now it'll be up to the states if they overrule it.
However, about half the states have so called trigger laws that would make it unlawful in their states.
So it will come down to a matter of red versus blue, half and half, allow it versus ban it, but it won't be illegal in all 50 states.
What does that mean?
What does that look like?
Does that enable women who want to have an abortion in red states like Mississippi to actually get one?
Be out of options and how will that all play politically?
That's where I'm going to pick it up with Lila Rose right after this quick break.
Don't go away.
Okay, so can we just talk about where the public is on this?
Because I'm sure you've got the latest data.
But what I read in the polls is that, as I was saying before, there's a 15% contingent that wants to see Roe overruled and abortion illegal everywhere.
There's a 15% contingent that wants abortion on demand all the way through nine months.
And most Americans.
Fall someplace between those two ends, saying, I don't love it.
I don't want to see a lot of it.
I don't necessarily want to see it banned, but I want a lot of restrictions.
I'm totally fine with restrictions in the second trimester, definitely in the third trimester, but they don't want to see an outright ban on it.
Do I accurately state the numbers?
Yeah.
I mean, two things.
First of all, on the question of Roe v. Wade, most people don't realize that Roe v. Wade permits abortion through all nine months if a state doesn't prohibit it at all.
So when people look at that question, actually, the vast majority of Americans.
Don't want abortion through all nine months.
They want abortion restrictions.
Over 70% of Americans want some kind of abortion restriction.
So most people want states to have laws, and many of them laws after the first trimester to ban abortions.
Like Europe.
That's like it, unlike in Mississippi, unlike Europe, exactly like what Mississippi is trying to do.
But the second thing is, I think the polling is obviously important to look at where people are.
And I'm really interested in that as an educator because I want people to be educated on.
The humanity of the baby in the first trimester, because that's usually when people say, some people say, oh, yeah, well, we can permit abortion then because the baby's so small and less undeveloped.
But when it comes to what should be legal, there's this question now the Supreme Court, it seems likely that they're going to uphold Mississippi's law, turn effectively.
These decisions back to the states to be making them individually about when to ban an abortion in the state.
California is not going to be banning abortion, at least not anytime soon, but Mississippi may ban abortion, right?
So it's that red versus blue state question.
But the second thing I would say here is I don't think it's up to a democratic process to decide whether some innocent people live or die.
And so even while it may be the case that the Supreme Court is about to turn abortion back to the states and say they're not going to make a decision at the federal level, it's not a question for the Constitution to answer, I think it is a constitutional right that we.
Have a right to life.
I got you.
You made that point.
Yeah.
You're in the contingent that would like to see them rule this is not a lawful thing to do, a constitutional thing to do, period.
But that's not on the table right now.
Last question.
I've got about a minute or so left.
What do you think politically this would do if they overruled Roe and kicked it back to the states and we had, I don't know, between 12 and 22 states kick in with their trigger laws saying abortion is illegal here and the other half don't?
Like, what, how do you think that plays politically?
Because I've heard a lot of smart Republicans say we want that, but it's not going to play that well for us politically at the ballot box.
I think it can play very well politically if we do a good job on education and continuing to expand safety net resources, both private and public, for women and families.
And that's been a huge, quiet effort of the prolific movement over the past 40 years.
There are 4,000 pregnancy resource centers offering free and confidential care in states and cities in virtually every state in the country.
So continuing to beef up that network.
And as long as we can educate, we care for families.
There's so much work being done in the prolific movement, it has been done since day one.
To care for mothers and families, to promote adoption, to help kids in foster care, to celebrate and encourage motherhood and fatherhood, then I think we can shift the scale.
It's hard to do.
It's going to be hard to do, Megan, because the media is very pro abortion in this country.
A lot of our institutions are very pro abortion.
That's been sort of cemented since Roe v. Wade, but we can change that with enough work.
Last thing quickly, quickly, where should people go for more information on what's real?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Liveaction.org.
There's great information on the abortion procedures.
From former abortionists on fetal development.
And then, of course, great review of what's happening at the Supreme Court and great news coverage of that.
Lila Rose, such a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Thanks so much, Megan.
I really enjoyed talking to you.
Thanks for joining us today, everybody.
I want to let you know that tomorrow we've got Matt Walsh, so excited, and Adam Carolla.
They're both with The Daily Wire here.
You're welcome because it's going to be amazing.
Check us out on YouTube and download the show in the meantime.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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