Years ago, a pro-life activist told me that her movement had several dirty little secrets — as in people who had been on the abortion-rights side of the equation, then flipped to the other side but were impossible to deal with or had weird lifestyles.
One such personality was Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of the famous 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
Shortly before McCorvey died in 2017, she consented to being part of a documentary that just aired on FX Networks (I saw it on Hulu) last week. McCorvey’s “deathbed” assertions first hit the Los Angeles Times:
When Norma McCorvey, the anonymous plaintiff in the landmark Roe vs. Wade case, came out against abortion in 1995, it stunned the world and represented a huge symbolic victory for abortion opponents: “Jane Roe” had gone to the other side. For the remainder of her life, McCorvey worked to overturn the law that bore her name.
But it was all a lie, McCorvey says in a documentary filmed in the months before her death in 2017, claiming she only did it because she was paid by antiabortion groups including Operation Rescue.
“I was the big fish. I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say. That’s what I’d say,” she says in “AKA Jane Roe,” which premieres Friday on FX. “It was all an act. I did it well too. I am a good actress.”
Many of us religion reporters who were working in the 1990s also interviewed McCorvey. There is no way she was putting on an act when I talked with her and I know other journalists who’d say the same thing. The most gaping hole in this story is linked to McCorvey’s conversion to Catholicism and the wealth of evidence that she sincerely practiced that faith.
After watching the movie on Hulu, it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s false about this woman. She’s switched personas more than once in this battle.
“AKA Jane Roe” also shows how McCorvey was held at arm’s length by abortion rights proponents. After a decade of anonymity, McCorvey went public in the 1980s and began granting interviews, and was depicted in the Emmy-winning TV movie, “Roe vs. Wade,” starring Holly Hunter. But to the leaders of the abortion rights movement, the inconsistencies in her story — for a time McCorvey claimed she had gotten pregnant as the result of a rape, then said she had been lying — and lack of polish made her a less-than-ideal poster girl for the cause.
“AKA Jane Roe,” which shows multiple TV network news clips featuring everyone from Walter Cronkite to Ted Koppel, makes it clear that McCorvey felt shunted by the pro-choice side. Thus, when she was approached in the mid-1990s by anti-abortion activist Rev. Flip Benham (who apologized for screaming at her in public), she was open to change.
In the years that followed, she became known by multiple clergy, including the Rev. Rob Schenck, once a prominent pro-lifer who’s since distanced himself from the movement. He has an extensive role in the FX documentary.
Despite her visible role in the fight against abortion, McCorvey says she was a mercenary, not a true believer. And Schenck, who has also distanced himself from the antiabortion movement, at least partially corroborates the allegations, saying that she was paid out of concern “that she would go back to the other side,” he says in the film. “There were times I wondered: Is she playing us? And what I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we were playing her.”
How much? By delving into (what appeared to be) 990 tax forms, the amount over the years was about $457,000, the documentary said. She was said to demand money, which is somewhat understandable if you’re a full-time movement spokeswoman who needs to also make a living. What is puzzling is McCorvey’s deathbed assertion that she only did it for the money.
It beggars believe that everything she said from 1995 on –- including her 2003 sworn testimony in her attempt to have Roe vs. Wade reconsidered by the U.S. Supreme Court –- was a lie, but the documentary wants viewers to believe that. I know she says she’s an actress, but no one can put in the public appearances, press interviews, a public baptism, jail time for demonstrating outside of abortion clinics and more for 20 years and be lying the whole time.
The New York Times came up with an answer to the money question.
The truth is that she was exploited by both, said Joshua Prager, a New York journalist who interviewed her extensively and is writing a biography of Ms. McCorvey.
“To say it happened on one side of the aisle but not the other is unfair,” said Mr. Prager, who spent hundreds of hours with Ms. McCorvey in the last four years of her life. “She was coached on both sides, and she was paid on both sides.”
Interestingly, Prager tried interviewing her for a 2013 Vanity Fair profile several years before and was told he’d have to pay her $1,000 for the privilege. He refused and she wouldn’t talk. Prager did follow the money trail with McCorvey and documented how she would constantly barrage her pro-life handlers for money. His piece is a must read on the topic and it’s certainly info the documentary producers had access to.
So why do they act like McCorvey was only paid off by one side, causing the inevitable pile-ons — as in “Jane Roe’s deathbed confession exposes the immorality of the Christian Right,” courtesy of a columnist for the Guardian. Then there is this sloppy Washington Post piece that regurgitates what the film said without doing basic searches for what other people had reported in the past about McCorvey’s price-gouging habits.
FX Networks is the same group that has come out with “Mrs. America,” a pseudo-documentary on Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, which will have its last broadcast on May 27. It’s been factual in its portrayals of the 1970s feminist pioneers but has inserted false narratives in its portrayal of Schlafly. (I wrote about the program here and will have more to say when it ends). So I have no confidence in FX’s ability to be truthful when it comes to conservative views or personalities.
Naturally, the pro-life side has said FX got it all wrong and selectively left out anyone who didn’t agree with their narrative. Case in point: One-time McCorvey attorney Allan Parker. Or pro-life women who worked with her for years.
The Stream mentioned specific conservative women who weren’t interviewed.
Starting with an L.A. Times story, national media has been abuzz about the film this week. Sensational headlines say it proves McCorvey was “bribed by the Christian right” and implied that her religious conversion was fake.
Two women who interacted with McCorvey shortly before her death were not interviewed for the ostensibly impartial documentary.
“Activities she did with our Dallas pro-life community were unpaid,” stated Lauren Muzyka, director of Sidewalk Advocates for Life. “There was no doubt in our minds she was pro-life.”
Abby Johnson, the Planned Parenthood clinic operator who left the business to join the pro-life movement and who — like McCorvey — also lives in Texas, is one of the latter. FX interviewed plenty of women who were for abortion and men who were for and against. But there were no women featured who opposed abortion.
That is, “anti” side was always voiced by men. The “pro” side was voiced by women. This is what is known as a set-up.
In a Facebook post on May 20, Johnson asks why the producers didn’t interview the Rev. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life who knew her far better than Schenck did. But Schenck — who expresses regret in the film for being publicly bombastic on abortion partly because he can’t imagine telling a pregnant woman what to do with her body — better fits the documentary’s narrative.
Pavone, whose remarks slamming media coverage of abortion at a Religion News Association conference last fall riled quite a few pro-choice reporters, would have blown apart FX’s narrative. He told Catholic News Agency that pro-life groups would support McCorvey because she was destitute, but it was never big money, plus McCorvey would push back if she felt pressured.
“When we were helping her cut down on her travels, we, and a number of other pro-life people and groups, knew that she was close to destitute, so we would help her” financially, Pavone said.
“She needed help, she asked for help in various ways, she accepted it, but if the person helping gave the impression that they were trying to control her, or if she felt that the person helping her was smothering her, she would push back,” Pavone said, adding that the two had difficult moments at various points of their affiliation, but, he said “you could always work things out and resolve it.”
World magazine also asks why Pavone wasn’t interviewed and noted that FX was pretty selective in which media outlets got an advance screening of the film. Unlike the Los Angeles Times and certain others, World did not get an advance look.
As stated above, the movie skipped the whole 1998 conversion-to-Catholicism event that McCorvey underwent not long after her baptism.
So, more questions are left unanswered than answered here. When McCorvey talks about getting paid, was that for her activism or just some kind of occasional retainer? As the National Review notes:
It is worth noting a few reasons to doubt the spin that media outlets are putting on these revelations. For one thing, it isn’t at all unusual for activists or public speakers to receive compensation for their work — in fact, it would be more surprising to find out that she wasn’t paid for everything she did. The testimony of public figures with personal experience is especially valuable, and it shouldn’t be considered especially controversial that those figures are often hired to promote the message that their experience supports. The fact that McCorvey was paid to speak about her change of heart doesn’t, in itself, mean that her conversion was insincere or motivated by financial considerations.
Consider, too, her subsequent conversion to Catholicism, her choice to speak with a priest on the day she died, and her decision to have a Catholic funeral. Presumably she wasn’t paid to do any of that.
So here we have footage filmed in May 2016, nine months before McCorvey’s death, and some notable personalities who should have been interviewed about her, but were not. Abby Johnson says she talked with McCorvey mere days before she died and heard nothing on the line of the I-was-paid mantra that McCorvey told FX.
Also, the documentary is coy about one important thing. To get access to McCorvey, surely they had to pay up too? We call that “checkbook journalism” and ethical news organizations don’t offer money to their interviewees.
When pressed by the Washington Post, the film’s producer admitted he paid her a “modest licensing fee” for use of family photos and documentary footage.
Hmmmm. Professionals in the journalism business aren’t supposed to do even that. So, FX also paid her as well, making themselves as complicit as the people that they criticize.
Transparency is everything. Next time, FX, use the same standards on yourselves.