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Center for Medical Progress legal team with David Daleiden outside San Francisco Superior Court.Lianne Laurence / LifeSiteNews

SAN FRANCISCO, California, September 12, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — The CEO of StemExpress dodged questions on whether her biotech company sold living fetal hearts to researchers in her second day of testimony at the criminal preliminary hearing of David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt.

Doe 12 dodged questions on everything else as well.

“Sometimes when a witness is being evasive part of your job as an advocate is to show full well that that witness is not being truthful, might be outright lying, but certainly is not being straight with the court,” said Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society and lawyer for Daleiden.

“People that generally tell the truth, generally tell the truth, and she was not one of those people and it was made crystal clear in the court today,” he told LifeSiteNews.

Daleiden and Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress are charged with 15 felony counts of illegally taping confidential information in connection with undercover videos they released in 2015 exposing Planned Parenthood selling baby body parts. They could be jailed for 10 years if convicted. 

Doe 12 essentially admitted last Thursday her biotech company sold living fetal hearts and intact fetal heads to researchers, and that the heads could be attached to the baby’s body or could “be torn off.”

When Breen returned to the subject Wednesday, referencing the 2012 Stanford School of Medicine study that used the Langendorff perfusion technique, which requires a living heart. Stanford acknowledged StemExpress supplied the fetal hearts.

Doe 12 said in her first day of testimony that StemExpress supplied “heart tissue” to Stanford. Did she mean “the same thing I had in mind, a fetal heart?” Breen asked Wednesday.

“I feel I’d need to go back and read the testimony,” Doe 12 said.

“Did you provide whole fetal hearts to Stanford?” Breen asked.

“If you’re talking undamaged, I’d say unlikely,” Doe 12 replied.

“When you say ‘damaged’, you would agree a heart should be able to perfuse blood?” Breen said. “They can’t do a study on a dead heart.”

When Deputy Attorney General Johnette Jauron objected, Breen said Doe 12 “directed procurement for the 2012 Stanford study.”

“Have your technicians procured whole fetal hearts for use by researchers?” he asked her.

“I have not and I am not aware of undamaged heart tissue being collected,” she said.

When Breen asked her what she meant by “damaged,” Doe 12 replied, “I mean damaged. I feel descriptive words work well for your clients to manipulate.”

Breen also quizzed Doe 12 about Dr. Robert Berman, who was at one point both the medical director at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte and medical director for StemExpress.

“Did Dr. Berman perform abortion procedures at the same clinic where StemExpress was procuring fetal tissue?” Breen asked.

“I feel like you have to talk to Dr Berman,” Doe 12 responded.

“Even though Doe 12 founded the company, she couldn’t remember key details, or any details at all, about what appears to be a conflict relationship where she actually had the abortion provider doing the fetal tissue procurement on her staff,” Breen told LifeSiteNews.

Berman had “an irreconcilable conflict of interest,” he said. “He had a duty to the patient he was doing the abortion on and yet he was making money off the fetal tissue he was procuring from her.”

Doe 12 also refused to authenticate documents Breen presented to her, notably the April 2012 contract between StemExpress, then called Stem-X, and Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, nor would she admit her signature was on the document, but that it “appeared” to be her signature.

She was similarly evasive under cross-examination by Horatio Mihet of Liberty Counsel, who is representing Merritt.

Mihet compared Doe 12’s testimony on Thursday on a non-disclosure agreement she alleges Daleiden and Merritt were bound by when they met for lunch in May 2015, with claims she made when she subsequently sued CMP. 

Doe 12 said the line of questioning “feels slimy.” 

“We had another day in court and another liar,” Mihet told LifeSiteNews.

Doe 12 “came up with a non-disclosure agreement that she claims she sent to David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt in advance of this meeting that they recorded, an agreement which she says would have prohibited the recording and the disclosures of the information that was discussed at that meeting,” he said.

Mihet revealed on cross-examination that “this agreement was not signed at the time of the meeting, and number 2, in sworn testimony in other proceedings, in a lawsuit that this Doe 12 had filed herself, a civil lawsuit, Doe 12 said that the first time that she learned of this agreement was after this dinner meeting.”

She also responded with questions to both lawyers as to what they were after, or complained about the questions, prompting Breen to tell her: “This is not a back and forth,” and the judge to remind her she was there to testify.

Breen attempted to question Doe 12 on purchase orders to establish profit motive, but Jauron objected.

The U.S. congressional proceedings found that that researchers pay “thousands of dollars for fetal brains, and we know that that requires an intact head,” Breen told LifeSiteNews.

Doe 12 admitted in last Thursday’s testimony that StemExpress sells intact baby heads, which when reported by LifeSiteNews was “called ‘lies! lies!’ by the attorney general, but of course, it was what was actually said in court, it was what was testified to by the witnesses, so the truth came out last week, and it continued to come out today,” Breen said.