Message from Cleveland Pro-Choice Activists April 1, 1999
Over the last four months, in the name of "investigating" the murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian, the FBI has chosen to target us-two known abortion rights activists. Our names have been publicized nationally as having "information about the sniper slaying of a doctor who performed abortions." We attended a vigil for Dr. Slepian, in Buffalo, on October 24th, the night after he was killed. Then, three weeks later, when we refused to talk to the FBI, after it became clear that they were investigating our pro-choice ties, the FBI began issuing public statements about us. The statements were knowingly false and intended to place us and our families in danger and to humiliate us in the national media. Since that time we have attempted, with no success, to get the FBI to retract its statements.
On our way to the vigil we mistakenly approached Dr. Slepian's house trying to find the vigil. The police officer took Mr. Stauber's identification and directed us to the vigil at the doctor's office. Three weeks later, the FBI questioned the owner of the car we had borrowed to drive to Buffalo from Cleveland, and quickly began harassing her and our attorney, Mark Kaiser. They wanted to know who told us about the vigil for Dr. Slepian, and how we could have gotten there on such short notice. On Friday, November 20th, 1998, Mr. Stauber and attorney Kaiser met with two agents of the FBI. Mr. Kaiser said that we had no information about the murder of Dr. Slepian, that we had attended a vigil to honor him, and that any further inquiries should go through him. Attorney Kaiser pointed out to the agents that they had no material evidence against us and that he had advised us not to answer questions.
The very next day, Saturday, November 21, news reports appeared on radio, tv, and print media that said, "the FBI office in Cleveland asked police across the country Friday to look for Ronald Stauber and Michael Gingrich (sic)." The AP releases carried by the New York times went on to say that it was believed that we were associated with James Charles Kopp, a known anti-abortionist being sought for questioning in the murder and last seen in Mexico. Some news reports said that we were believed to be driving a car with Canadian plates suspected to be involved in the murder. These public announcements from the FBI could have been used to support the outrageous claims by anti-abortionists over the years that the pro-choice side kills its own doctors and bombs clinics to get sympathy from the public. In fact, the Baltimore Defender for Life actually claimed that we were being sought for the murder of Dr. Slepian, and that pro-choicers had killed him because they were just about to "convert" the doctor to be against abortion!
We were clearly being portrayed as being fugitives by the FBI, and as a result of this, our lives and that of our families were placed in danger, less than 24 hours after we met with them. We spent four days doing media appearances to answer the lies and to prove that we were in fact not fugitives. At a press conference outside the Cleveland FBI office we were joined by pro-choice and social justice organizations that supported our demands. To this day, we have restricted our travel and business because we may be subject to being routinely stopped because of this FBI order to police nationally. All this because we refused to answer questions of the FBI about the pro-choice movement!
To some, this experience brings to mind the FBI treatment of Richard Jewel, the security guard accused in the 1996 Olympic bombing. Jewel was wrongly accused as well as publicly humiliated in the global media for 3 months. But in our case, the FBI knew us to be pro-choice activists on the left, and generally active in a number of causes, when they purposely and wrongly associated us with James Kopp. We are both veteran activists against the politics of cruelty, especially against police brutality, having attended numerous demonstrations that have been surveiled by the FBI. We both have been arrested a number of times at political demonstrations, so the FBI already had files on us.
When the media questioned the FBI about the treatment we received from them, the FBI would only say, "As with any serious crime we do a thorough investigation" and "In this particular investigation thousands of leads were generated which required us to talk to people." In fact, in the 5 months since the murder of Dr. Slepian, our names have been the only ones publicly released since Kopp's in the first week. In some of the press releases of November 21, the very ones implying that we were fugitives, the FBI mentions a "woman associate" of Kopp's believed to have driven him to Mexico after the shooting. "She's going to be questioned. It is believed that she may have been with Kopp sometime after the murder," one AP release stated. While the FBI has made no retraction of our names, they have yet to make her name public!
The FBI and other police agencies have a history of conducting "investigations" like this one which attack progressives, and an established record of having their own agents inside reactionary white supremacist organizations who declined to stop horrible crimes such as the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The legacy has not been reformed. Only days after an "all points bulletin" was issued for us, the ACLU remarked on the 90th anniversary of the FBI by issuing a statement against the FBI's "growing legacy of abusive practices." In the five years of sniper attacks on abortion providers in the northeastern US and Canada, which have resulted in 3 serious injuries, and now the murder of Dr. Slepian, federal authorities have made no arrests. Time and again they have approached the arsons of abortion clinics, or the burnings of Black churches in the South, by suspecting the victims first. Questioning the clinic staff or church congregation about whether they burned the building for insurance money, they have arrested and charged very few people in these crimes. And today, after a striking increase in anti-abortion violence in North Carolina, the very state where Eric Rudolph, suspected in the Olympic Park and abortion clinic bombings in Birmingham and Atlanta, has been sought, the FBI has announced that they are cutting in half the forces searching for him.
Many of us in this movement have been arguing for years that we cannot rely on the FBI and the police to protect abortion providers and clinics. Our experience is another good example of why this is so. The FBI portrays itself as "protectors" while they attack progressive activists, and let anti-abortion violence escalate. This can only further immobilize the movement in defense of women's right to choose. In our opinion, the only guarantee that there will be access to abortion and that abortion providers will be protected and defended-and that one day, no defense will be necessary-is that we build a broad, diverse movement of the people themselves.
We are asking organizations and individuals to join us in making the demand to the FBI that they publicly state:
Contact the FBI Cleveland Office at 1240 E. 9th Street, Cleveland OH 44100 (216) 522-1400
Abortion on Demand and Without Apology!
Keep the Clinics Open -
Stand Together for Abortion Access and Women's Lives!
Contact us through Refuse & Resist!
Cleveland Chapter 216-556-5747 refuse_216@hotmail.com
National Office of R&R! 212-713-5657 info@refuseandresist.org
[posted Thu, Apr 8, 1999]
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