A man named Ryan Gonzalez reportedly spent 11 months editing the secretly recorded Planned Parenthood video footage that was released by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress, a source close to Gonzalez told The Huffington Post. The videos, which appear to show Planned Parenthood officials discussing the disposal of fetal tissue and whose content rallied Republicans to threaten to shut down the government, have since been found to have used actors and contain heavy edits that make them entirely unreliable.
The Huffington Post's source said that Gonzalez worked with his friend, David Daleiden, who started the Center for Medical Progress, in an apartment in Orange County, California. The pair began by meeting to edit the videos once or twice a week, then ramped up the frequency in May 2015 until it became a full-time effort. In July, Gonzalez promoted the videos on his personal Facebook page: "This is the first part of a project I've been editing since last August and haven't been able to talk about until now. It was just released today and the news is tracking well so far." The pair later made fun of allegations that the footage was manipulated on their Facebook pages.
The Center for Medical Progress blames the unexplained edits on "bathroom breaks or waiting time between meetings [that] were removed to protect the investigators." Daleiden added in an email to The Huffington Post that "the Center for Medical Progress works with a variety of contractors for technically skilled tasks like acting, legal research, and video editing, but as a general rule we do not publicly comment on or identify these individuals because of serious personal security concerns." He maintains that the authenticity of the videos has been verified.
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