David Delaiden and Jan Jekeilek are finally being duly recognized for their courageous reporting of the awful truths about Planned Parenthood selling aborted baby body parts and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials forcibly harvesting organs from unwilling prisoners for transplanting to other privileged CCP members.

These two men represent what genuine, public interest investigative journalism is all about — getting the facts about important issues that all Americans have the right to know and that honest reporters have the First Amendment right to collect, confirm, and make known, even if doing so comes at the cost of character assassination, misrepresentation, and legalized persecution.

The founder of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), Delaiden had skillfully recorded undercover videos that left no doubt that Planned Parenthood was selling the arms, legs, torsos, and heads of aborted babies to commercial interests linked to medical research. After the videos were released in 2015, California authorities raided Delaiden’s home and seized materials, claiming the videos were illegally recorded.

Then, in 2016, Delaiden’s battle to get the truth to Americans about what Planned Parenthood was doing was stopped by then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who filed multiple spurious felony charges against him for publishing the undercover videos of officials with America’s largest abortion business discussing the sales of body parts of unborn babies who were ripped apart in their mother’s wombs.

Costly, time-consuming litigation followed, and along the way, Planned Parenthood’s case against Delaiden’s videos was centered on accusations by Fusion GPS opposition research firm Co-Founder Glenn Simpson that some of the videos had been altered to unfairly present the facts about the abortion business’s role. Delaiden soundly rejected those charges, saying they were based on nothing more than edits to delete irrelevant passages such as bathroom breaks.

It took a decade, but finally, in January 2025, a California judge ruled in Delaiden’s favor, dismissing all of the video-related charges. In a statement, Delaiden said that “after enduring nine years of weaponized political prosecution, putting an end to the lawfare launched by Kamala Harris is a huge victory for my investigative reporting and for the public’s right to know the truth about Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted baby body parts. Now we all must get to work to protect families and infants from the criminal abortion-industrial complex.”

In the same statement, his attorney, Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, blasted Harris and successor attorneys general “who initiated this case and pursued it for nearly 10 years should be ashamed for weaponizing their office to pursue people who were merely exposing illegality associated with the harvesting and sale of fetal body parts.”

But Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups kept up rear-guard legal actions after the dismissal, seeking to have it overturned. On April 2, Delaiden happily announced on X that “as promised, the final charge has been DISMISSED and the case completely expunged — after a couple months administrative delay and a truly bizarre last-minute ‘April Fool’s attempt by [PP] and [National Abortion Federation] to over-turn the State’s agreement.”

Even before the final settlement, Delaiden’s efforts bore fruit, as noted in the January 2025 statement:

“CMP’s undercover reporting at issue in the case led to a $7.8 million settlement in which two companies admitted illegally selling aborted fetuses from Planned Parenthood in southern California, a settlement with disgorgement of profits from the sale of aborted fetal organs in Arizona, and the disqualification of Planned Parenthood from state and federal funding in Texas for violations of medical standards and ethics documented on the undercover footage — where Planned Parenthood now faces a nearly $2 billion federal False Claims Act case from the disqualification.”

Even before Delaiden was recording and reporting the truth about PP selling aborted baby body parts, Epoch Times Senior Editor Jan Jekielek and multiple colleagues in his newsroom were gathering thousands of documents and reports about how CCP officials had begun murdering selected prisoners in order to harvest key organs, including hearts, livers, and lungs, for use in treating favored party members.

Jekielek was in a great position for such an investigation because the Epoch Times and its television outlets are owned and operated by members of the Falun Gong religious movement that originated in China several decades ago. For reasons that still remain unclear, the CCP began persecuting millions of Falun Gong members in the late 1990s, which prompted many to migrate to the U.S., Europe, Hong Kong, and Australia.

A group of those who came to the U.S. started Epoch as an independent news source for Americans seeking credible information about events in China. From the outset, Epoch was uniquely blessed with sources inside and outside of the CCP, sources neither The New York Times nor other mainstream American media outlets could match.

As a result, the reports from the Falun Gong underground in China and Epoch sources within the government and party flowed to Jekielek and colleagues. As Epoch’s circulation and credibility grew during the first Trump and Biden presidencies, their continuous reporting on the issue and advancing the knowledge base about the horrors of China’s organ harvesting constantly grew. It was thus inevitable that Jekielek would write “Killed to Order,” the book that within a few days of its release in late March, became a New York Times best-seller — despite the fact for years the reporting behind the book was ignored by the legacy media and rigorously derided by the CCP as false propaganda intended to undermine the communist regime in Beijing.

What Jekielek and his book expose beyond any doubt is not the sort of underground organ harvesting of rumor in which somebody wakes up on ice in horrendous pain and discovers they are missing a kidney. As he explained during at his book’s official release in the nation’s capital, that sort of scenario does occur in places around the world, but it is incidentally organized and amateurish by comparison with the documented facts about the CCP’s systematic and brutal program.

“But what they do in Communist China is a whole different level, it’s a whole different game. And it is so extreme that it is honestly very difficult to explain to people. I did some of the earliest reporting on this back in 2006 when reality hit me over the head, and I was faced with the evidence and understood it was. I didn’t want to, my mind didn’t want to go there. Hundreds of people I’ve talked to over the years about this issue, because when you start grasping what it is, people would just sort of leave mentally in the middle of the conversation … because it is simply horror, it’s horror,” he continued.

But Jekielek never stopped digging, never stopped reporting, and after many years, his work is now being recognized and vindicated. It is a wonderful thing that his vindication and that of Delaiden came during the same early spring week of 2026.

In full disclosure, I should point out that I had the privilege of working in the Epoch Capitol Bureau newsroom for nearly six years and often talked with Jekielek about his work. Having devoted the biggest portion of my own journalism career to investigative work, I can attest to Jekielek’s professionalism and devotion to accuracy in his reporting. I’ve never met Delaiden in person, but I long ago recognized a kindred spirit in observing his determination to see his struggle to its ultimate resolution.

I can honestly say without reservation that I admire both of these men and wish there was a Journalism Medal of Honor they could receive. And I pray that God will raise up more investigative journalists like them to follow in their footsteps.