Justice Department sues anti-abortion activist who barricaded himself inside Center City clinic

The U.S. Justice Department is suing an antiabortion provocateur who barricaded himself inside a restroom at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Center City three years ago, prompting the evacuation and temporary closure of the facility.

The lawsuit against Matthew Connolly — a 42-year-old activist from Minnesota and a member of the group Red Rose Rescue, which has been linked to protests at clinics across the country — is the latest salvo in an ongoing campaign by federal authorities to crack down on aggressive demonstrations seeking to interfere with patient access to reproductive care.

But it quickly drew condemnation from the members of the antiabortion movement, who have accused the Justice Department of unfairly targeting them for their political views in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Connolly “engaged in conduct calculated to shut down [the] clinic for an entire day … obstructing access to reproductive health services,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “The Justice Department is committed to … ensur[ing] that providers can continue to deliver legal reproductive health services and that patients can obtain them.”

Monica Miller, director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, an affiliate of Red Rose Rescue, shot back, accusing federal authorities in their suit of attempting to “twist and stretch the language” of the law.

“This lawsuit against Matthew Connolly is another instance of a weaponized Department of Justice obsessed with persecuting nonviolent pro-lifers,” she said.

The suit, filed Monday in federal court in Philadelphia, accuses Connolly of violating a 1994 law known as the FACE Act, which prohibits demonstrators from injuring, intimidating, or interfering with anyone seeking access to a reproductive health-care provider.

It’s the same law federal prosecutors used in 2022 to charge Mark Houck, a prominent Bucks County Catholic activist, for a scuffle with a Planned Parenthood volunteer outside the organization’s clinic on Locust Street in Philadelphia.

Houck took his case to trial and won. He is now suing the Justice Department for malicious prosecution. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress in this year’s GOP primary with a campaign foregrounding his experience throughout his prosecution and trial.

Unlike Houck’s criminal case, the suit against Connolly seeks only civil penalties — $5,000 in damages for each patient affected by his disruption and a fine of roughly $28,000.

In court papers, lawyers for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division say Connolly in August 2021 slipped past security at the Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center on Locust Street near 12th Street — the same facility where Houck’s incident would occur a year later — and barricaded himself inside a restroom in the clinic’s secure patient area.

He remained locked inside for nearly three hours, refusing to come out, until a Philadelphia police SWAT team forcibly removed him on a stretcher.

After a psychological evaluation — in which Connolly, the government says, said he’d “do it again” — police released him without charges.

Still, the incident prompted the closure of the clinic and forced facility staff to cancel more than 40 scheduled appointments that day, government lawyers said. Lawyers did not indicate what type of services had been scheduled.

“Fearing for the safety of staff and patients, staff directed [them] to leave the facility and law enforcement ordered the building evacuated and the neighboring street and intersections shut down,” the lawsuit states.

Connolly and Red Rose Rescue, the group with which he was demonstrating that day, are no strangers to disputes with authorities over their protest techniques.

Since its formation in 2017, it has staged several demonstrations aimed at disrupting operations at clinics across the country. Its members, including Connolly, have faced prosecution before.

Last year, the Justice Department charged eight members of the group with blockading the entrance to a clinic in Sterling Heights, Mich., in August 2020.

And during the same month as the incident at the Blackwell clinic, three other protesters affiliated with the group were arrested for refusing the leave the waiting room of a Planned Parenthood clinic in West Chester.

One of them — Christopher “Fidelis” Moscinski, a Franciscan friar — was sentenced to eight days to six months in jail after being convicted of felony trespass last year. The others were released on probation.

For his part, Connolly had been arrested at least eight times in four different states — and convicted four times — before the 2021 incident at the Center City clinic.

Most recently, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued him and several other members of the group last year, seeking to bar them from clinics in the state after multiple arrests for trespassing failed to deter their efforts.

That same year, Connolly was sentenced to three months in jail for an incident in which he and other demonstrators ignored requests to leave the waiting room of a Michigan clinic, prompting police there to forcibly remove them.

Connolly did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday on the Justice Department lawsuit in Philadelphia. It was not immediately clear from court dockets whether he had retained an attorney.

A judge has yet to schedule a hearing in the case.

Staff writer Sarah Gantz contributed to this article.