WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Three members of the “DC-Nine” peaceful pro-life rescuers who were prosecuted by the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ), convicted of unprecedented grave charges in 2023, and pardoned by President Donald Trump in January of this year, have attested that a supposed surveillance video used against them in court was manipulated, perhaps by an AI technology, to provide a “deep-fake” revision misconstruing their behavior as violent.

“In the first five minutes I knew that they were using fake video coverage,” said rescuer Jean Marshall in an interview with LifeSiteNews. “I said, ‘I don’t have to watch anymore. What I am seeing did not happen.’”

Also joining Marshall for the interview were fellow rescuers Will Goodman and Paulette Harlow, along with the latter’s husband, John Harlow.

With six others, the rescuers were convicted for blocking access to a scandal-plagued late-term abortion facility in the nation’s capital, in a case criticized by pro-life leaders as an egregious example of Biden administration overreach.

In addition to this violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, the rescuers were also convicted for “conspiracy against rights,” which left them vulnerable to incurring up to 10-year prison sentences, in a ruling that Trump referred to as “ridiculous” when signing their pardons.

“I encountered only one abortion worker as I entered the waiting area,” Marshall recalled. “And I was blindsided, somebody pushed me, one person.”

“I told her, ‘We’ve come in peace, but what you’re doing is assaulting us, and that’s a felony,’” the rescuer said. “She disappeared into the back room.”

“Yet the video showed me surrounded by abortion workers,” Marshall described, saying the image of one such worker was shown throwing her in a chair, with her then rising and “supposedly doing the same to her.”

Given her “training as a nonviolent rescuer” and a nurse she assured, “I would never do something like that.”

“Whether it was the DOJ or the abortion center itself that manufactured this, I don’t know. How can I accuse? But I just do know that it was fake. It was fake,” Marshall emphasized.

Video, judge misconstrued Harlow as throwing ‘body slams,’ but her fragility confined her to a wheelchair

Paulette, who is Marshall’s sister, assessed that “they took the video from the clinic and superimposed” it with other footage “so that it looked like everything was happening at once.”

“We only had 11 rescuers and 4 or 5 (abortion center) staff (present),” she continued, but the video portrayed “about 50 people in the scene,” including “one lady going toward the door, and she just disappeared.”

Another oddity in the video included “people who were already in the clinic, and they went back into the wall” and “never came out,” Paulette explained. “You see everything that happened that morning from around 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 (noon) all at once.”

She went on to recall a special technique of “body slamming” executed by the late professional wrestler Killer Kowalski and reported how the judge said more than once during the trial that Paulette “had body slammed the nurse” at the abortion center.

Such comments were made while Mrs. Harlow, who was 75 at the time, and suffering from severe chronic back pain, was confined to a wheelchair in the courtroom, and had to be transferred to the trial in Washington, D.C., from Massachusetts in a special-needs van equipped with a mattress for her to lie down.

Due to these difficulties and additional medical complications, the court found it impossible to even incarcerate Harlow, despite her being convicted of the same charges as her fellow rescuers who were given heavy sentences. She was thus confined to house arrest.

“If the situation wasn’t so dire” during the trial, “I almost felt like I was going to burst out laughing” at the prospect that she even had the capacity to do such a thing, she said. “It was so absurd. Absolutely so absurd.”

“And yet, the grand jury accepted that,” she continued. “They had to say we were violent because they had nothing else.”

“It’s hard to be violent while you are singing and praying the Rosary.”

Abortion workers, police testified rescuers were peaceful, but doctored video presented otherwise

Also corroborating their judgment regarding the “deep fake” nature of the video was the testimony of the abortion center staff, other eyewitnesses, and the police report, the pardoned rescuers said.

While Marshall recalled she was unable to address this topic during the trial, she did bring it up at the time of her sentencing, telling the judge, that “even one of your witnesses” said that what is portrayed in the video “did not happen,” particularly that “I had hands grabbing abortion workers.”

“What we’re watching in the video,” the abortion center staffer affirmed, Marshall “did not do that.”

Paulette added how the police record concurred “that we were peaceful,” as did the testimony of the abortion workers. And thus, the witness of the “the abortion workers themselves, the police and other people’s eyewitness (accounts) of what they saw going on,” in the end, “didn’t count” in the verdict of the jury due to what the alleged “deep-fake” video appeared to show.

‘Shocking’ violence of abortion workers against elderly rescuers ‘doesn’t even really appear’ on video

On the contrary, according to the rescuers, it was the abortion center workers who were acutely and admittedly violent towards the rescuers.

In addition to Marshall’s testimony of being pushed by an abortion center staffer, Paulette described how she and fellow rescuer Joan Andrews Bell entered the facility and were soon “met with a nurse and another worker.”

“The nurse had the middle end of a mop where you put in the big handle,” she recalled. With this instrument “they were stabbing Joan and I repeatedly in the shoulder.”

Instead of engaging at all, the nonviolent activist women went down on the floor and the abortion workers “ran in the back room and locked the door.”

“I now have to have shoulder surgery because of the damage that was done, and Joan still has damage to her shoulder,” Paulette explained.

Goodman added, “from my perspective, I could see them wailing on these older ladies who were very peaceful, just hitting with this handle, you know, this wooden handle.”

“It was shocking to me what they were doing,” he continued. “And yet watching the video in court, it’s like you can’t really see anything. This horrific thing I witnessed doesn’t even really appear. You can’t even tell on the video (that it happened).”

According to Paulette, all of this was corroborated in court by official testimony of the abortion center worker who committed this assault. “The nurse who was doing that admitted in court that she did it.” The perpetrator said “she was sorry and that she shouldn’t have done it.”

‘This is how a weaponized deep state works’ against those ‘trying to protect the unborn’

Goodman went on to explain that the DOJ “asked that all the evidence be sealed so that the general public cannot have access to it. So we would need to follow up with our attorneys and see if that’s been kind of declassified.”

“But it’s very telling that (the video) was only used in the courtroom to try to prove that we were violent,” he observed.

“I was right there seeing Paulette knocked down…. Jean was really being violently shoved. She had to hold herself in the doorway,” he reported. “And that they would try to say things like Paulette was body slamming someone and that Jean was attacking someone, it’s completely outrageous.”

And the fact they would try to seal the video “so that no one else can see it unless you were there in the courtroom on that day, watching on a big screen where everything’s grainy” and it is impossible to “pinpoint” these events, suggests a severe lack of credibility as well.

“This is how a weaponized deep state works against people who are trying to protect the unborn and live their faith in the public square,” Goodman observed. “They twist the evidence to try to make their opponents look as bad as possible, and then they hide the evidence and move forward.”

At the time, many pro-lifers couldn’t conceive of a DOJ doctoring evidence

In a follow-up telephone interview, Goodman explained that, for the trial’s discovery period, the prosecution submitted “13 or 14 terabytes of data” to the defendants, including “hours and hours of videos,” which “would also tend to make it easier to doctor something if you’re overwhelming people with lots and lots of data.”

While today the utilization of “deep-fake” videos is widespread and very common online, even just two years ago public awareness of such technology was far lower. Further, Goodman explained, “my impression was, when we were given this discovery, we just assumed that what the government was giving us, well, it’s got to be the truth, it’s got to be factual.”

He said most pro-lifers at the time could hardly conceive that the DOJ would use AI to falsify evidence in such an egregious manner, and yet, “from the very first viewing, Paulette and Jean alleged that the DOJ doctored the tape.”

“And when I actually got a chance to finally see it, that’s when I explained to the judge in sentencing that what I saw in that video didn’t correspond to what I saw from my perspective in the hall (outside the abortion facility),” he recalled.

At the time Marshall testified, “I did not have the wherewithal, the means to uncover or prove that it was fake video, but I knew there was something very wrong.”

“They used AI to do this. I mean, you look at the films we’re watching today, they can do anything now with it,” she observed. “And we all know what has happened in our country with the Department of Justice and how they can turn on their people, turn on the population, to accomplish whatever nefarious ends they have.”

LifeSiteNews makes initial inquiries seek copy of video for independent forensic analysis

And, according to Marshall, the motive for doctoring this video was “to influence the grand jury, to sway their opinion about peace-loving people who are going in to do a sit in.”

“So this is the danger we’re facing now. We’re facing AI, which is being used to persecute Christians,” the rescuer continued. “And it will also discourage other people, good people, from standing up for the truth.”

Illegitimate use of such technology “also will affect the whole judicial system, our whole government, when this is allowed to be used in court, depending on who the judge is, who the prosecution’s lawyers are, and the DOJ.”

“That’s all I can say. I could not say anymore because I couldn’t prove it,” Marshall said. “And AI is advancing so quickly that the forensics for AI may be trying to catch up with the fake videos.”

Along with the voice of commentators warning about these dangers, legislation is being advanced in the United States at both the federal and state levels to address the creation and distribution of deceptive deepfake videos through various legislative initiatives. Similar initiatives are present in the EU, the UK, Australia, and more.

With the help of Goodman, LifeSiteNews has made an initial inquiry to assess the status of the video in question in hopes of finding a means to obtain a reliable third-party assessment of its contents.

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