A crew member of a controversial anti-abortion movie stole my notes while I reported from a shooting location in Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning.
It was the latest embarrassment for the production of the movie, entitled Roe v. Wade. The film’s director and actors Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Sorbo quit the film after reading gory drafts of its full script, which featured what one crew member describes as “buckets of baby fetuses.” Some crew members were also kept in the dark about cameos from conservative provocateurs Tomi Lahren and Milo Yiannopoulos.
While it had been filming in Louisiana, the Roe crew arrived at the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. at dawn on Thursday to film actors Corbin Bernsen and Wade Williams, who play two Supreme Court justices in the movie about the landmark 1973 court decision. But as the cameras rolled, a man later identified by police as a member of the crew came over to where I was sitting in public space with a group of tourists and grabbed my notepad out of my hand by force.
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The man hid my notepad in his pocket and began quickly walking away down the steps of the monument. The crew member refused to give the notebook back as he walked away, and insisted that I stop following him.
As he walked down the monument’s steps, the crew member ripped my notes out of the notepad, handed the notepad back, and crumpled up the notes. Then he continued walking away with the pages, stopping briefly at the production’s snack table.
I called the police. A Park Police officer eventually stopped the man, who slipped the notes into his bag and claimed he didn’t have them. He eventually surrendered the notes to the officer after being searched.
The officer declined to stop the man, reveal his name, file an incident report, or talk to other members of the crew, insisting that the problem had already been solved.
This wasn’t my first run-in with this crew member. Earlier in the morning, he had posed as a tourist and asked me to take his picture in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in an apparent attempt to distract me from watching the production.
After the Lincoln Memorial shoot, the production moved to the reflecting pool, where actors, including Clueless actress-turned-conservative-media-star Stacey Dash, were filmed walking through a crowd of extras playing pro-life protesters.
On the sidelines of that shoot, Bernsen said the man stole my notes because “the movie’s been under great attack.”
“Sometimes we grab, sometimes we talk to you,” Bernsen said.
Shooting on Roe is set to wrap on July 15, with a release scheduled for early 2019.
