A man who pleaded guilty to phoning death threats to Planned Parenthood in Santa Barbara on the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade received an 18-month sentence in federal prison on November 27. Nishith Tharaka Vandebona, 34, of Oxnard, called Planned Parenthood California Central Coast on June 24, 2022, the day of the Dobbs decision, using an anonymous phone number obtained via an internet application. He also called Planned Parenthood Los Angeles to make threats the next day and had called Californians for Population Stabilization with a bomb threat in February 2022.
“Mr. Vandebona crossed the line from protected speech to criminal activity when he terrorized his ideological adversaries with death threats,” said Donald Alway, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, in a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecuting the case.
Vandebona pleaded to one misdemeanor count of “threatened forcible intimidation” under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and one felony count of making a threat over interstate commerce. In his calls to the organizations, he said he intended to come kill staff and security or plant a bomb for “white Americans … servicemembers, families, everybody.”
The Dobbs decision came after the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in May caused a furor, both for the leak and the decision. Upheld 6-3 by the rest of the court that June, Alito determined abortion was not a Constitutional right, overturning a precedent in place since 1973 when the Supreme Court had ruled the Constitution’s right to privacy included abortion in Roe v. Wade.