Roundup: Fireworks and Frivolity - Kimmel Catches Abortion Protestors on Tape

Roundup: Fireworks and Frivolity – Kimmel Catches Abortion Protestors on Tape

Jul 5, 2010, 8:39am

It's not quite the dog days of summer yet, but some protestors are complaining that they can't take the heat from a talk show host's crew.

It’s been a hot weekend of festivities, fireworks and protests.

Yes, I’m talking about the Jimmy Kimmel show!

Turns out that Friday a group of anti-choice protestors got into a filmed kerfuffle with a crew from the Jimmy Kimmel show. According to Huffington Post:

Via Fishbowl LA comes this video capturing an altercation between Jimmy Kimmel’s production crew and pro-life group SurvivorsLA outside the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. The group describes itself as “a Christian, pro-life activism organization dedicated to educating and activating high school and college age individuals.”

The group claims that Kimmel’s crew “turned high intensity spotlights onto a young teenager peacefully practicing his first amendment rights”, though it is difficult to make out from the video.

The Examiner thought the story sounded a little over the top.

A pro-life group called Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust were peacefully protesting outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood when a crew from the Jimmy Kimmel Show arrived to do some filming. The pro-life youth activists weren’t in the film crew’s way — whatever they were shooting was across the street — but then for no reason other than to be ideologically sadistic, the crew turned a hot spotlight on Ryan Bueler, one of the young protesters. Bueler refused to be intimidated and for 15 minutes stood under a light hot enough to partially melt a bracelet he was wearing.

Huh. Melted a plastic bracelet, huh? That seems like a bit much.

Most of the reports on the even were coming from the side of the protestors, so Examiner went a step further and managed to find someone on Kimmel’s crew who could give a little more detail on what may have happened.

Well, it just so happens that we’re pals with someone on that very crew of Jimmy Kimmel Live employees (who wishes to remain nameless, by the way, but I can assure you– they work for the show), so I contacted the worker and asked for a statement. Here’s what they told me:

What happened that day was we were shooting a bit where Tom Cruise ziplines over Hollywood blvd from the Kimmel building to the sidewalk by Grauman’s. The protestors say we were shooting across the street, which was true, but we were ALSO shooting on the OTHER side of the street as well, where one of the oodles of protestors were, which was not a “peaceful” protest.

We obviously had a permit to put lights there and light the shoot location. Since the protestors however want to make it all about themselves, they thought (or figured they’d turn it into a story by thinking this) we were pointing the lights at them instead of what we were rehearsing/shooting, so a protestor took it upon himself to try and pull the light down. If the protestors were bothered by our lights, they could’ve moved away and the lights would not at all have followed them. We’re a professional crew, so to think we would bully them is absolutely outlandish.

Long story short, it’s pretty simple. We were lighting the action, the protestors wanted to stand in the light and say we were pointing it at them. Pretty stupid.

So, there you have it. Of course this side of the story’s just as biased as the version told by protesters, but was anyone else sort of suspicious when the “Survivors of The Abortion Holocaust” (as they’re referring to themselves, clearly a group not prone to exaggeration) were claiming that they were just minding their own business, “peacefully” protesting, and that some random film crew from a latenight talk show attacked them for no good reason? I think we were all kinda wary of this story yesterday, but after the report by our inside source above, I’m calling shenanigans on this whole thing.

Of course, no story is complete without the video itself, so here you go!