Pro-choice protesters were filmed verbally abusing pro-life campaigners while destroying a cross-shaped monument to 800,000 aborted fetuses at a Catholic university.
Student Nick Baker, who identifies himself as a community organizer for Greater St. Louis Students for Life, shared video editing of the memorial being destroyed at Saint Louis University on Monday. He also filmed his tense confrontation with one of the same students a few days later.
During the clip shot Monday, two angry female students hectored him for ‘shaming’ women with the college-approved memorial, containing 800 crosses. Each one is designed to symbolize 1,000 abortions, with the memorial saying they represent the 826,320 fetuses terminated in the U.S. in 2017.
Student Fiorella Michelis was recorded dismantling the memorial and later going on an aggressive rant at Baker aggressively stating: ‘I’ll keep killing f*****g babies!’
During Monday’s confrontation, filmed by Baker, Michelis and her friend Olivia Jarrell were both filmed kicking the flag display, yanking them out, and stomping their way through it.
Baker began recording when he saw the memorial being taken down within the first few hours of it being displayed and approached the women when one of them, who later identifies herself as Jarrell, says: ‘So you just love disrespecting women.’
When asked if he put the flags up he confirms that him and his fellow Students for Life members created the memorial.
Two pro-choice protestors Fiorella Michelis (left) and Olivia Jarrell (right) were recorded destroying an approved pro-life memorial on the Saint Louis University campus on Monday
Michelis and Jarrell ripped the flags out of the ground and repeatedly stomped on the memorial as they angrily hurled insults at the man recording them who identified himself as part of the student group of erected the memorial
‘Yeah, a man who has absolutely no right telling women what to do with their bodies or trying to shame them or trying to make them feel guilty about their decisions that they have absolutely all the right to do,’ the other woman, later identified as Michelis, chimes in.
Two other students approach the commotion when the second male asks the pro-choice protestors: ‘Would you please just let them have their thing?’
‘Why can’t you just leave women alone?’ Michelis quips back. Baker is also told that the memorial will ‘shame’ anyone walking past who has previously had a termination.
The second male student tries to explain that the memorial: ‘helped us remember the people who were aborted’ and ask that the women ‘respect the free speech of these people.’
On Wednesday, Baker shared another clip of a confrontation with Michelis when she approached him on the sidewalk two days after she was recorded destroying the memorial.
All clips were filmed at St Louis University, which pro-life students say ‘is an echo-chamber for left wing ideas’, despite being a Jesuit Catholic college.
Baker named Michelis, a sophomore, on his clip. Her identity has been confirmed by DailyMail.com.
‘People hate you. You’re a disgusting misogynist and you know karma is going to f**king get you. You’ll see that when you die, and hopefully you f**king go to hell,’ she says in the clip shot Wednesday.
Michelis approached Students for Life community organizer, Nick Baker, days later going off on an expletive filled rant
The memorial designed by Students for Life made a cross out of 1,000 red flags stuck into the ground on part of the campus green with each flag equaling 800 abortions
‘You can see my pictures, you can see how pretty I am, how good of a life I have. And what do you have? You’re a f**king loser, and you think you can tell other people what to do with their f**king bodies’ she continued.
Michelis goes on to accuse him of harassing another student group and says: ‘Do you really think anything is going to happen to us when you’re so clearly a douche bag?’
‘That’s not very nice,’ Baker replies to which the woman quickly replies: ‘I don’t care about your feelings.’
When he warns her that she will be contacted by the school she questions: ‘What does that help you? Obviously you don’t care about the lives of other people. You lack any sort of empathy and you’re really just trying to hide behind this because you’re not a f**king free thinker at all and you’re just a f**king loser who wants to f**king control women.’
Baker goes to note that most of the members of Students for Life are women.
Michelis ends her rant: ‘You just really enjoy your life, cause I’ll enjoy mine. And I’ll f**king keep killing babies.’ She blows him a kiss before marching off.
Baker confirmed to DailyMail.com that Michelis is one of the women he filmed damaging the memorial and the woman who’d roared at him on Wednesday, and bragged that she’d ‘keep killing babies.’
He said: ‘When she started yelling her head off, I recognized that it was the girl from the display vandalism.’
‘She approached me and began the angry confrontation. I figured it would be best to respond to her criticism with a calm demeanor,’ Baker said.
Later that night around 9pm more students were caught on camera destroying the memorial when Isabelle Hotard, president of the Saint Louis University Students for Life chapter approached them and asked: ‘Can you guys please not touch these? These aren’t your property. I’m cleaning them up anyways, just leave them on the ground.’
The group of about five students drop the red flags on the ground and walk away without interacting.
As the memorial continued to be destroyed, Hotard decided to take the memorial down each night and replace it in the the morning during the three days the student group planned to maintain it. Members of Students for Life sat guard and watched over the memorial on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
The pro-life memorial was destroyed again later that night when Students for Life president Isabelle Hotard arrived to take the controversial memorial down
Hotard described the Catholic university as a ‘left-leaning’ ‘echo-chamber.’ The school confirmed they are investigating the destruction of the memorial
Hotard told Fox News that despite being a Catholic university the campus is ‘extremely left leaning.’
‘It is a bit of an echo chamber on [Saint Louis University’s] campus, our entire campus is extremely left leaning, so you just find a lot of people, particularly among the students in positions of authority, who will be far more tolerant of left-leaning beliefs rather than right-leaning beliefs,’ Hotard said.
A spokesperson for the university confirmed an investigation into the destruction of the memorial is currently underway. The spokesperson said the school takes ‘seriously any alleged violation of our Community Standards, and has policies and processes in place to address concerns when they are reported.’
The school’s investigation is underway but administrators told students that the outcome of the case will not be shared.
Abortion is currently legal in Missouri but a highly-controversial law seeking to ban most abortions after eight weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest, has led to a legal battle in the courts.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Missouri Attorney General’s appeal to reinstate an eight-week abortion ban, first passed by the Legislature in 2019, because the case currently being considered by the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Missouri case is one of several abortion battles across the nation as more states introduce restrictive abortion laws following the passage of Senate Bill 8 in Texas.
Senate Bill 8, or the Heartbeat Bill, amounts to a near complete ban on abortion in the state as opponents state that most women are unaware of their pregnancy within the first six weeks, the small time frame women are legally allowed to seek an abortion according to the law.