(CNN) Norma McCorvey, the anonymous plaintiff in the 1973 US Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, says in a new documentary that she became an anti-abortion activist because she was being paid.
The documentary “AKA Jane Roe” is set to premiere Friday on FX and gives viewers an inside look into McCorvey’s journey from abortion rights plaintiff and advocate to anti-abortion campaigner.
Before her death in 2017, McCorvey told the film’s director that she hadn’t changed her mind about abortion, but told the director she said what she was paid to say.
“I was the big fish,” McCorvey says in the documentary. “I think it was a mutual thing. … I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say.”
Norma McCorvey (left) and her attorney Gloria Allred stand near the Supreme Court in 1989.
McCorvey became well-known as Jane Roe in the case that legalized abortion in the United States. She was pregnant when the case was filed and gave birth to a girl who was given up for adoption.
In the aftermath of the case, McCorvey worked in women’s clinics but switched sides in 1995. She became a Christian, joined anti-abortion activists and started an outreach group called Roe No More that was dissolved in 2008.
In the documentary, the Rev. Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who worked closely with McCorvey, said she was “coached in what to say” and was paid because there was concern that she “would go back to the other side.”
“What we did with Norma was highly unethical. The jig is up,” Schenck said in the documentary.
Source: Norma McCorvey, plaintiff in Roe. v. Wade, said she was paid to speak against abortion
