Conservative radio host Glenn Beck buys Rowe’s anti-Wade lawyer Linda Coffey’s archive to draw attention to the “bloody legacy”.

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Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck has acquired the files of Linda Coffey, the last living member of the legal team that opposed Roe v. Wade.

“Rowe vs. Wade is history, and now that history is in the hands of a pro-life conservative,” Beck said on his radio show Thursday.

Coffey, 80, put the archive up for auction through an independent auction house earlier this year with a starting price of $50,000. According to the website of the auction house, 14 applications were submitted. Beck won with a bet of over 600,000.

Through a spokesperson for Coffee, he declined to comment.

Beck rose to prominence as a conservative radio host before joining Fox News in 2009. Almost immediately, he instigated a boycott by calling President Barack Obama a racist and making anti-Semitic remarks about George Soros. He left Fox after only two years, focusing instead on The Blaze, his frequently deteriorating right-wing media website.

In 2020, he opened the American Journey Experience, a “museum and learning center” in Irving, with David Barton, a Christian conservative activist and founder of WallBuilders. The museum encourages visitors to “take an active part in protecting the American journey.”

The Coffee Archives will debut this summer as part of an exhibition called Blueprints for Freedom, Beck said on his radio show.

“Including the Roe archives on display will highlight Coffee’s bloody legacy, which was destroyed in the service of life and a proper reading of the Constitution,” Beck said.

The archive covers all aspects of the legal battle to establish the constitutional right to abortion: a receipt for payment of the $15 initial filing fee; the notarized testimony of Norma McCorvey, who appears in the lawsuit as Jane Roe; and feathers given to Coffee for the honor of appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court.

It also contains many of Coffey’s personal mementos, including her legal license and a letter she wrote to Sarah Weddington asking her to join in filing a lawsuit challenging the Texas abortion ban.

“Would you consider becoming a co-counsel in the event that a lawsuit is actually filed?” Coffee, then only 26 years old, wrote to Weddington. “I’ve always found it much more fun to work with someone on this kind of litigation.”

Before they were put up for auction, these documents and artifacts were freely kept by Coffey and her partner Rebecca Hartt at their home in Mineola. Hartt stuffed many of them into folders and pasted others on poster boards throughout the house.

Coffey and Weddington were barely 30 years old in 1973 when they won their case in the US Supreme Court, overturning the Texas abortion law and every other state ban in the process. In 2022, an amended court overturned that decision, allowing states to pass laws restricting or near-banning abortion.

In Texas, where Coffey and Beck live, all abortions are prohibited except to save the life of a pregnant patient.

The complete destruction of her life’s work was part of the motivation to auction off her archives, Coffey told D Magazine. Weddington died in 2020, and after a near-death experience with the West Nile virus, Coffey began to struggle with the idea of ​​protecting her legacy.

“That’s why the collection needs to move on to the next generation, because you won’t have that chance again,” Hartt told D Magazine. “We don’t know who will end up acquiring it, but hopefully it will encourage some people to get into law or politics or whatever, because that needs to be fought.”

The Weddington Archives was acquired by Texas Woman’s University in 2021. Documents and memorabilia have been officially archived and are available to the public for research. According to the university’s website, some artifacts are on display at the library.

“This collection is a treasure trove of interesting artifacts that will give researchers a true place in the front row of historical events affecting women’s issues,” Mary Ann Alhadeff, executive director of the Jane Nelson Women’s Leadership Institute, said in a press release at the time. .

As for the Coffee artifacts, Beck said they would be “at home” in his “German Eugenics” collection, which includes the last prescription prescribed by Nazi physician Josef Mengele before being sent to work in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

He portrayed his acquisitions as an act of preserving history.

“We are fighting people who hate America so much that they will destroy our history,” he said. “They will burn it. They will destroy it in any way.”

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