Orly Taitz

Orly Taitz (אורלי טייץ; born August 30, 1960) is an Israeli-American political conspiracy theorist and political candidate.

A dentist, lawyer, and former real estate agent, Taitz was a figure in the "birther" movement, which promoted the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen eligible to serve as president of the United States.

Taitz also promotes other conspiracy theories both related and unrelated to Obama.

Taitz has initiated lawsuits on behalf of the "birther" movement; all were dismissed by the courts, and on one occasion Taitz was ordered to pay $20,000 as a sanction for misconduct in filing frivolous claims.

Taitz has unsuccessfully run in statewide elections in California three times.

Taitz was born to a Jewish family in Kishinev, Moldavian SSR, in the Soviet Union (present-day Moldova).

Both of her parents were science teachers.

In 1981, Taitz immigrated to Israel, where she obtained a dentistry degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 1987, she met Yosef Taitz who proposed four months later.

Taitz immigrated to the United States in May 1987, marrying the Latvian-born Yosef in Las Vegas.

Taitz became a naturalized United States citizen in 1992.

She received her law degree from Taft Law School and was admitted to practice law in California in December 2002.

Taitz lives in Laguna Niguel, California, and owns dental practices in nearby Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita.

She has three sons, holds a second degree black belt in Taekwondo, and speaks five languages: English, Hebrew, Romanian or Moldovan (which are two different names for the exact same language though in her homeland "Romanian" and "Moldovan" are sometimes considered different languages for political reasons), Russian, and Spanish.

Before her national news exposure, Taitz was quoted in The Orange County Register in 2006 supporting Israeli military actions against Hamas and Hezbollah, and downplaying the impact of the espionage trial of two American Israel Public Affairs Committee staffers.

(Charges against both were subsequently dropped. ) Taitz has also said that she lost relatives in the Holocaust and that her grandmother witnessed the Kishinev pogrom.

Taitz claimed that U.S. president Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the United States and was therefore ineligible to serve as President.

She claimed he was born in Kenya and that he falsified his Selective Service papers and his application to the Illinois bar.

Taitz made other claims against Obama, including:

Taitz has also supported a number of other theories not directly related to President Obama, including:

Taitz has also advocated numerous Internet-related theories, including PayPal attacks, the deletion of her Wikipedia entry, and Google's flagging her webpage as an attack site and suppressing search results for her name.

In November 2008, Taitz filed a lawsuit on behalf of independent presidential candidate Alan Keyes, suing California's secretary of state, Debra Bowen, for allegedly failing to ascertain Obama's eligibility for president before placing him on the ballot.

Taitz filed an emergency petition in the California Supreme Court in 2008 on behalf of Libertarian vice presidential candidate Gail Lightfoot to stop the certification of California's 2008 election results because of the challenge to Obama's eligibility.

The California Supreme Court denied the petition, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Taitz filed a lawsuit on behalf of Pamela Barnett, Alan Keyes, other candidates in the 2008 federal elections, several military personnel, and some legislators from various states alleging that Obama was ineligible to be president.

The case was dismissed on May 4, 2009.

On October 29, 2009, U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter dismissed the lawsuit.

The dismissal criticized Taitz's legal abilities, stated her behavior was "unethical", and suggested that Taitz "may have suborned perjury".

Taitz filed an appeal in the Eleventh Circuit, which was dismissed on November 24, 2009, due to a failure to prosecute the appeal.

In September 2009, Taitz was retained by Captain Connie Rhodes, a U.S. Army physician.

Rhodes sought a restraining order to prevent her forthcoming deployment to Iraq.

In the request for a restraining order, Taitz argued the deployment order was illegal since Obama was illegally serving as president.

On September 16, federal judge Clay D. Land rejected the motion and denounced it as frivolous.

In his opinion, the judge noted that Rhodes had not previously raised any objections to orders she had received from Obama since he had been sworn in.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined without comment to review the case on October 3, 2011.

On December 22, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal.

On June 11, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court declined, without comment, a request by litigants not represented by Taitz to hear the case.

Taitz represented Stefan F. Cook, a major in the United States Army Reserve, who challenged orders implementing his voluntary deployment to Afghanistan because of his claim that Obama was not a legitimate president.

The case was dismissed when the Army Reserve revoked his order to deploy.

Taitz has stated that 2016 Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Bobby Jindal were not natural-born citizens and therefore were ineligible for the office they sought.