They have a key thing in common, beyond the misogynist zealot lawyer who runs them.
Jerry Rodriguez appeared to be a deeply aggrieved man—the victim of a scheme orchestrated by his girlfriend’s domineering ex-partner to “murder” not one, but two, of his “unborn children.” In a lawsuit filed in Galveston, Texas, last summer on behalf of “all current and future fathers… in the United States,” Rodriguez was portrayed as a devoted boyfriend who accompanied his girlfriend to ultrasound appointments and, eventually, pleaded with her not to go through with abortions that her ex was trying to force her to have.
Weirdly, the villain in this anguished narrative story wasn’t the girlfriend’s estranged husband, but a California-based provider named Dr. Rémy Coeytaux whom Rodriquez accused of “wrongful death” for allegedly supplying the abortion pills used to terminate her pregnancies.
Demanding justice on Rodriguez’s behalf was anti-abortion legal mastermind Jonathan F. Mitchell, who was seeking an injunction to stop Coeytaux—and all other medical providers—from sending pills to Texas, where abortion is banned. This winter, Mitchell amended the lawsuit to incorporate a new Texas law, House Bill 7, that allows private “bounty hunters” to sue abortion-pill providers for at least $100,000 per violation.
The suit was part of a larger legal strategy by Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general who has helped craft some of the most radical and punitive anti-abortion laws in the country, including Senate Bill 8, a six-week ban enacted in 2021, and HB 7 itself. Four years after the end of Roe v. Wade, abortion pills have become so widely available that the number of abortions across the US has actually risen, with medication now accounting for 63 percent of the total. Mitchell is trying to use the courts to resurrect the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era anti-obscenity, anti-abortion law that has been dormant for decades. If Comstock is revived, it would outlaw the mailing of abortion pills nationwide, amounting to a federal ban.
Sympathetic-sounding plaintiffs like Rodriguez are an essential part of Mitchell’s strategy. But a few months after the case was filed, Rodriguez’s story has fallen apart, highlighting just how ineffective Mitchell and his allies have been—so far—in using such lawsuits to push their sweeping anti-abortion agenda.
According to an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle, at the same time that Mitchell was promoting his client as a symbol of aggrieved fathers-to-be, the Galveston man was evading a felony arrest warrant for allegedly beating up the girlfriend whose abortions he claimed to mourn. In October 2024—a few months before filing his lawsuit—Rodriguez had a violent altercation with his girlfriend at a motel. He allegedly grabbed the woman’s neck as if he was trying to “crush” it, the article detailed, to the point where she “believed she was going to die.” She told police the attack was the eighth time in five months that Rodriguez assaulted her. He then proceeded to slam her to the floor, climb on top of her, and punch and slap her until she finally broke free and escaped, the Chronicle said.
It wasn’t Rodriguez’s only alleged incident of domestic abuse. According to police records, he pleaded guilty to assaulting a woman he lived with in 2006 and to harassment for threatening to kill a different woman in 2009, spending a total of two days in jail.
Now attorneys for Coeytaux have asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit, in part due to Rodriguez’s abusive history. As it turns out, HB 7 specifically excludes anyone who has committed a “family violence” offense from suing under the state law, making Rodriguez ineligible to be a plaintiff. In a 43-page motion filed last Thursday evening, lawyers at the Center for Reproductive Rights offer a list of other arguments for why they thinks the suit should be thrown out—including the fact that all the allegations Rodriguez raised against Coeytaux occurred more than a year before HB 7 took effect. The law is not retroactive. The attorneys also argue HB 7 has “serious constitutional defects” that violate both the Texas and US Constitutions.
Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.
Marc Hearron, a senior counsel at CRR who is representing Coeytaux in the case, draws parallels between Rodriguez’s alleged violence and his lawsuit. “The decision to have an abortion is a personal, intimate choice,” Hearron says. “Who would have the gall to file a lawsuit over someone’s decision like that and splash it all over the papers, except for someone who intends to further abuse? This is not something an average person would ever do.”
Other legal experts were perplexed at the suit’s apparent conflicts with a law—HB 7—that Mitchell helped write. “The retroactivity part seems quite obvious,” says David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University and expert in abortion rights.
See here for more on this lawsuit. I had not heard about the updates to or flaws with the case, but that’s a key component to this story. Most if not all of the big-swing lawsuits that radical zealot Jonathan Mitchell has filed have had deeply flawed – to put it gently – plaintiffs. See here and here for a couple more examples. That doesn’t mean there’s a zero chance of success – Mitchell knows how to shop a courtroom, at least – but it’s good to know. Go read the whole thing, and then read this Slate piece about how the main effect of the Dobbs decision has been to stop the life-saving abortions first and foremost. We still have a lot of work to do here.