For at least the second time in as many years, far-right attorney Jonathan Mitchell is providing direct legal services to men who seek to exercise dominion over the women who left them.
Texas law lets residents file petitions in state court that ask for the power to investigate potentially illegal activity and take depositions of whoever they name in the petition. And The Washington Post reported last week that Mitchell is currently representing a man in one such petition: Mitchell and his client (henceforth, “these two assholes”) want to investigate the man’s former partner for traveling to Colorado to obtain legal abortion care.
To be clear, there is no illegal activity here. Abortion is legal in Colorado, and Colorado is where the woman got an abortion. But these two assholes argue that they can sue under Texas’s wrongful death statute or, alternatively, under Senate Bill 8, a state law that Texas enacted (and Mitchell drafted) that makes it unlawful for anyone to “aid or abet” an illegal abortion. Both statutes allow winning plaintiffs to collect monetary damages. So, under this theory, not only are women not free to get an abortion in Texas, they also arguably aren’t free to leave, and if they do leave and get a legal abortion, their spiteful exes can literally make them pay.
This is, obviously, awful. And it is also awfully familiar: In March 2023, Mitchell started representing a man in another lawsuit against his ex-wife’s friends for texting her as she planned and had an abortion, and for helping her access the necessary medication. The court filings called the woman and her friends “murderers” and sought millions of dollars in damages in an attempt to isolate her from her support network and exert power over his former spouse. This asshole’s case (not to be confused with these two assholes’ case) is ongoing.
So far, courts aren’t going for requests like these. On Monday, in Alabama, federal judge Myron H. Thompson blasted the state’s Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall for threatening prosecutions of women who travel out of state to obtain abortion care. Thompson characterized the right to interstate travel—and to engage in lawful conduct while traveling—as “one of our most fundamental rights,” and concluded that the Attorney General’s cramped view of the right “contravenes history, precedent, and common sense.” But even if judges ultimately dismiss such lawsuits as frivolous, the threat of a lawsuit and the time and expense and pain that come with it can be used to punish women for legal behavior that their exes resent—and make other women afraid to step out of line.
Mitchell pops up everywhere conservatives are attempting to undermine democracy and stymie the legal rights of people of color, women, and queer people. But his bread and butter seems to be reproductive abuse. Again, this is the same guy who drafted SB 8, the law that empowered vigilantes to act as abortion bounty hunters and allowed successful uterus watchdogs to receive financial rewards upwards of $10,000. This is the same guy who argued before the Fifth Circuit that a dad has a legal right to deny his teenage daughters access to contraceptives. And this is the same guy trying to resurrect the Comstock Act, an 1870s law broadly prohibiting anything “obscene” from being shipped through the mail, which Justice Samuel Alito has made clear he’s open to using to cut off abortion medication access nationwide overnight.
Mitchell is a dutiful soldier in the conservative legal movement, and as such, he is consistently working to take control over a woman or girl’s body away from her and give it to a man. Conservative activist lawyers do not think women should be able to decide whether to get pregnant or stay pregnant, which makes them natural allies of men who want to weaponize the law to dictate the lives of their former partners.
By limiting what women can do with their own bodies, keeping women from going to certain places or talking to certain people and punishing them if they do, anti-abortion litigators like Mitchell mirror domestic abusers’ patterns of power and control. And they will keep doing so unless and until lawmakers force them to stop.
