The Explosive Lawsuit Challenging a Right-Wing Abortion-Pill Story

Last month, an anti-abortion activist named Jana Pinson gave explosive testimony before a Texas Senate committee in support of HB7, a law that would vastly expand the state’s bounty-hunter abortion law, allowing lawsuits against anyone who facilitates a Texan getting abortion pills, including manufacturers, for up to $100,000. She described a lawsuit filed that very day by Liana Davis against Christopher Cooprider, accusing him of smuggling abortion pills he ordered online into Davis’s hot chocolate, terminating her pregnancy.

The case soon made international headlines for both its sordid details and its political valences. Like other red states that outlawed abortion as soon as the Supreme Court let them, Texas has been unable to stop tens of thousands of abortion pills — as many as 12,000 a month, according to the Society of Family Planning — from being mailed by providers in blue states, where they enjoy protection under “shield laws.” (Davis also sued Aid Access, a prominent provider of abortion pills to places where they’re illegal.) Attorney General Ken Paxton promptly issued cease-and-desist letters to shield providers, citing the Davis case. Meanwhile, the state senate passed HB7, and it now awaits the governor’s signature.

But a countersuit filed Thursday by Cooprider claims the sensationalistic drugging never happened. He says Davis had a spontaneous miscarriage, which he blames on her own conduct, and that she vengefully framed him for a forced abortion. Cooprider is seeking an eyebrow-raising amount in damages — over $1 billion.

“I’m not here to castigate the pro-life position. I consider myself a pro-life individual, but we don’t do political advocacy by criminal allegations that are not true, and that’s disgusting,” Cooprider’s attorney, Mikal Watts, told me Thursday. “They used this situation to pass a law that, if it’s based on this case, was passed based on a lie.”

Even as initially presented, the case raised questions. Cooprider wasn’t criminally charged, even though Texas prosecutors have brought at least two other cases against men accused of similar crimes — one of them for capital murder, which carries the death penalty. A second man was sentenced to 180 days in jail last year after pleading guilty to giving his wife abortion pills, though her pregnancy continued.

Davis did go to the cops in Corpus Christi, where she and Cooprider were neighbors, but they declined to bring charges. When reporters asked why, the police issued a long statement, saying the case had been assigned to a “highly experienced family violence detective” who had “conducted an extremely thorough investigation into the allegation, including an examination of the existing evidence and medical records, and interviews with the complainant, accused, witnesses, hospital medical staff, the complainant’s OBGYN, and the Nueces County Medical Examiner.” Along with the district attorney, the department said, they “concluded that the elements of a crime could not be established, and the investigation was subsequently closed as unfounded.” Unusually, the department added that it “highly encourages any media outlet requesting further information regarding this case to file an open records request through the Police Department Open Records Unit,” though when I filed one, it was declined on the basis that the information would be “highly intimate or embarrassing” and “not of legitimate concern to the public.”

Even in Davis’s filing, there are a few hints of uncertainty about the pregnancy’s viability. She includes text messages that show that weeks before the hot-chocolate incident, both Cooprider and Davis expressed doubts as to whether the fetus was still alive.

Cooprider’s 99-page lawsuit says that Davis faked a first pregnancy, then tricked Cooprider into having sex with her when she was ovulating, telling him it would help expel the remains of a miscarriage for a nonexistent pregnancy. It alleges that Davis’s own negligence was a “proximate cause of the death of her unborn baby” and accuses her of not “properly” treating a sexually transmitted infection, causing fevers that can trigger miscarriage; of consuming alcohol, Red Bull, and medications contraindicated for pregnancy; and of ignoring cramping while staying in extreme heat with her kids, which is associated with greater miscarriage risk.

Cooprider’s lawsuit also accuses Davis of erratic behavior, including, a month before the hot-chocolate incident, standing outside his house and “loudly screaming at him, threatening that she would charge Cooprider with sexual assault if he didn’t speak to her.” Cooprider includes a transcript of a call he says he made to the Corpus Christi police department in which he says Davis was threatening him and had taken abortion pills for a pregnancy he now says didn’t exist.

Davis’s lawyer, Watts, suggested that Jonathan Mitchell, probably the best-known anti-abortion attorney in America and the father of the original Texas bounty-hunter law, knew that Davis’s case had major holes in it and pressed on even after the police concluded the claims were unfounded.

“There’s Rule 11 that you have to do a reasonable investigation before you can sign your name to a federal court plea,” says Watts, a well-known torts lawyer in San Antonio who was acquitted in 2016 of fraud in a case where he represented himself. “I’m not here to suggest that that rule has been violated yet, although I may be suggesting after we do some digging.”

Mitchell didn’t respond to a request for comment but told Autonomy News, “These are abject lies and we will disprove every one of them in court. Cooprider is guilty as sin and will be held to account for what he did, both in this civil suit and in the upcoming criminal proceedings.” It’s not clear what criminal proceedings he’s referring to.