AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas man who sued his ex-wife’s friends for helping her obtain an abortion informed the court that the two sides reached a settlement, forgoing the need for a trial that would have tested his argument that their actions amounted to assisting in a wrongful death.
Attorneys for Marcus Silva and the three women he sued last year filed court papers this week stating they had reached an agreement. Two of the woman countersued Silva for invasion of privacy but have also dropped now those claims, according to court records.
As of Friday, the judge hadn't yet signed off on the settlement. Court records didn't include its terms, but a spokesperson for the defendants said the settlement didn't involve any financial terms.
“While we are grateful that this fraudulent case is finally over, we are angry for ourselves and others who have been terrorized for the simple act of supporting a friend who is facing abuse,” Jackie Noyola, one of the women, said in a statement. “No one should ever have to fear punishment, criminalization, or a lengthy court battle for helping someone they care about.”
Abortion rights advocates worried that the case could establish new avenues for recourse against people who help women obtain abortions and create a chilling effect in Texas and across the country.
Silva filed a petition last year to sue the friends of his ex-wife, Brittni Silva, for providing her with abortion pills. He claimed that their assistance was tantamount to aiding a murder and was seeking $1 million in damages, according to court documents.
Two of the defendants, Noyola and Amy Carpenter, countersued Silva for invasion of privacy. They dropped their counterclaims Thursday night after the settlement was reached.
“This case was about using the legal system to harass us for helping our friend, and scare others out of doing the same," Carpenter said. “But the claims were dropped because they had nothing. We did nothing wrong, and we would do it all again.”
Brittni and Marcus Silva divorced in February 2023, a few weeks before Silva filed his lawsuit. The defendants alleged in their countersuit that Silva was a “serial emotional abuser” in pursuit of revenge and that he illegally searched Brittni's phone without her consent.
Silva was represented by Jonathan Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general who helped draft a strict Texas abortion law known as Senate Bill 8 before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Mitchell declined to comment Friday.
Brittni Silva took the medication in July of 2022 according to court filings. It was a few weeks after the Supreme Court allowed states to impose abortion bans. The lawsuit claimed that text messages were shared between the defendants discussing how to obtain the abortion medication.
Earlier this year, an appeals court blocked an attempt by Silva's attorney to collect information from his ex-wife for the wrongful death lawsuit against her friends. The decision was upheld by the Texas Supreme Court, which criticized Silva in the footnotes of a concurring opinion signed by two of its conservative justices, Jimmy Blacklock and Phillip Devine.
“He has engaged in disgracefully vicious harassment and intimidation of his ex-wife,” the opinion read. “I can imagine no legitimate excuse for Marcus's behavior as reflected in this record, many of the details of which are not fit for reproduction in a judicial opinion.”
Abortion is a key issue this campaign season and is the No. 1 priority for women younger than 30, according to survey results from KFF.
Thirteen states ban abortions at all stages of pregnancy, including Texas, which has some of the tightest restrictions in the country. Nine states have ballot measures to protect the right to an abortion this election.
Lathan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
FILE - Demonstrators march and gather near the Texas Capitol following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, June 24, 2022, in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
CENTREVILLE, Va. (AP) — The brother of a Dutch journalist slain in 1982 covering El Salvador's civil war has filed a lawsuit against a former Salvadoran military officer who has lived for decades in the northern Virginia suburbs and is accused of orchestrating the killing.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks unspecified monetary damages against Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena and a declaration that he is responsible for the killings of Jan Kuiper and three other Dutch journalists.
Reyes Mena, now 85, was a colonel who commanded El Salvador’s Fourth Infantry Brigade. That unit, and Reyes Mena in particular, were declared responsible for the journalists' deaths by a United Nations Truth Commission that was established in 1992 as part of the peace agreement that ended El Salvador's civil war.
An estimated 75,000 civilians were killed during El Salvador’s civil war, mostly by U.S.-backed government security forces.
“The killing of the Dutch Journalists, which the U.N. Truth Commission highlighted as among the most emblematic crimes committed during the civil war, demonstrated the brutality with which the Salvadoran Security Forces sought to stifle national and international independent media in El Salvador,” the lawyers wrote in their complaint.
Kuiper and three other Dutch television journalists — Koos Koster, Hans ter Laag and Joop Willemsen — were ambushed as they tried to travel to territory controlled by the leftist guerilla group that was fighting the Salvadoran Security Forces. According to the truth commission, the killings occurred near the El Paraíso military base that was under the command of Reyes Mena, who ordered the ambush.
Kuiper's family and others who have sought to bring the journalists' killers to justice have been thwarted for decades. Shortly after the truth commission released its report, the Salvadoran government passed an amnesty law that shielded Reyes Mena and other military officers from prosecution.
But El Salvador's Supreme Court struck down the amnesty law as unconstitutional in 2016. In 2022, a judge ordered the arrest of Reyes Mena and others, including former defense minister Gen. José Guillermo García and Col. Francisco Antonio Morán, former director of the now-defunct treasury police, in connection with the journalists' killing.
According to the lawsuit, Reyes Mena ended his travel to El Salvador when the arrest warrants were issued. The lawsuit said there's no indication that Reyes Mena will be extradited, even though a notice seeking his arrest has been posted with Interpol.
The Salvadoran Embassy referred questions about efforts to extradite Reyes Mena to the country's court system, which said a formal public information request must be submitted. The U.S. State Department referred questions Friday to the Justice Department, which did not respond.
At Reyes Mena’s Centreville townhouse, a woman who identified herself as his wife declined to comment Thursday and said she would relay a reporter’s request for comment to their lawyer, whom she did not identify.
The Center for Justice and Accountability, a nonprofit legal group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Kuiper's brother, Gert Kuiper, has brought multiple cases over the years against individuals accused of overseas war crimes under U.S. laws like the Torture Victim Protection Act.
In 2019, a jury at the Alexandria courthouse found a northern Virginia man who once served as a colonel in the Somali Army during the regime of dictator Siad Barre responsible for torturing a Somali man in the 1980s. The jury awarded $500,000 in damages. It also won a $21 million default judgement against a former Somali defense minister and prime minister, Mohamed Ali Samantar.
Other efforts to hold foreign officials accountable have failed. Earlier this year, a judge in Alexandria tossed out a series of civil lawsuits against a Libyan military commander, Khalifa Hifter, who used to live in Virginia and was accused of killing innocent civilians in that country’s civil war. The Hifter lawsuits were not brought by the Center for Justice and Accountability.
FILE - The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is seen, Sept. 9, 2024, in Alexandria, Va. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough, File)
FILE - In this Dec. 12. 2018 photo, Oscar Perez, a spokesman for Gert Kuiper's legal team, holds a photograph of Koos Koster, one of four Dutch journalists - including Kuiper's brother, Jan - who were killed in 1982 in El Salvador. Calls are mounting for Mario Reyes Mena, a former Salvadoran army colonel, to be brought to justice for the killings. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez, File)
