Marcus Silva, the Texas man who sought to exact revenge on his ex-wife by suing her best friends for $1 million dollars each under Texas' abortion ban, has asked a court to dismiss his claims. For the women Silva targeted, a legal nightmare that spanned more than a year and a half is finally over.
“We spent the last 19 months of our lives being harassed by this case, by this man,” Jackie Noyola told Rolling Stone. “It's been stressful. It has impacted our jobs, our families, our reputations. We will never get that time back, but I'm glad we are here, and grateful that we won.”
In March 2023, Silva filed a civil lawsuit against Noyola and Amy Carpenter, the best friends and co-workers of his ex-wife, Brittni, accusing them, and a third woman, of supporting Brittni as she allegedly sought to terminate an unwanted pregnancy amid the dissolution of their deeply troubled marriage.
Silva was represented in the case by lawyer Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who represented former president Donald Trump at the Supreme Court earlier this year. Mitchell achieved notoriety as the architect of Texas' abortion bounty law, SB 8, which effectively ended abortion access in Texas nine months before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Lawyers for Brittni Silva described Marcus' suit as an effort “to use the judicial process to harass, oppress, extort, and intimidate” her after she left him. According to a transcript of a phone conversation that was made public during the proceedings, Marcus Silva promised he would drop the lawsuit if his ex-wife had sex with him, and reneged on the deal after she acquiesced.
Trial in the case was set to begin in Galveston, Texas, on Monday. On Thursday night, Mitchell filed a notice of “nonsuit with prejudice,” asking the court to dismiss his client's lawsuit against the three women with prejudice, meaning he can never revive the lawsuit. (Mitchell says the two parties reached a “confidential” settlement. No money changed hands, according to a person familiar with the settlement, though Noyola and Carpenter did agree to drop a countersuit they filed against Marcus Silva.)
In his original complaint, Mitchell asserted that, under Texas law, “a person who assists a pregnant woman in obtaining a self-managed abortion has committed the crime of murder and can be sued for wrongful death.” The case marked the first time that a wrongful death lawsuit was filed against a pregnant person's friends over an alleged abortion.
This summer, the Texas Supreme Court denied Mitchell's attempt to force Brittni Silva to turn over her own communications relating to the alleged abortion, with one Republican justice blasting Marcus' “disgracefully vicious harassment and intimidation of his ex-wife Brittni during the course of their marriage's demise and during this litigation.”
With Mitchell's motion to dismiss, the dubious legal strategy remains untested. Men in Arizona and Alabama have previously tried to sue doctors who provided abortions to their ex-partners for wrongful death — so far without success. (The Arizona case is ongoing; the Alabama lawsuit was dismissed.)
Mitchell refused to discuss his decision to request a dismissal days before the trial was scheduled to begin. Noyola and Carpenter told Rolling Stone they were eager for their day in court.
“We were ready to show up to court on Monday. We were ready to have our voices heard. It was, honestly, disappointing that after 19 months of all of this extreme stress, that now these bullies just get to change their mind,” Noyola says. “They have no evidence, because we did nothing wrong — there's nothing to prove.”
At the same time, both women expressed relief that the protracted ordeal had finally concluded.
“It was just a constant state of stress to have to have a wrongful death lawsuit hanging over you, 24/7, for 19 months,” Carpenter says. “It's been a lot of emotional turmoil — and at the end of the day, that was his goal, right? His goal was to bring chaos to our lives and continue his abuse of his ex-wife, by proxy.”
She adds: “It's been pretty stressful, pretty scary, but through all of it, we're hanging in there and staying strong — and if anything, it's brought us closer together and made our voices even louder than they were before.”
Noyola and Carpenter's friendship strengthened over the course of the ordeal, but their friendship with Brittni suffered as a result of her ex-husband's lawsuit. “Unfortunately, due to the lawsuit, there has had to have been some distance now” for legal reasons, Noyola said. “I guess that's the part that has worked for Marcus. But we've heard that she's doing great.”
For Mitchell, the lawsuit could either be considered an abject failure — his client neither won his argument, nor was awarded the $3 million dollars and legal fees he sought — or a hypothetical success, since the attention the case attracted raised the specter of crippling lawsuits for anyone in Texas who may have considered supporting a friend seeking to terminate a pregnancy.
In addition to Texas' abortion bounty law (another law that remains untested), Mitchell is a driving force behind the “abortion trafficking” ordinances that have spread in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wadeas well as one of the figures who has sought to popularize the idea that the Comstock Act, a 151-year old obscenity law, could be enforced as a de facto national abortion ban if Trump is re-elected. (“We don't need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Mitchell said.)
Mitchell, Carpenter says, “used the legal system to allow his client to continue relentlessly abusing his ex-wife in the hopes of scaring people out of supporting their loved ones' access to abortion.”
She adds: “The state of Texas is colluding with abusers by banning abortion, criminalizing even emergency exceptions, promoting bounty hunting laws against people who are just trying to help their friends and their loved ones… By allowing abusers like Marcus to file lawsuits like this , they're helping them to continue the abuse. Texas has basically gifted all of these laws to abusers and are giving them a pathway to continue this disgusting behavior.”
Brittni Silva was not immediately available to comment on the resolution of the case.
“I hope that this failure means that people will continue helping their friends — that the Marcuses of the world are not going to win,” Noyola says. “As long as women stand together to support one another, they're just not going to win.”
