A Texas district attorney who made headlines in 2022 for wrongly charging a woman with murder after she underwent a so-called “self-induced abortion” paid for another woman’s abortion in the mid-1990s, according to new court filings.
The allegations against Starr County District Attorney Gocha Ramirez, the target of a lawsuit brought by the woman he charged three years ago, came in sworn depositions from Rosita and Becky Rocha, a pair of sisters with whom Ramirez has admitted to having once had affairs.
“DA Ramirez also knew that abortion was not a crime because, in the past, he not only urged Ms. Becky Rocha, with whom he had an extramarital affair, to get an abortion after she became pregnant with his child, but he also paid for the procedure,” Tuesday’s filing states.
Rosita Rocha said in her deposition that Ramirez called her in April of 2022 to talk about his arrest of Lizelle Gonzalez, the woman he’d charged with murder. Ramirez asked her how she’d “felt psychologically” when she’d had an abortion years earlier, to which Rosita Rocha said she responded: “You should know. Becky went through one with your child.”
The deposition was included in the court filing to underscore that Ramirez knew Gonzalez had not committed a crime. Emails to Ramirez’s attorney seeking comment on the allegations were not immediately returned.
Rosita Rocha said she urged him on that call to get Gonzalez out of jail, where she spent three days before being released on a $500,000 bond. The case was later dropped, and in 2024, the State Bar of Texas fined and disciplined Ramirez for disregarding that women who seek abortions in Texas are exempt from criminal charges.
In another deposition, Becky Rocha said Ramirez made it clear to her she couldn’t have his baby.
“He didn’t tell me like straight out to have an abortion, but he told me that I could — we couldn’t have that baby because of his career,” she said.
Tuesday’s court filing also references text messages between Ramirez and Becky Rocha in which Ramirez admits he shouldn’t have charged Gonzalez.
“It’s very possible that my career is over,” he wrote to her, according to the filing, adding: “I should have never indicted her. Because it’s not Murder in Texas.”
Gonzalez’s lawsuit against Ramirez and other Starr County officials was brought in part by the American Civil Liberties Union and seeks $1 million in damages.
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“Lizelle Gonzalez’s life has been forever changed by the cruel and unconstitutional actions of Starr County’s elected officials,” Lauren Johnson, director of the ACLU Abortion Criminal Defense Initiative, said in a statement Tuesday. “Lizelle deserves justice for the trauma they have caused her and her family — and each of us deserve to be free of targeting by officials who ignore the law to unlawfully charge and arrest based on personal beliefs.”