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.
