Texas Slammed for Paying Discredited Abortion Foe

“It amazes me that states continue to spend large amounts of taxpayer dollars outsourcing this work to this guy.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry attends an anti-abortion rally in January 2010.Jack Plunkett/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In the first six months of 2014, Texas paid a controversial marriage therapist named Vincent Rue $42,000 to prepare the state’s defense of a draconian anti-abortion law. It turns out that wasn’t such a great idea. On Friday, when US District Judge Lee Yeakel struck down part of that law, he slammed the state for hiring Rue—and for trying to hide Rue’s involvement.

“The level of input exerted by Rue undermines the appearance of objectivity and reliability of the experts’ opinions,” Yeakel wrote in his decision. “Further, the court is dismayed by the considerable efforts the State took to obscure Rue’s level of involvement with the experts’ contributions.” His decision blocked a portion of the law that would have closed all but about a half-dozen of the state’s abortion clinics.

Rue was thoroughly discredited as an abortion expert long before Texas hired him. When he testified in two landmark abortion cases in the 1990s, judges disregarded his testimony for being personally biased and lacking expertise. Mainstream medical organization have rejected Rue’s efforts to classify a supposed mental illness caused by abortion, “post-abortive syndrome.”

In Texas, Rue helped draft, edit, and find citations for the reports that the state’s experts witnesses submitted to the court.

“It amazes me that states continue to spend large amounts of taxpayer dollars outsourcing this work to this guy,” says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. Kolbi-Molinas was the lead attorney on a lawsuit in which Alabama hired Rue to defend its anti-abortion law. “But we basically have a road show now, of all of his experts.”

Rue’s involvement with the defense came out thanks to emails between Rue and the experts that plaintiffs brought up at trial. But lawyers for the Center for Reproductive Rights, the legal advocacy group which sued to block the law, accused Texas of withholding some of those emails. Yeakel appeared to agree. On the final day of the trial, he said the state had made “very disturbing” efforts to “effectively tried to hide Rue’s involvement,” the Austin Chronicle reported.

Yeakel ultimately discarded the testimony of four expert witnesses because of Rue’s “considerable editorial and discretionary control” over their written reports and testimony: James C. Anderson, the chair of Virginia Physicians for Life; Deborah Kitz, a health care consultant from Pennsylvania; Peter Uhlenberg, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; and Dr. Mayra Jimenez Thompson, an OB-GYN and University of Texas-Southwestern professor.

Emails showed that that Rue sent Uhlenberg sources, “ideas,” and “fact changes.” In one message, Uhlenberg wrote, “I need your critical suggestions.” Kitz wrote Rue an email that said, “Tried to use as much of your material as I could, but time ran out.” Anderson testified that Rue was responsible for “wordsmithing” his report to the court. Rue has tapped Anderson as an expert witness in four other states that paid Anderson more than $110,000.

Rue, Kitz, Thompson, and Anderson did not respond to requests for comment. But Uhlenberg objected to the judge’s characterization of his testimony.

“He was wrong in asserting that Rue had considerable control over what I wrote in my expert report,” Uhlenberg wrote in an email. “That is insulting to me and not correct. I worked hard to provide a critical evaluation of what the experts for the plaintiffs wrote. If the judge wanted to know if this was my report, written by me, he could have asked.”

Here’s the full text of the footnote in which the judge discusses Rue:

The credibility and weight the court affords the expert testimony of the State’s witnesses Drs. Thompson, Anderson, Kitz, and Uhlenberg is informed by ample evidence that, at a very minimum, Vincent Rue, Ph.D, a non-physician consultant for the State, had considerable editorial and discretionary control over the contents of the experts’ report and declarations. The court finds that, although the experts each testified that they personally held the opinions presented to the court, the level of input exerted by Rue undermines the appearance of objectivity and reliability of the experts’ opinions. Further, the court is dismayed by the considerable efforts the State took to obscure Rue’s level of involvement with the experts’ contributions.

Yeakel is not the first judge to disregard Rue’s handpicked witnesses. In August, a judge who struck down an Alabama law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges with a local hospital tossed out Anderson’s testimony in favor of the law “due to concerns about his judgment or honesty.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate