Sometimes, even big-time lawyers have trouble getting paid. Consider Jonathan Mitchell, who says his regular hourly rate is $1,200. The baby-faced, Austin-based savant graduated from the University of Chicago Law School with high honors in 2001 and clerked for right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Mitchell has since earned a reputation as the canniest champion of the movement against abortion rights. He’s the architect of Texas Senate Bill 8, the law that allows anyone to sue, and collect civil damages from, anyone who has “aided or abetted” an abortion after about six weeks of gestation. He’s also crafted a host of other ingenious attempts to eradicate abortion rights in Texas. But though Mitchell was the winning lawyer last year in a defamation case that had been filed against two of his clients by several abortion rights groups, he curiously remains unable to collect the fees his clients would normally be owed by the losing side. The facts behind that fee dispute raise deeper questions about who exactly funds the movement against abortion rights in Texas.
The case in question dates back to 2020, when the leaders of three abortion rights organizations, the Afiya Center, the Lilith Fund, and Texas Equal Access Fund, had finally had enough of Facebook attacks from Mark Lee Dickson, the Southern Baptist minister and director of the anti-abortion rights group Right to Life of East Texas. At the time, the plaintiffs in the case mostly helped low-income women of color get legal abortions. (This was prior to the 2021 passage of S.B. 8, and the chaos that ensued after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.) In those days, Dickson, known for wearing a backward baseball cap, was pinballing around the state with a pet project: creating abortion-free “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” These were towns where, despite the procedure’s legality throughout the U.S. at the time, abortions would be prohibited.
To advance his cause, Dickson wrote Facebook posts describing the abortion rights groups as “criminal organizations” that existed “to help pregnant Mothers murder their babies.” Leaders of the groups strongly objected to that characterization, and sued Dickson and Right to Life of East Texas for defamation, claiming Dickson had linked them to “literal, criminal murder.” Dickson found himself an attorney: Mitchell. (The two met through Republican state senator Bryan Hughes of Mineola. Dickson needed help creating his first “sanctuary city,” in Waskom, near the Louisiana border. Hughes introduced the pair during a conference call while Dickson was snacking at a Chick-fil-A.)
After much legal wrangling, the defamation case ended up before the Texas Supreme Court, which has long ruled in favor of abortion restrictions. Mitchell and his clients used a law called the Texas Citizens Participation Act to argue that Dickson had a right to call women who had abortions murderers. Designed to protect those who might be harassed or intimidated for making public statements, the TCPA is the enemy of frivolous libel or defamation suits. In February 2023, the court found that “the challenged statements are protected opinion about abortion law made in pursuit of changing that law, placing them at the heart of protected speech under the United States and Texas Constitutions.” It ordered the case sent back to the lower courts for dismissal and for determination of court costs, fees, and possible sanctions—all to be paid by the abortion rights groups who had filed the suit.
Oddly, that’s when events stopped working in Mitchell’s favor.
Shortly after judgment was rendered, Mitchell reached out to the opposing counsel, in the Dallas office of white-shoe firm of Thompson Coburn. He was ready to negotiate just how much he could expect to collect, and find out how soon the check might arrive. He could not have been more gracious. He didn’t rub it in; he didn’t condescend. “It’s not a huge amount of attorney hours (fewer than four hundred on the three cases combined) so I think we should be able to work this out among ourselves,” he wrote in an email that is now part of the court record. In a May 3 message, he complained about foot-dragging on the part of the plaintiffs’ lawyers and stressed that “we should make a good faith effort to reach an agreement or at least narrow our disagreements before we ask the Court to get involved.”
Later that day, Elizabeth Myers, a Thompson Coburn partner who represented the abortion funds, wrote back asking for Mitchell’s invoices, the engagement letter (legalese for contract) between Mitchell and his clients, and contracts with any other lawyers, along with any potential third-party payers—meaning anyone other than Dickson who might have paid Mitchell—so the firm could evaluate his request. She wasn’t being especially pushy: in accordance with the Citizens Participation Act, the winner in a libel or defamation suit cannot collect money from the loser without producing an accounting of the lawsuit costs. Notably, if a third party is paying for the defense, the winner cannot collect because they didn’t pay to defend the lawsuit in the first place. The law says that damage awards must be based on fees “incurred.” Myers, then needed receipts to ensure that her clients paid the right amount to the right person.
The next day Mitchell sent back another polite invitation to negotiate, even apologizing for his persistence. “I hope I haven’t been a pest,” he wrote. He attached time sheets and stated his total investment in the case was around 373 hours, and proposed deeply discounting his fee, something of a rarity among high-priced lawyers. “At the outset of the litigation my full hourly billing rate was $1,000/hour; it has since moved up to $1,200/hour.” But he was offering a deal: “So I propose a $550 hourly rate, which is halfway between half of my initial full rate and half of my current full hourly billing rate. If we use that hourly rate, the total fees would come to $205,150.” He added airfare and hotel receipts, along with court costs, bringing the total to $209,693.67.
Mitchell did have a request: “I don’t think it’s necessary to turn over my engagement letters. I’ve never had to do that when submitting fee applications to a court,” he wrote. “I also don’t think it’s necessary to disclose third-party payer information, either to opposing counsel or to the court.” Such avoidance might pass muster in federal court, where Mitchell often plied his trade. But not under Texas’s Citizens Participation Act. Myers and her colleagues politely told him as much.
Silence followed. Mitchell became less amenable. Instead of producing those pesky engagement letters, he sent copies of myriad “You’ve Got Money” messages from PayPal stating that someone had, indeed, paid Mitchell thousands of dollars over the course of the lawsuit. The only problem was that the name of the payer was redacted.
That was a no-go for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who again requested the actual engagement letters and actual bills that showed who exactly paid what. Mitchell, who has won many victories by proving that the devil is in the details, responded with some bad news. “I have not been able [to] locate my original engagement letter,” he wrote to another Thompson Coburn lawyer involved in the case. But—good news!—Mitchell was sending along a new engagement letter he had executed with Dickson “a few months ago.” It was dated May 22, 2023—after the Texas Supreme Court decided the defamation case in his favor, and long after Dickson had hired him way back in June of 2020.
Mitchell remained un-reimbursed through the early fall. Then, on October 3, he gave in—sort of. He turned over unredacted copies of the PayPal receipts. They revealed something curious: neither of Mitchell’s clients, not Mark Lee Dickson or Right to Life East of Texas, had actually been paying Mitchell. The payer listed was Sovereign Love Church, a tax-exempt religious institution in Longview, listed in the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention’s online directory. The church had been paying Mitchell from July 2020, when the defamation case was filed, through July 2023, a few months after the state Supreme Court’s judgment in favor of Mitchell and his clients. According to the receipts, the church had even come up with $109,979.10 in July 2023, the final payment of fees totaling more than $277,000 over three years.
This turn of events, according to pleadings, struck the plaintiffs’ lawyers as suspicious. That may have been because Sovereign Love Church was not anything like, say, Lakewood, the Houston megachurch run by Joel and Victoria Osteen, which could likely come up with six figures just by passing the hat on a couple of Sundays—or perhaps by digging more cash-stuffed envelopes out of the walls of another of its restrooms. For much of its life, Sovereign Love Church was based in a small, forlorn strip mall on Pirate Avenue in Longview, about two hours east of Dallas. According to Google, it is now permanently closed.
Mark Lee Dickson has pastored the church but according to facts that emerged in subsequent filings, it is “a legally distinct entity from” Dickson and Right to Life of East Texas. According to Dickson, his activities against abortion rights have taken him away from a more consistent pastoring schedule. “Just like any church, we have a [leadership] rotation of sorts,” he told me, adding that he is often “traveling around the country so is currently unable to lead Bible studies or services that meet at different locations.” When pressed on who might be supporting his church financially, Dickson paused. After a beat, he told me, “It’s not proper to reveal donor information.” Indeed, the law does not require churches to publicly identify their donors. But according to public filings, in 2022, Sovereign Love received a hefty $25,000 donation from the National Christian Charitable Foundation Inc., an organization that has doled out around $18 billion in grants since the early eighties, for what was only specified as “church.” Another generous sum came from a Lubbock-based foundation called WTAB, which the same year donated $23,000 for “propagation of Christianity.” The same organization, which funds, among other things, English language education, evangelism programs, and public school textbook reviews, donated $58,500 to Sovereign Love in 2021, and $19,000 in 2020.
What was missing—for the plaintiffs—was proof that defendant Dickson had incurred any losses. Without that crucial bit of information, the Thompson Coburn lawyers could not see their way to paying Jonathan Mitchell’s clients one red cent.
So in January, Mitchell went to court, filing a Motion for Entry of Judgment and an Award of Costs, Reasonable Attorney’s Fees and Sanctions. After all, it had been almost a year since he had won the case, and “the plaintiffs are unwilling to pay anything in costs or fees—even though the state supreme court has already ordered them to pay. . .” He stated that Dickson had hired him, and that Dickson had “incurred” fees and that Dickson—not Sovereign Love Church—had paid him thousands of dollars via PayPal, Venmo, and wire transfers. But he failed to show how Dickson had “incurred” the fees if Sovereign Love Church was the one paying the bills.
To any stickler for the provisions of the Citizens Participation Act, including, one assumes, the lawyers at Thompson Coburn, it looked like Mitchell had stepped in a cow pile. The firm sent out the discovery basics, official court documents requesting that Dickson provide written answers to questions, with help from his attorney.
What they got back only added to the confusion. Mitchell produced the 2020 engagement letters that he had earlier attested he had lost. One was signed by Right to Life of East Texas, and the other was from Dickson, unsigned. Lawyers for the plaintiffs responded that the documents produced were insufficient to prove payment. History has shown that the relentless Mitchell will not go quietly, though he did not agree to requests for an interview, citing a busy schedule.
The question remains: who is paying for Mitchell’s services, and who might, in turn, be demanding that they be reimbursed? In a footnote in his most recent pleading, Mitchell wrote that “Mr. Dickson ‘paid’ the bills that were sent to him because he has complete control of Sovereign Love Church’s bank account . . . No one but Mr. Dickson took the actions that transferred the money from the church’s bank account to the lawyers and law firms that represented him.”This statement, of course, does not explain how the money got into the church account in the first place. It also appears to contradict sworn stipulations that Dickson and the church are separate entities and that the money from Sovereign Love’s PayPal, Venmo, and bank accounts is not owned by Dickson.
Sovereign Love Church is listed on the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention’s website directory, but the phone number it provides goes to voicemail with a garbled outgoing message that doesn’t identify a speaker at all. Dickson told me he has been far too busy with his Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn movement to preach regularly. Several Baptist churches couldn’t confirm the existence of Sovereign Love Church. When I asked Dickson if I could attend a weekend service, his response was not that of the “y’all come”–style evangelical church pastor typical in Texas: “There are services this weekend, but those services exist for the membership of the church, are centered on the reading of the Word of God and prayer, and with their best interest in mind.” Dickson told me he’d consult with a few members to see if they’d be comfortable having me.
What about Mitchell’s other client in the lawsuit, Right to Life of East Texas? For 2010, it filed a 990-EZ form, as required for nonprofits with gross receipts of less than $200,000 a year. It listed $6,902.70 in net assets. It seems unlikely that an organization of its size could foot a six-figure legal bill. But some person or organization has been paying Mitchell—someone with the means to pay out a quarter of a million dollars.
Many anti-abortion rights groups are proud of their efforts, and proud of their successes. In Texas, they’ve had plenty to celebrate lately. So it’s odd that the financial supporter or supporters in this case remain secret. Maybe they just don’t want the credit. Or maybe they are the kind of billionaire, business, or organization that doesn’t like publicity, especially the kind that could lead to protests or boycotts. After all, the majority of Texans and Americans support reproductive rights.
So far, only one thing is certain. Jonathan Mitchell will keep fighting on behalf of those who oppose reproductive rights—while providing cover to those who want it.
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