Patience Rousseau was 26 years old and living in Winnemucca when she miscarried in 2018. She was convicted under a Nevada law, put on the books in 1911, that makes it illegal to take drugs to end a pregnancy after the 24th week. Civil rights lawyers and abortion rights advocates say the statute is the only law like it nationwide and unfairly targets women who want to end a pregnancy.
Rousseau says the money from Humboldt County is welcome but not enough to make up for years of trauma. She wishes the county had been forced to pay more.
“They fought so much to avoid paying me,” said Rousseau. “I went through so much and so did my children, who are still facing these issues. It’s not fair.”
Rousseau told The Nevada Independent her life was turned upside down by the nearly decade-long ordeal. Already suffering from depression and substance abuse before her miscarriage, in its aftermath she was labeled a “baby killer,” sent to prison and separated from her young children for more than two years before her conviction was tossed out for ineffective assistance of counsel.
“The trauma of all of it was pretty horrendous,” said Paola Armeni, the Las Vegas-based civil rights attorney representing Rousseau. Armeni likened Rousseau’s treatment after her miscarriage to being attacked by a lynch mob, “all the while under a statute that was on the books before women were even allowed to vote in Nevada.”
Her lawyers say the money is a final act of justice in a case that should have never existed. They submitted a demand letter to Humboldt County in March, outlining their view that the county had broken state law, violated Rousseau’s state and federal constitutional rights and intentionally inflicted emotional distress upon her. The settlement was finalized in early August and the money was received last week.
Roughly $1.2 million of the settlement is reserved for Rousseau, who now lives in South Dakota with three sons, aged 4, 7 and 9. She said she will use the money to finance her house, buy her mom a car and open a store selling rare aquatic plants and animals — she’s an animal lover who owns five dogs and three cats.
The rest of the money will go to pay lawyers and to repay the state of Nevada for a $100,000 settlement it awarded Rousseau in February.
It’s notable that there isn’t a single comment here extending sympathy for what this woman went through, only judgment about how she’s going to waste this money.
You all kind of suck for this.
Have you considered that it comes from a place of concern and wanting the best outcome for her?
Have you considered she has all the authority and autonomy to choose what’s best for herself? And that it’s disrespectful to see a poor woman and immediately assume she’s going to waste her money? How condescending to assume you know better than her for her own life.
I never said any of those things. It’s also really weird how much you are making this whole situation about yourself. Goodbye.
The other commenters that you are defending sure are saying those things.
Are you drunk? I haven’t said a single word about myself here.
She said she will use the money to finance her house, buy her mom a car and open a store selling rare aquatic plants and animals
She should get a financial advisor. She’ll be broke in five years.
She’s been broke and can’t take it to the grave. She lost two years of her life - I really don’t care what she does with that money.
She has three young children to take care of. Being wasteful with that money will make their lives harder though.
The last thing this lady needs is more judgment from the public. Buying a house is not being wasteful.
Assuming she wouldn’t need fiduciary guidance after obtaining a large sum of money when statistically people who gain it tend to lose it quickly is arrogant.
She’s buying a house and then buying a car for her mom. These are practical things to purchase when you’re poor.
What does it do for you to judge this woman from afar after everything she’s been through?
Buying a house is great. Deciding to build a business without consulting anyone about how well it would go would be extremely detrimental to anyone’s finances.
You have no idea if she will hire consultants or not Jesus fucking Christ
Leave her alone ffs.
But, like lottery winners who suddenly get a similarly large amount of money, keeping it at arms’ length is best to ensure she has anything to show for the pain she endured in a year’s time.
I don’t like sitting around judging this woman about what she should do with this money or that she’s making the wrong decisions with it. None of us know what steps she’s going to take to safeguard that money and this is all conjecture. Assuming this woman is going to be irresponsible with it feels gross.
She’s been judged unfairly quite enough.
I’m don’t care what she does with the money. I was just throwing the concern into the ether. It’s unlikely she’s on Lemmy.
She might not be on Lemmy, but the rest of us are. There’s plenty of single mothers here.
Then they should heed this advice if any of them ever end up with a windfall.
This is meant as a, “you’re doing it wrong” since I don’t have enough details to begin making that case.
However, most people who receive a million plus windfall are back to where they started within five years.
I’m also assuming her financial position isn’t great after being imprisoned for 2 years. The starting weath is a key factor, the lower it is the faster the windfall is consumed.
It’s only when it’s over 100 million that it’s essentially hard to out spend it.
Almost all of the comments here are judging this woman for how she’s spending this money and it’s leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
How about everyone get off this woman’s case and let her live her fucking life?
You should heed your own advice then. None of us knew of this situation until you brought attention to it. Now that people are commenting in a way you don’t like you’re complaining about it?
It’s my post, I can cry if I want.
Idk how you read it as that, it’s just advice, you can say that and still have sympathy. Or the comment about conservatives deserving what they do to others, you thought that was an attack on her but they mean that the sort of laws that allow this to happen are terrible, which is a sympathetic comment.
All of the comments on this post were completely bypassing the story and concern-trolling about how this woman is going to waste the money.
I stopped giving any of the men in here spouting off with “advice” the benefit of the doubt.
Not necessarily. I got a few hundred thousand from selling my mom’s house when she died, and I paid off my house and bought a car I sorely needed, while still keeping a good chunk to pad my retirement. Now that my house is paid off, I can make much larger contributions to my retirement as well, so it wasn’t a huge deal that only a fraction of the initial inheritance went to retirement.
I imagine if I’d gotten over $1 million more, I’d probably have been able to start a small business on top of all that. You get the things you need, and then you go back to your normal spending. It’s that last part that some people have trouble with, but we don’t know that this lady will.
Most small businesses fail. I just hope she doesn’t put too many eggs in that basket.
Yes and my concern is she won’t go back to normal spending. It’s really depends on the her financial literacy. Which isn’t something that should be assumed.
Paying your house feels good but did you do the math? If your mortgage rate is lower than the average market returns, you should keep the loan and invest the funds.
Once you’ve got over 100k you can start using it for collateral while it continues to make gains. This is how wealthy people operate their finances.
The whole zero debt movement is for poor people because Americans are taught to internalize their exploitation rather than fight for higher wages.
I hate wealthy people, and I hate what they do to the economy. Yes, I probably could have made more money by exploiting how our broken system makes it more profitable to use borrowed money than to just be financially independent, but my goal wasn’t to maximize profit, it was to be debt free and able to build up a retirement fund, which I am, and I can.
It has nothing to do with whether I can fight for higher wages and fairer wealth distribution - I absolutely still can, and I’m much more likely to want to do so if I’m not trying to use the same avenues of financial exploitation as the wealthy, since those are the exact avenues we need to close.
You seem to have things backwards with what you shouldn’t assume - you can be worried about someone, but you should have enough faith in your fellow human that you err on the side of assuming they’re capable of making the right decisions for themselves.
You seem to have things backwards with what you shouldn’t assume - you can be worried about someone, but you should have enough faith in your fellow human that you err on the side of assuming they’re capable of making the right decisions for themselves.
Sorry but my knowledge on this doesn’t disappear because you have faith.
Being poor is trauma. Money often causes a over spending response. This is backed behavior science studies.
If you’ve never been poor, living among poor, it probably sounds made up. It may also sound like I’m blaming them but I cannot overstate that I’m pointing out a trauma response not a character flaw.
Of course I’ve been poor - I’d rarely ever seen my bank account with 5 digits until my mom died. I’m fully aware of the feeling of “Oh, man this is so much money! I’m never going to have money trouble again!” that you get. That was the point of my original comment - you can have that feeling, make big purchases that you need to make, and still understand when to stop spending. Again, you can be worried about someone, but you can’t just say “Sorry, you can’t handle this. Science says so.”
Yes, it’s difficult to stop spending money when your bank account still has more money than you ever thought you’d see, but people are capable of overcoming it, and we shouldn’t assume someone is struggling with it until we can see that they’re struggling with it. As I said, I made nearly the same big purchases this woman did before going back to my usual penny-pinching - what we know about this woman isn’t enough to comment on whether or not she’s struggling to return to her normal spending.
If she says she’s having problems, or if we see that she’s spending herself into bankruptcy, then yes, we can say she has a problem. Until then, she’s a stranger who should be assumed to be capable of making good decisions for herself. It’s not our place to force “help” on someone. No matter how good the intentions, it’s unfair and belittling to assume it’s needed when you don’t actually know.
You seem to have things backwards with what you shouldn’t assume - you can be worried about someone, but you should have enough faith in your fellow human that you err on the side of assuming they’re capable of making the right decisions for themselves.
Thank you for understanding this.
Conservatives deserve to be treated the same way they treat others.
Who tf said she’s a conservative?
What?? Nobody. I’m talking about the people who wrote those shitty laws and still uphold them. Go away with your weird victimhood complex.
This is an article about a woman who was unfairly targeted by conservatives for her miscarriage.
Your comment implies that she deserved this treatment for voting conservative.
No, it doesn’t. At all.
No, random passerby, fully understood what they meant.
who now lives in South Dakota with three sons
After that ordeal she moved to a redder state??? Honey. Sweetie. Get yourself to an Illinois-level state or better.
You don’t know if she’s staying close to family or something.
So move them to a blue state too? Like damn, it’s pretty clear by now no one is actually safe living there.
I can’t muster the energy to tell this woman what she should or should not do after the government stole 2 years of her life for a miscarriage.
Not to mention that there were people in this story that stole the remains and kept them for themselves.
It’s a wild story and I can’t believe the only thing any of you can focus on is advising this woman what she should do with her life now.
It’s the leopards eating faces problem. We tell people that the leopards are going to eat their face and they don’t listen. Then when the leopard eats their face they realize the leopards are bad after all and cry about how horrible having their face eaten was, but then keep voting for (or in this case, living with) the leopards anyway.
If red states saw the type of brain drain and corporate disinvestment that their harmful policies would normally realize in a sane society, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess. But instead we have normalized living in, working in, and paying taxes to states with ineffective and cruel government policies. Let’s also remember that thanks to the electoral college, every person who lives in a solid red state contributes to the Republican party vote, regardless of what they actually put on their ballot.
It’s hard enough living in a world full of people who have to learn things the hard way, but it’s even worse when they don’t even learn things the hard way.
Did she vote for any of this or is she automatically guilty for living in a red state? Go touch grass
You have no idea how this woman voted.
She didn’t deserve this in any way regardless.
