Opinion: Rachel Mitchell Turned One Disabled Woman’s Love Life Into a 14-Count Felony Spectacle
- Justice for Laura volunteer
- Dec 13, 2025
- 18 min read
Updated: Dec 16, 2025
When the story first hit Arizona news, it sounded like something dreamed up in a TV writers’ room.
A Phoenix woman, Laura Owens, supposedly fakes a pregnancy with former Bachelor lead Clayton Echard, files a paternity case, loses — and then somehow ends up criminally indicted on seven felony counts in May 2025. The headlines said an online group called “Justice for Clayton” helped expose her, and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell swooped in to finish the job. The message was clear: you don’t pull felony charges out of a family-court mess unless it’s really, really bad. In a world where paternity cases usually end with DNA results, “you’re not the father”, and blocked numbers, the public was told to take the leap — she must be guilty. Trust us.
I more or less did, until Mitchell went back for seconds.
Last week, she announced a superseding indictment adding seven more felonies — this time wrapped around an earlier relationship with a man named Greg Gillespie, whom Owens had sued in 2021 for “abortion coercion.” Overnight, Owens stopped being just the woman who supposedly lied to a TV personality and became, in Mitchell’s telling, the architect of two separate “fraud schemes” years apart, now staring at fourteen felonies over two short, failed relationships. At that point, the story stopped sounding tough and started sounding strange. If this was really just about “protecting the public,” why did it read more like a season arc than a charging decision?
So I did what the press largely hasn’t bothered to do: I went past the JFC threads and slick breakdowns, pulled the dockets, read the civil and family-court filings in full, and walked through both indictments line by line. I went looking for the massive, hidden fraud that would justify turning a family-court disaster into a 14-count epic.
I didn’t find it.
What I found instead was this: in both the Echard and Gillespie cases, the record includes early clinic-run hCG pregnancy tests that came back positive — tests from licensed medical providers that neither man nor his lawyers has ever claimed were forged. Echard even admitted to inviting Owens to his apartment under false pretenses to take a pregnancy test he purchased, which was positive. And, long before Mitchell branded Owens a fraud, Arizona judges had also granted her a two-year order of protection against Echard (which he contested twice and lost, expiring only last month) and three separate orders of protection against Gillespie, one still active. None of that shows up in Mitchell’s press releases, or in the national coverage that treated those releases as gospel.
Yet it is Owens — a 35-year-old autistic woman who reportedly weighs in the 80s, with no prior criminal record — who is now being treated as if she were running a high-end criminal racket. Across the two indictments, she faces two charges in the same felony class as manslaughter, plus five perjury counts and a stack of additional felonies. On paper, if a judge ever ran the maximums back-to-back, she could be looking at more than sixty years — effectively life in prison — over how she handled the worst months of her love life.
Neither man says she wanted his money. Neither claims physical injury. With Echard, she asked for a parenting plan, not a payout; with Gillespie, she once proposed that any judgment in the civil case go to charity, not to herself. In their own telling, she was chasing connection, not cash.
You can believe she was never pregnant, you can believe she was, or you can sit uneasily in the middle — and the question still doesn’t go away: how did a woman the State itself effectively paints as desperate for relationships wind up charged like someone who killed two people?
And once you ask that, the next question is even uglier: if this were the exact same mess between two warehouse coworkers in west Phoenix — no Bachelor lead, no built-in fanbase, no Reddit vigilantes — is there any chance Rachel Mitchell would have sent a tactical team through a front door, assigned a special-crimes prosecutor, and stretched two chaotic relationships into a 14-count felony saga in a county with more than 13,000 violent crimes a year, most of them unsolved?
Or is this what happens when a reality-TV mob picks its villain, a celebrity brings his own cheering section, and an elected prosecutor decides that in a place drowning in actual violence, the safest legacy play is turning one disabled woman’s love life into a felony spectacle — and treating her like she’s already been convicted.
The Echard Case
The Echard chapter began the way a lot of bad stories do: a one-night hookup in August 2023, followed by panic and lawyers.
In the paternity record, this is not a “she just made it up out of nowhere” scenario. Owens produced early positive urine and blood hCG tests from actual clinics. Media coverage summarizing the record acknowledges those tests; nobody — not Echard, not the State — has claimed that the labs themselves were forged or that clinic staff were in on some conspiracy.
Owens has said she also took a positive home pregnancy test in front of Echard; he has acknowledged in interviews that she took a test in his presence, even as he disputes what it meant. Her paternity petition asked for a parenting plan and shared responsibility, not a giant damages award or a lifetime payout.
Months later, she told the court she had miscarried and moved to dismiss her own paternity case. Both parties were still representing themselves. At that fork in the road, a judge could have simply granted the dismissal, closed the file, and left two adults to crawl out of a disaster.
Instead, Echard hired counsel and pushed to keep the litigation alive — for a declaration that he was not the father, a formal teardown of Owens’ credibility, and his fees. Judge Julie Mata obliged. In June 2024, she issued a scathing ruling finding Owens’ claims “not grounded in fact,” ordering her to pay roughly $149,000 in Echard’s fees, and referring her to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office for possible perjury and evidence tampering over an ultrasound image and video she’d shared privately, not as court exhibits.
That referral — plus a growing online campaign — is what turned a collapsed paternity case into a criminal file.
From Paternity Case to Fandom Campaign
Echard did not walk into this as a universally beloved figure. His season of The Bachelor was widely criticized; one recap famously asked whether he was “the biggest f***boy in Bachelor history.” His public brand was “guy who humiliated women on television,” not “model citizen.”
Owens’ paternity petition handed him something much better: a redemption role. In his retelling on podcasts and reality spin-offs, he became the nearly ruined man targeted by a woman who would supposedly say anything — a storyline he has repeated so often that the litigation now functions as Season Two of his media life rather than a one-off court case.
Around that storyline, a cottage industry grew. Under the “Justice for Clayton” banner, accounts sprang up on X, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube, along with dedicated sites for the cause. They do not read like casual fan pages. They read like an organized project to turn one woman into a permanent villain: multi-page wikis cataloging “The Laura Owens Court Cases,” curated timelines of every filing, links to fundraisers for the men, and whole playlists of monetized commentary content breaking down her medical records, text messages, and court appearances episode by episode. In the comment sections, strangers who have never met Owens vote on whether a new filing makes her a “monster,” a “predator,” or a “pathological liar.” Her life is treated as content to be refreshed, not a reality to be lived in.
The fixation hasn’t stayed online. Supporters trade court dates, travel to hearings, live-post from the hallway, and treat routine status conferences like fan conventions. Money is raised to buy police body-cam footage and obtain records; the resulting clips are chopped into reaction videos and passed around for sport. The emotional through-line is not concern about the integrity of the legal system. It is hostility toward a single woman who, in this universe, has stopped being a person altogether and become a hated character they feel entitled to drag from platform to platform.
Eventually, the campaign stopped just talking about prosecution and started trying to engineer it. Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk hosted Echard, framed him as the target of a “false accuser,” and promised to pressure Mitchell “publicly and privately” to bring charges. JFC members circulated letter templates urging Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell to indict Owens. And just days after Judge Mata’s referral, photographs circulated of Mitchell smiling beside a Justice for Clayton supporter, holding one of those letters calling for Owens’ prosecution — a picture JFC accounts themselves promoted as proof their effort was paying off.
Most prosecutors, confronted with that level of organized fandom and personal animus toward a single defendant, make a point of saying they don’t take charging requests from online mobs. Mitchell didn’t just ignore the line; she stepped over it, then let the same ecosystem that hounded Owens for months serve as her loudest cheering section.
A SWAT-Style Raid Over “Pregnancy Fraud”
Rather than quietly assigning a line prosecutor to review transcripts and medical records, Mitchell handed the file to Edward Leiter, a senior “special crimes” attorney whose usual portfolio includes terrorism, gangs, and organized crime.
Then, Mitchell’s office helped green-light a pre-dawn tactical raid on the Owens family home.
On January 29, 2025, Scottsdale’s Special Assignments Unit — its tactical/SWAT arm — executed a pre-dawn warrant at the Owens property. According to publicly available Scottsdale PD documents, sixteen officers were deployed. Inside the main house were Owens’ elderly parents, including her 80-year-old father, National Radio Hall of Fame inductee Ronn Owens, who has lived with Parkinson’s disease for decades. Owens herself, autistic, underweight, and with no criminal record, was in a small detached guest casita. Nothing in the police paperwork indicates weapons, violence, or any threat to officer safety from anyone on the property.
Measured against standard law-enforcement practice, this was an extreme choice.
Agencies — including Scottsdale PD in their own public materials — state that tactical units are reserved for situations involving armed subjects, barricades, violent felonies, or imminent threats to life. None of those conditions appear anywhere in the reporting for this case. If investigators wanted documents, phones, or medical records, they could have obtained them through far less intrusive means: a daytime knock-and-talk, a scheduled search, a subpoena duces tecum, or even simply requesting voluntary production. All are routine in white-collar and family-court-adjacent investigations.
Instead, the county’s most forceful option was chosen — and the consequences quickly left the justice system and entered the content economy.
Body-camera footage of the raid, obtained through a paid public-records request crowdfunded by a “Justice for Clayton” creator, shows the sixteen-officer stack in full tactical gear shouting commands and threatening to breach the door. When officers pull Owens into the hallway, she panics, swears, and pleads with them not to wake or drag her disabled father out of bed — an instinctive, human reaction to armed men flooding your home before sunrise.
The framing online has been anything but human. The footage was chopped into viral clips and reposted as commentary fodder for the same online community that had been demanding her indictment for months. Strangers debated her tone, posture, and fear as though they were evaluating a reality-show episode, not a real-world raid on a disabled woman’s home. The videos then migrated to outlets like The Daily Mail and Inside Edition, where a few chaotic seconds were turned into shorthand for her entire mental state.
If Maricopa County has ever deployed a full tactical team in response to allegations rooted in a paternity petition, it has not been advertised. There is no public record of any other family-court litigant — in a case with no violence, no weapons, no criminal history, and no ongoing threat — being met with a sixteen-officer, pre-dawn SWAT-style entry.
The First Indictment: Making a “Scheme” Out of a Mess
On May 6, 2025, Mitchell’s office issued a press release announcing that a grand jury had indicted “Laura Michelle Owens” on seven felony counts tied to what MCAO called a “paternity scheme” against Echard. According to that release and subsequent media coverage, investigators concluded that between May 2023 and June 2024, Owens altered an ultrasound image, fabricated a pregnancy video, and lied multiple times under oath.
If you only read the press release, you would never know that early clinic-run hCG tests are in the record and have not been alleged to be forged; or that the ultrasound image and video at the heart of the case was sent privately to Echard, not presented to the court as official exhibits. The public storyline is streamlined: not “a chaotic early pregnancy that went off the rails,” but a neat “scheme,” slotted on the same page of MCAO’s website as murderers, child predators, and road-rage shooters.
Fraudulent schemes and artifices is the statute Arizona normally uses for big swindles — people who loot the vulnerable, rig contracts, or steal large sums through deception. Perjury is technically a Class 4 felony, but in practice is almost never charged because the system would collapse if every fuzzy memory, exaggeration, or contradiction turned into its own criminal case.
That’s not just a defense-bar talking point. Gregg Woodnick, the Phoenix attorney who represented Echard in the paternity case and Greg Gillespie in related civil litigation, has publicly said that in more than 25 years of practice in Arizona, he has “never actually seen someone prosecuted for [perjury].” When the lawyer on the men’s side of the aisle is stunned that perjury is being criminally charged at all, you’re not looking at routine line-drawing. You’re looking at an outlier.
Yet in this case, perjury is suddenly center stage. Between the Echard indictment and the later superseding indictment, Owens now faces five separate perjury counts — each one carrying the potential for years in prison if stacked harshly — and two Class 2 “fraud schemes” counts on top of that.
A Press Release Written Like a Reality Show Recap
If you scroll through the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office press releases, a pattern emerges almost immediately. When the subject is a violent crime, the headline focuses on the act, not the accused. “Father Indicted for Death of 5-Year-Old Daughter.” “Road
Rage Shooter Indicted.” “Domestic Abuser Sentenced to Life in Prison for Murder.” The individuals involved are treated as anonymous until later in the text. The office does not turn victims into characters, and it does not frame cases around fame.
The Owens release breaks that pattern in every direction. The headline is not about what allegedly happened; it is her name: “Laura Owens Indicted on Fraud Charges.” Her full name is repeated in the first sentence. And then, in a departure from the usual template, the press release elevates the opposing party not as an “alleged victim” or a “man,” but explicitly as “a former contestant on the television program The Bachelor, Clayton Echard.”
And here is the part that makes the deviation impossible to shrug off as coincidence:
Since Rachel Mitchell was sworn in on January 6, 2025, not a single other press release reviewed from her administration has used an individual defendant’s full name in the headline.
Not one.
Just as striking: Owens is the only defendant during Mitchell’s tenure to receive two press releases — one for the original indictment and another for the superseding indictment.
Even in cases involving a child’s death, sexual exploitation of minors, or serious violence, there is no double-announcement treatment. Those cases get one release, written in generic terms, with no attempt to create a headline character.
But in a case that began with a paternity petition, Mitchell’s office not only broke its own naming convention — it framed the entire release around a reality-TV personality. It is the only instance in which MCAO has ever named a celebrity as the anchor point of a criminal charging document. Not in homicide cases. Not in child exploitation cases. Only her.
The Second Indictment: Rewriting the Gillespie Story
Six months after the Echard charges, Mitchell’s office went back to the well.
On November 6, 2025, MCAO announced a superseding indictment tied to a different brief relationship from 2021 with a man named Greg Gillespie. The official release is titled “Laura Owens Indicted on Additional Felony Charges,” and opens by describing
Gillespie as a “second victim” of a false pregnancy claim. According to MCAO’s summary, he went on a few dates with Owens, decided not to continue, and she then fabricated a pregnancy using falsified documents. The charges include another Class 2 fraudulent schemes count, perjury, identity theft, forgery, and theft by extortion (“accuse of crime”).
If you stop reading there, you would never know what is in the court filings from Owens v. Gillespie, a civil action she brought in 2021 alleging “abortion coercion” and related claims.
In that case, Owens submitted documentation of a positive urine pregnancy test from a major clinic. Nothing in the public record suggests that Gillespie’s side ever seriously contested that early positive. The dispute was about what happened next — about whether he encouraged or pressured her to terminate, and about the fallout in their short relationship.
None of that context appears in the November 6 announcement. On the county website, Gillespie is cleanly labeled a “victim.” Owens is framed, twice over, as a woman who lied about pregnancy and spun out a scheme. Her protective orders — granted by Arizona judges after hearings — are erased.
Criminalizing Private Drama and “Catfishing”?
One of the more striking features of the superseding indictment is how much of the alleged wrongdoing appears to involve private communications: documents and messages Owens allegedly sent directly to Gillespie or others, rather than anything she filed with a court or used to pry money out of a bank.
That raises a hard question: if sending embellished or misleading documents to a romantic partner is now “identity theft,” “forgery,” or “fraudulent schemes,” where exactly is the line? Catfishing — people misrepresenting themselves online to romantic targets using altered images, invented jobs, or fake medical stories — is hardly rare. It is ugly and often cruel. But Arizona has not historically treated every manipulative dating lie as a felony, much less as a Class 2 fraud scheme.
The real difference here is who the target is and how much public energy is available to reward a prosecution.
Paternity Law Was Never Meant To Be a Felony Trap
Under Arizona law, what Owens did in 2023 is not only legal, it’s expressly anticipated. A.R.S. § 25-804 allows a petition to establish paternity to be filed during pregnancy; there is no requirement of a live birth, and no clause that converts an ultimately incorrect belief about paternity into a felony. The law assumes what real life has always reflected: early pregnancies are fragile, facts can change, and people sometimes get it wrong.
In that framework, there are essentially two lawful outcomes to a paternity case: the court finds you are the father, or the court finds you are not. The remedy for being wrong has always been civil — fee awards, sanctions, credibility findings — not prosecution. Owens filed a single paternity case in her life. She supported it with early clinic-run urine and blood hCG tests that were positive, which would more than satisfy any good-faith basis to file. When she later told the court she had miscarried, she moved to dismiss her own petition. That sequence is exactly what the statute contemplates, not what it criminalizes.
In reviewing reported cases and media coverage, I have not found another instance of a woman in the United States being charged with Class 2 “fraudulent schemes” and multiple perjury counts because she filed a paternity petition and later lost. That alone should set off alarms for anyone who works on reproductive justice, domestic-violence advocacy, or access to the courts. If asserting pregnancy in a paternity case — even one backed by lab results — can be retrofitted into a major fraud prosecution when the politics line up, the message is blunt: bring your pregnancy-related disputes to court at your own risk.
Perjury and Who It Gets Used On
Inside Arizona courtrooms, everyone understands the uncomfortable reality: witnesses fudge things constantly. They overstate, minimize, misremember dates. Judges issue blistering credibility findings. Lawyers use contradictions to win cases. Then the parties go home. Perjury charges are almost never layered on top, because if every bad answer under oath spawned its own criminal file, the entire system would choke.
That’s what makes Owens an outlier. Out of the tens of thousands of criminal prosecutions Maricopa County brings each year, the person now facing five separate perjury felonies is not a cartel witness, a corrupt official, or a mob lieutenant. It is a disabled woman in two failed relationships whose behavior — whatever you think of it — played out in the overlap between family court and online spectacle.
When the only time a statute gets dusted off is for the defendant who comes pre-packaged as an internet villain with a famous man on the other side of the “v.”, that isn’t neutral enforcement. That is selective deployment of the harshest tools on the one person it is politically safest to crush.
If You Change His Name, the Case Vanishes
You don’t need a memo labeled “SELECTIVE PROSECUTION” to see what’s happening. Imagine the exact same fact pattern with different names.
Owens works a warehouse job. The man in the caption is an immigrant coworker with no Wikipedia page and no podcast bookings. She files a first-time paternity petition, says she’s pregnant based on early tests, later says she miscarried and moves to dismiss. He insists she lied, says she sent him questionable images and dramatic messages about her health.
What happens in that world? Most likely, the judge dismisses the case. At worst, she gets scolded in a written order and maybe hit with some fees. It never becomes a criminal file, and it never lands on a prosecutor’s desk at all.
What does not happen is a SWAT-style raid on her parents’ house, a terrorism-credentialed special-crimes prosecutor, a fourteen-count felony stack, and press releases touting a “fraud scheme” with a theoretical 69-year exposure.
Now compare that to this case:
● The complaining man is a former Bachelor lead whose reputation has been burnished by a redemption tour.
● There is a coordinated fandom eager to punish Owens and applaud any official who does it.
● National commentators have publicly promised to pressure the County Attorney to indict.
● Photographs show the elected prosecutor posing with supporters holding letters demanding prosecution.
The same statutes that sit dormant in a thousand other messy relationship cases suddenly roar to life here. That’s what selective prosecution looks like in practice: not a written policy, but a pattern of who gets the book thrown at them and who gets told to sort it out in family court.
What Public Safety Risk, Exactly?
Prosecutors routinely justify hard choices by saying resources are finite. Mitchell herself has talked publicly about the office not having enough lawyers to take every case to trial and needing to triage.
So it’s fair to ask: what public-safety risk does Laura Owens actually pose that justifies this level of investment?
If you, or someone you love, has been the victim of a shooting, a sexual assault, a serious domestic-violence attack, or a random stabbing in a parking lot, you are entitled to be furious that this is where so much prosecutorial energy is going. You are also entitled, as a taxpayer, to know roughly what it has cost — in detective time, tactical deployments, expert witnesses, and courtroom hours — to chase one woman’s alleged lies about early pregnancies all the way from a paternity petition to a 14-count indictment.
Arizona’s public records laws give citizens the right to ask for that price tag. Whatever the exact dollar figure ends up being, the real cost is in the cases that didn’t get that attention because this one did.
And on a more basic level, there is a gut-check question for any Arizona resident: if you had to choose who you might encounter alone in an alley in Phoenix at night, would you rather it be Owens — an autistic, under-100-pound woman with no violent record — or one of the many unsolved, never-prosecuted violent offenders whose cases sit in MCAO’s backlog?
Because right now, the office is acting as if she is the greater threat.
The Chilling Message This Sends
There is another audience for this case: anyone in Arizona considering whether to step into a courtroom at all.
If making inconsistent statements about pregnancy timing, symptoms, and evidence in the middle of a chaotic breakup can be re-labeled “fraudulent schemes and artifices” and five counts of perjury, then every litigant in a high-conflict family case has reason to be afraid. Parents in custody battles routinely shade the truth. Survivors of abuse often tell their stories in messy, evolving ways. People misremember dates, minimize their own bad conduct, and overstate the other side’s.
Historically, the system has handled that with sanctions, fee awards, and sharp paragraphs in judicial rulings. If Rachel Mitchell’s new standard is that some of those litigants can be retrofitted into Class 2 fraud defendants once the internet picks a villain, that is not just about Owens. It is a warning shot to anyone whose personal life is complicated enough to land in court.
She Didn’t Ask for a Payout. He Got a Redemption Tour.
There is also something quietly backward about who has gained what from all this.
In the Echard paternity case, Owens did not ask for a check. She asked for a parenting plan and shared obligations. In the Gillespie civil suit, commentators who’ve reviewed the docket note that in a 2021 motion to seal court records, she asked the court to require a donation to a women’s charity rather than money for herself.
Whatever you think of her motives, she was not seeking a headline-grabbing windfall.
Echard, on the other hand, has turned the saga into a career asset — booking reality shows like Perfect Match and sitting for podcast interviews that market him as the man nearly destroyed by a “fake pregnancy” who fought back and won.
The criminal indictments from Mitchell’s office function as the final, official seal on that story. They are what make the “fraud” narrative more than just a fandom meme. And they do so by using the heaviest tools of Arizona criminal law on a defendant whose alleged wrongdoing, even at its worst, is miles away from the violent and organized crimes those statutes were written for.
What Mitchell’s Legacy Will Be
In the end, this case says far more about Rachel Mitchell’s judgment than about Laura Owens’.
No one is arguing that lying under oath is fine, or that sending altered images is acceptable. The question is whether those acts — filtered through early lab-confirmed pregnancies, medical trauma, disability, and the pressure cooker of online harassment — justify treating one woman like she is on par with a killer.
Mitchell has choices. She can quietly walk this back: dismiss the indictments, or at least cut them down to something that bears a rational relationship to the harm. She can acknowledge that perjury and fraud statutes were never meant to be sledgehammers for romantic chaos amplified by reality-TV fame.
Or she can double down, march this all the way to trial, and signal to every future litigant in Maricopa County that if the internet hates you enough — and if the person on the other side of your case has the right kind of platform — your private life can be mined, retrofitted, and prosecuted as if you were a public enemy.
If that’s the precedent she chooses, then years from now, when people talk about Rachel Mitchell’s tenure, the headline won’t just be about crime statistics or border policy. It will be about the case where, with a county full of unsolved violence, she chose to spend a staggering amount of time and power turning one disabled woman’s love life into a 14-count felony spectacle.
This article relies on publicly accessible filings, testimony, and reporting. It aims to summarize and contextualize the existing record but does not purport to speak for any party involved in the litigation. All interpretations are based on documents already in the public domain.