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L.A. Restaurateur Pleads Guilty To Poisoning Unborn Fetus With Abortion Drug

By Amy Feinstein
Published on: 07:36 PST, Nov 14, 2015

Josh Woodward, restaurateur and part owner of Table 8, has taken a plea and will do jail time for killing his girlfriend’s unborn fetus with an abortion drug.

TMZ has reported that Woodward, who owned restaurants in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City, intentionally used the drug Misoprostol to induce an abortion. Woodward is expected to get nine years when he is sentenced in January.

The New York Daily News says that Woodward was convicted yesterday of attempted murder for slipping his then girlfriend a drug without her knowledge when she was 13 weeks pregnant.

“Joshua Woodward pleaded no contest to secretly giving his girlfriend the early-term abortion drug misoprostol shortly before she miscarried in October 2009, Los Angeles prosecutors said.”

Woodward administered the drug Misoprostol in powdered form once orally and twice vaginally during foreplay.

“Woodward, a partner in the Table 8 restaurant chain that graced the Cooper Square Hotel before it changed to Standard Hotel East Village, is expected to get nine years in state prison at his sentencing next year, prosecutors said.”

The girlfriend said that Woodward did not want the baby and repeatedly begged her to get an abortion, which she refused. He then took matters into his own hands, literally. As part of the investigation after the loss of the pregnancy, the police found searches on Woodward’s computer which included “ways men have forced abortions” and “evil ways to terminate a pregnancy.”

He lured the woman back into a relationship by saying he had changed his mind, and wanted to be a supportive parent, and then put his plan into action with the Misoprostol powder.

“With his right hand he pulled out a small piece of clear plastic with a white powdery substance from his right front pocket and started grinding the item on his pants just below the pocket,” the detective wrote in the 2009 court paperwork.

The Daily News believes that Woodward had hatched the plan from the time the woman refused to get an abortion, as the woman was his mistress, and at the time, he was engaged to writer, Suzy Buckley.

“Josh Woodward was arrested in October 2009 after a woman he was having a relationship with lost the child she was carrying after just 13 weeks and noticed a white powder in her underwear. She told police that she recalled Woodward dipping his finger into a bag before touching her sexually during a previous encounter, and said that hours later she lost the fetus. A test of the substance found that it was misoprostol, a drug used to induce labor and terminate pregnancies.”

When Woodward was arrested, he had more of the substance in his pocket, as the woman had followed police advice, and not told him that she had miscarried the fetus. After his arrest, Buckley broke up with Woodward, but she has since married him, and they had their first child in 2014.

The Wrap has reported that in discovery, the district attorney found that Woodward had tried on at least three occasions to induce abortion, and each time he researched how to increase the dose to cause a miscarriage in an amount that could not be detected by blood tests. Woodward’s plea will at least mean that he does nine years in prison.

Do you think Woodward deserves to do more or less time in prison?

[Photo courtesy of Twitter]

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