Defamation suit targets attorney Al Watkins, ex-wife

A St. Louis attorney is being sued by the executive chairman of a billion dollar critical minerals company after the attorney allegedly urged his ex-wife to make a “defamatory and outrageous” call to the executive’s Idaho housekeeper.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Idaho, is just the latest chapter in the drama between Evolution Metals and Technology and local attorney Al Watkins, who at one point was to play a key role in the firm.  

At the center of the suit is a September 2025 phone call made by Watkins’ ex-wife Carolina Diaz-Silva to a Peruvian domestic worker employed by William David Wilcox in Hailey, Idaho.

The Peruvian domestic worker, Doris Rojas, provides childcare and “household services” to Wilcox. Diaz-Silva is also being sued over the call, which took place last September.

The lawsuit says that during that call Diaz-Silva “published” false statements about Wilcox, including that he abuses women and is a kidnapper and “previously held the mother of his child captive for months on a ranch in Ketchum, Idaho.” The suit also accuses Diaz-Silva of saying that Wilcox “trafficked Rojas into the United States to force her to work against her will.” 

As SLM reported in June, Diaz-Silva said in a deposition she was motivated to make the call out of concern for Rojas, a young woman who, like her, was from Peru and who she understood could potentially be in danger. She said that Watkins gave her Rojas’ phone number and alerted her to Rojas having been potentially trafficked to Idaho. Diaz-Silva said she forgot about the call—which was conducted almost entirely in Spanish—until she was served a subpoena to be deposed about it. 

A partial transcript of the call between the two women, including a translation by a certified court interpreter, shows at least some of the alleged defamatory statements were phrased more as questions than declarative statements. 

At one point in the brief conversation, Diaz-Silva said, according to the transcript, “And you haven’t been trafficked, they’ve brought you here to the States, you’re in Idaho, right?”

Also, the use of the word “kidnapped” appears to have been used by Diaz-Silva as an aside in English in a conversation otherwise conducted in Spanish. Speaking of Wilcox, Diaz-Silva said, according to the transcript, “The attorney told me that he can be he can be a very nice man, very likeable, that he has…hmm…kidnapped”—with that one word in English before she reverted to Spanish—“how do you say, that he has held people against their will in the past, that the woman who had his child, that he had her trapped for a few months in Ketchum on a ranch.”

The lawsuit argues that Diaz-Silva told Rojas to leave Wilcox’s home in Idaho, and that in doing so she was seeking to “shatter household stability” for Wilcox, making it harder for him to carry out a custody case against the mother of his daughter.

In an email to SLM, Diaz-Silva called the whole matter very upsetting. “I have nothing to do with this, and I have not defamed anyone. I was told that a young hispanic girl, who didn’t speak English, was in danger and asked to speak with her and ask questions about her safety,” she said. “I guess no good deed goes unpunished.”

Watkins denies that the call was defamatory, telling SLM, “That dog won’t hunt.” He reiterated that the motivation for his ex-wife making the call was simple concern for a woman he reasonably believed to be in danger. Wilcox’s Idaho-based attorney did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment. 

Watkins adds that lawyers representing him and his ex-wife plan to file a motion to dismiss the suit on the basis of improper service. “I was advised by my co-defendant that some vile process server had tried to serve her with a copy of the lawsuit but, instead, served the fellow preparing to walk her dog. I was tickled pink, like a rash,” he says. 

Back in the spring of 2025, Watkins and Wilcox were on decidedly better terms, with Evolution Metals and Technology gearing up to go public and establish its headquarters in St. Louis.

The plan had been for Florida-based Evolution Metals LLC to purchase St. Louis-based Critical Mineral Recovery as well as four Korean companies. Evolution would then merge with a Chicago-based special purpose acquisition company and the new entity would go public as Evolution Metals and Technology. St. Louis businessman Rob Feldman, the CEO of Critical Mineral Recovery,  was to become the new company’s co-CEO, and Watkins was to be the chief legal officer. 

The deal was set to close in July of last year. 

It didn’t happen. Watkins told SLM that the deal fell apart after he discovered that executive chairman David Wilcox’s full legal name was William David Wilcox, and that he had a similarly named company called Evolution Metals Corporation, which had been sued by an investor and a former executive, each saying they were owed money. 

However, Wilcox’s team suggested in an email to SLM that the true cause of the split was that Critical Mineral Recovery’s facility in Fredericktown suffered a catastrophic fire in October of 2024. 

Whatever the cause, Evolution Metals and Technology went public on the NASDAQ in January sans Feldman and Watkins. The relationship between Watkins and the company soon turned acrimonious.

The Idaho defamation suit is the second piece of litigation that has come to involve Watkins, Wilcox, and Diaz-Silva. 

The other is a custody suit between Wilcox and the mother of his child, which is playing out in state court in Idaho. It was in the context of that suit that Diaz-Silva was originally deposed in St. Louis County about the call. 

It was also in the context of that paternity suit that Diaz-Silva’s attorney Patrick Watts made accusations at the man who became EMAT’s chief legal officer after Wilcox and Watkins parted ways. A wide-ranging filing by Watts accused John Arrastia of failing to disclose to Evolution’s board that Wilcox employs “Peruvian foreign nationals as domestic servants” when they are not lawfully in the country. It also accused Arrastia of having conflicting loyalties—both to Wilcox personally as his lawyer in the paternity suit and to Evolution Metals’ shareholders as its chief legal officer. 

In Idaho, Wilcox has been charged with violating the order of protection that the mother of his child took out against him. He’s pleaded not guilty and the matter is set for trial in December. He’s also filed a series of increasingly expansive records requests seeking information about calls to law enforcement made by his child’s mother “in regards to her relationship and incidents with David Wilcox.”

Meanwhile, Evolution Metals and Technology’s stock price has taken a beating in recent months. In January, it hit a high of above $21, but has since fallen to around $3.30, as of Thursday.

In April, the company was sued by the law firm Jones Day, which says it’s owed $3.9 million in fees related to legal work helping the firm prepare to go public. 

Evolution Metals and Technologies filed a motion to dismiss one count of the lawsuit, in which Jones Day is seeking to recover attorneys’ fees and litigation expenses. In their motion to dismiss that count, attorneys for the minerals company argued that the white-shoe law firm “botched” the job they’d been hired to do.

Last week, a judge in Georgia denied Evolution Metal’s motion to dismiss.