The Environmental Lawyer Chevron Put Behind Bars Is Finally Free
He beat them in court, and the company used the justice system to lock him up — everyone should know the Steven Donziger case
Imagine if instead of a movie telling my story, I’d gone to jail. That’s essentially what has happened to Steve Donziger. — Erin Brockovich
This is one of the most horrific case studies of corporate control over all of America, including the justice system. A corporation was, in effect, the prosecutor, judge, jury, and sentencer. Chevron got beat in a foreign court, never paid a cent of the settlement, spent millions using its influence to crucify the lawyer that beat them, and they won.
Steven Donziger spent almost three years in detention because he dared stand up to corporate power.
The UN in 2019 ruled that his treatment was against international law, including his right to a fair trial, a fair judge, and the right to be free from arbitrary detention — of course, America has never really cared about human rights.
Every American should know this case because I think it is a window into the future. Chevron, fossil fuel companies, and corporations, in general, see this as a case study for what’s to come.
A future where ever more desperate Americans, who try to utilize their first amendment rights, protest the grotesque purchasing of their government and environmental degradation, will be hauled off to a cell for trying to help the people, save the planet, and get in the way of profits.
Steven Donziger’s case isn’t simply a disgusting abuse of the justice system; it’s the canary in the coal mine.
Steven Donziger spent almost three years in detention because he dared stand up to corporate power.
This dystopian saga goes back thirty years and starts in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It is regarded as one of the worst environmental disasters in history, the details more unbelievable every time I read them. It’s hard to comprehend the lack of accountability for a corporation that ruined lives.
Here’s how it started:
From 1964 to 1990, Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, allegedly spilled more than 16m gallons of crude oil — “80 times more oil than was spilled in BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster”, according to Gizmodo — and 18bn gallons of polluted wastewater in the Amazon rainforest. The pollution allegedly contaminated the ground and waterways with toxic chemicals that the plaintiffs — mostly Indigenous people and poor farmers — say has caused cancer, miscarriages, skin conditions and birth defects. — Erin Brockovich for The Guardian
Steven Donziger arrived in Ecuador in the early nineties to build an environmental case on behalf of the indigenous and farmers allegedly affected by the Texaco contamination. It eventually became a 30,000-person class-action suit in a New York federal court.
Not wanting an embarrassing and public trial in America and assuming they’d get preferential treatment in a smaller nation that relies heavily on the oil industry, Texaco lobbied to move the trial to Ecuador. A US judge agreed on the condition that the company accepts the eventual verdict.
That, of course, didn’t happen.
In 2011, Donziger and his team won. The Ecuadorian court found Chevron was ‘responsible for vast contamination’ and ordered the company to pay $18 billion in damages, which was the largest judgment ever awarded in an environmental suit — it was later reduced to $9.5 billion by the Ecuadorian national court of justice but the original decision was affirmed.
Both parties appealed the judgment, with Chevron claiming the ruling was ‘illegitimate and unenforceable,’ alleging corruption and that the plaintiffs themselves drafted the opinion. Donziger’s team, of course, denied the allegations and said, if anything, the damages were too low.
In 2011, Donziger and his team won. The Ecuadorian court found Chevron was ‘responsible for vast contamination’ and ordered the company to pay $18 billion in damages…
This is where it starts to get really off the rails.
Chevron’s allegations of corruption were based on the testimony of Ecuadorian judge Alberto Guerra, who claimed Donziger and the plaintiffs bribed him to influence the judgment against Chevron.
He later recanted his testimony in 2015, with Vice News reporting: “In New York, Guerra testified that he had struck a deal between the plaintiffs and the presiding judge, Nicolas Zambrano: Guerra would ghostwrite the verdict, Zambrano would sign it, and the two would share an alleged $500,000 in kickbacks from the plaintiffs… But later on, “in testimony given before the international tribunal…Guerra has now admitted that there is no evidence to corroborate allegations of a bribe or a ghostwritten judgment, and that large parts of his sworn testimony, used by Kaplan in the RICO case to block enforcement of the ruling against Chevron, were exaggerated and, in other cases, simply not true.”
Chevron claims his testimony wasn’t critical, and they had proven the case before the aforementioned tribunal. But for his work, Chevron relocated judge Guerra to the United States and gave him a $12,000 a month salary — seriously.
And we’re still just getting started.
Chevron’s legal strategy, from the beginning, has been to attack Steven Donziger. Corporations with that amount of resources often seek to stretch out the legal process and bleed their opponent dry financially and bury them in paperwork. It becomes a war of attrition, and nobody can financially take on a freaking corporation or oil giant.
It is literally cheaper for them to spend years paying millions in legal fees and muddying the system than it is to pay a multi-billion-dollar settlement.
And so, they pursued the environmental lawyer.
The oil company “hired private investigators to track Donziger, created a publication” which smeared him, and “put together a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms, who have successfully pursued an extraordinary campaign against him”, the Intercept reported in 2020… Donziger has spent years of his life fighting seemingly endless litigation. In 2011, Chevron sued Donziger and members of the lawsuit in a US court for $60m in damages, accusing them of extortion and invoking a sweeping and controversial statute originally created to fight the Mafia. — E.B. for The Guardian
The company dropped the monetary damages so there wouldn’t be a jury trial, and they won the suit. During the trial, the company demanded that Donziger hand over his phone and laptops. He refused and filed an appeal, saying there was sensitive information regarding victims and the Chevron case, and handing over all his electronics would go against attorney-client privilege — but said he’d turn everything over if he lost the appeal.
The US attorney’s office declined to prosecute him for contempt — that is an important point.
But the judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, who it was later found had freaking investments in Chevron, seemed hell-bent on making an example of Donziger, and in an unprecedented move, drafted the criminal charges himself and gave the case to a freaking private law firm, Seward & Kissel, who had previously had Chevron as a client, to prosecute the environmental lawyer on the state’s behalf.
A Chevron-linked judge wanted to pursue the case to the maximum and chose a Chevron-linked law firm to prosecute Donziger.
Judge Kaplan went even further and bypassed the usual random selection process and personally selected U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska to oversee the case. Judge Preska has ties to the Federalist Society, which of course, has Chevron as one of its donors.
A Chevron-linked judge selected a Chevron-linked private law firm to act as the state prosecutor and then chose another Chevron-linked judge to oversee the case.
After having shown up for weeks of depositions and court appearances, Donziger was somehow deemed a flight risk had his passport taken, and was sentenced to house arrest. A move he says makes him the only lawyer to be held in detention pre-trial for a misdemeanor charge.
He spent over eight hundred days confined to his home awaiting the trial, had his bank accounts frozen, couldn’t earn money, still faces massive fines and legal fees, and had a lien on his apartment.
He lost the contempt case, lost his law license, and judge Preska sentenced him to six months in prison, the maximum allowed.
In October of 2021, Donziger reported to federal prison.
After serving two months out of the six, he was able to return home as part of a COVID-related early-release program but still was under house arrest with an ankle bracelet.
On April 25th of this year, after 993 days of detention, Steven Donziger was finally free.
He spent over eight hundred days confined to his home awaiting the trial, had his bank accounts frozen, couldn’t earn money, still faces massive fines and legal fees, and had a lien on his apartment.
This case is extraordinary on every level. It’s easy to be depressed when learning about it, but Donziger is an inspiration. A look at his social media shows a man who has somehow remained optimistic and resilient in the face of inexcusable and relentless injustice.
From his home during house arrest, he was still fighting for the victims who have been hurt the most by the alleged crimes of Chevron: the Ecuadorians.
In a recent podcast for the Intercept, Donziger says the movement is stronger than ever. Chevron’s overreach has led to a lot of attention on the case — obviously barely a peep from mainstream American outlets. But as I mentioned, even the UN said it was clearly a violation of international law.
Twenty-nine Nobel Laureates signed an open letter, saying Donziger is the victim of ‘judicial harassment.’ Hundreds of human rights organizations and nine members of the US Congress have penned similar letters.
There’s also now a movement for President Biden to pardon him and for his law license to be reinstated.
But it’s not over for Donziger, Chevron, the Ecuadorians, and all of us.
This is an example of what’s to come. There are parallels with the Standing Rock or Line 3 pipeline protests. Massive multi-billion dollar corporations have the resources to crush dissent and influence the justice system to lock up anyone who stands in their way.
They have the money to hire private mercenaries and investigators to harass peaceful protesters, and hire teams and teams of high-paid lawyers to use every tool available to get activists accused, fined, sentenced, and locked up on flimsy allegations of loitering, trespassing, or destruction of property.
With the state of global warming and this level of corruption in our governments, reversing the humanity-ending threats to our planet is likely going to fall on the shoulders of the people.
It is going to end up being ‘we the people’ and groups like Extinction Rebellion that will be the only line of defense.
The capitalist-eternal-growth-profit machine only goes in one direction. It is literally incapable of properly factoring in what it calls ‘externalities.’ They won’t even stop when the last river is poisoned, ocean is dead, and tree is cut. It is a system with only one mode of operation: exploitation until exhaustion.
We all need to take inspiration and a lesson from the indigenous at Standing Rock, Erin Brockovich, Steven Donziger, Christian Smalls, and activists all over the world, and do what little we can to push back against corporate totalitarian power.
A little civil disobedience can go a long way.
One love.