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- [00:00]
Zach Goldbaum
Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Lawless Planet ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This is the second episode in a two part series. If you haven't listened to last week's episode, you should check it out, but here's a quick recap. On February 14, 2011, a judge in Lagoagrio, Ecuador shocked the world by delivering a roughly nine and a half billion dollar judgment in the trial against Chevron. The case was brought on behalf of indigenous people and farmers who were affected by the company's oil operations in the jungle.
- [00:43]
Pablo Fajardo
10 years of struggle had results. It gave hope for justice and reparations.
- [00:50]
Zach Goldbaum
While lead Ecuadorian attorney Pablo Fajardo celebrated, his American counterpart, Steven Donziger, was nowhere to be seen. That's because two weeks earlier this happened.
- [01:01]
Steven Donziger
So I was going down to Ecuador on February 1, 2011. When I got down to the ground, I turned on my BlackBerry and it blew up. They had sued me.
- [01:14]
Zach Goldbaum
Basically what happened was this. Chevron was leaving nothing to chance. So in anticipation of an adverse judgment in Ecuador, they'd filed suit in the US against their main legal adversary, Steven Donziger.
- [01:31]
Steven Donziger
I appeared alone in court, representing myself against this phalanx, this army of lawyers from Chevron.
- [01:39]
Zach Goldbaum
It's February 8, 2011, just under a week before the verdict would come down in Ecuador and Steven Donziger is in lower Manhattan.
- [01:47]
Steven Donziger
The courtroom was packed. I mean, you couldn't get a seat in the gallery. It was almost like they came to witness a spectacle where the guy who had led the effort that I think had caused them such trouble for now many, many years was going to get basically crucified. I felt like I was on the cross.
- [02:06]
Zach Goldbaum
You felt like you were on the cross?
- [02:07]
Steven Donziger
Well, I don't mean to compare myself to Jesus Christ, but I'm just saying they were trying to crucify me.
- [02:14]
Zach Goldbaum
On the bench that day was the man who would decide his fate, the Honorable Judge Lewis Kaplan. He's wearing his signature aviator eyeglasses and his face seems stuck in a perpetual scowl.
- [02:26]
Steven Donziger
There's different views of Judge Kaplan. He used to be a defense lawyer for the tobacco industry at the highest level before he became a judge. Kaplan went to Harvard Law School, as did I. We obviously took completely divergent career paths. I think he didn't like that.
- [02:41]
Zach Goldbaum
Kaplan was set to rule on whether to block the impending Ecuadorian judgment. And their court filing is really something. Chevron reframed themselves as victims and called Steven Donziger, Pablo Fajardo and the other lawyers the Enterprise like they're some sort of criminal cabal. They had brought a racketeering or RICO case, which is a law originally aimed at organized crime, and it alleged that Donziger concocted a scheme to extort Chevron through bribery and fraud.
- [03:10]
Steven Donziger
Judge Kaplan basically said, do you want to stand up and say anything? And I basically said, I'm not going to say anything until I'm represented by counsel. And I would ask that you don't do anything until I can get counsel in here.
- [03:26]
Zach Goldbaum
How did Kaplan respond to that?
- [03:28]
Steven Donziger
Well, he's like, well, you went to Harvard Law School. Why don't you just represent yourself? He was mocking me. But of course, any lawyer, especially in that kind of complicated situation, who represents himself, you know, a lot of lawyers would say, that lawyer has a fool for a client. I was not that stupid where I was going to represent myself.
- [03:49]
Zach Goldbaum
In the end, Judge Kaplan sided with Chevron, granting a preemptive temporary restraining order that barred Donziger and his Ecuadorian co defendants from making any attempt to collect on whatever judgment might result from their lawsuit. In a bizarrely fawning statement, Kaplan wrote, quote, we are dealing here with a company of considerable importance to our economy that employs thousands all over the world, that supplies a group of commodities, gasoline, heating oil, other fuels and lubricants on which every one of us depends every single day. Remember, all of this was happening before the verdict would be announced in Ecuador. That would happen just a few days later when the judge handed down his landmark $9.5 billion judgment ruling against Chevron. But when that happened, even after 20 years of working on this case, Steven Donziger could hardly celebrate.
- [04:43]
Steven Donziger
I remember word came down, and I tried to sort of feel happy, but I was so hurting because I didn't know what was going to happen to my life. And the next several months was really some of the most intense weeks of my life where I truly didn't know if I'd be able to survive, you know, as a lawyer or as a respected person. And even physically, I was worried. I didn't know what they had in the sore for me. They were trying to crush me.
- [05:23]
Zach Goldbaum
For moddable originals. I'm Zach Goldbaum, and this is Lawless Planet. Each week we tell a new story about the true crimes fueling the climate crisis and the people fighting to save the planet or destroy it.
- [05:39]
Steven Donziger
If I had just given up, I would look terrible. So they forced me to fight it.
- [05:58]
Zach Goldbaum
In my first conversation with Steven Donziger, he walked me through the Ecuadorian trial the following day I came back to his apartment to talk about everything that happened next. Hey, Stephen. How are you?
- [06:08]
Steven Donziger
Thanks for coming all the way up here.
- [06:09]
Zach Goldbaum
Oh, my God. Thanks for having me. It's a modest two bedroom in the Upper west side of Manhattan. The walls are lined with large black and white photos of Stephen's time in Ecuador, as well as rows and rows of books.
- [06:21]
Steven Donziger
This is Lou dematteis book Crude Reflections, which I have a copy if you don't have it. Do you have that book?
- [06:27]
Zach Goldbaum
I don't. Crude Reflections is a photographic chronicle of the long fight for justice in Ecuador, one that is still being waged today. Stephen generously gave me a copy, and then he sat down on the couch in his living room and started rifling through the book. Can you describe what we're looking at in the picture?
- [06:45]
Steven Donziger
One of my favorite pictures of the case. And Basie shows me on the first day of the trial in Ecuador in, like, a suit and a tie, talking to some indigenous women. They're in traditional dress with kids.
- [07:01]
Zach Goldbaum
The day before, Stephen had told me the backstory of this photo, that he'd come up with the idea to pay the local indigenous community to come to town for the first day of the trial. It made for an incredible image. And that's the thing I was beginning to realize about Stephen Donziger. He understands the power of a good story. It's part of why he was able to help the plaintiffs win this case. But it's also part of what landed him in serious trouble. Because if I had to pick a point when things started to unravel, it would probably be when he invited a filmmaker, Joe Berlinger, to come to Ecuador and tell his story for the documentary.
- [07:34]
Steven Donziger
Crude.
- [07:36]
Zach Goldbaum
Could you kind of just talk about what your mindset was in bringing Berlinger down to do this film? And in retrospect, if you think that it was a mistake to work so
- [07:45]
Steven Donziger
closely with him, well, no, there were no mistakes. There were decisions made based on information available at the time. I mean, those are not mistakes. I decided to, you know, be myself. I mean, that's what I am. I don't have a hard time being anything other than my authentic self. And that's. I didn't have the energy to try to control what Joe did. And I felt like what we were doing was righteous and a really good thing, and he could shoot whatever he wanted.
- [08:13]
Zach Goldbaum
Whether or not Donziger believed it was a mistake to give Berlinger unfettered access after the film came out, Chevron's lawyers seized on it in 2010 a year before the verdict was reached in the Texaco Chevron case in Ecuador, Chevron's lawyers asked Judge Kaplan to demand that Berlinger hand over his footage. And to the shock of journalists and First Amendment lawyers alike, the judge sided with Chevron, saying, quote, review of Berlinger's outtakes will contribute to the goal of seeing not only that justice is done, but. But that it appears to be done. Berlinger was subpoenaed for any raw footage related to the case, and after a brief and unsuccessful appeal, he relented.
- [08:58]
Pablo Fajardo
Berlinger did not adequately defend his rights.
- [09:02]
Zach Goldbaum
That's attorney Pablo Fajardo, Danziger's Ecuadorian counterpart.
- [09:08]
Pablo Fajardo
I mean, a filmmaker has rights because otherwise they take away your freedom of expression. What guarantees do we have now to give access to a North American filmmaker if that information can later be used for other purposes or handed over to the opponent?
- [09:27]
Zach Goldbaum
That opponent was handed over 600 hours of raw footage. For Chevron's lawyers, it was a field day. For Steven Donziger, it was the beginning of a Kafkaesque nightmare that is still continuing today.
- [09:41]
Steven Donziger
When those manipulative outtakes came out, it hurt me and it hurt the case because they were manipulated and they were able to use them to successfully plant a narrative that I was doing something wrong when I wasn't.
- [10:05]
Zach Goldbaum
As soon as Chevron's attorneys got their hands on the footage, they started cherry picking bites and posting clips out of context online. So while the film that premiered at Sundance showed Donziger and the Ecuadorian lawyers in a really favorable light, in these clips, Stephen looked not so good. In one, Stephen is out to eat. He's wearing a brown suit and nursing a glass of red wine. And when the conversation shifts to what would happen if the judge ruled against the plaintiffs in the trial, his dinner companion says he'd be killed. He'd be killed.
- [10:40]
Steven Donziger
Yeah, please. Who will be killed? If he rules against us, he rules against sex.
- [10:47]
Zach Goldbaum
Against sex.
- [10:49]
Steven Donziger
He'll be killed. Yeah, sure, he might not be, but he'll think.
- [10:52]
Zach Goldbaum
He thinks he will.
- [10:53]
Steven Donziger
He thinks he will, which is just as good.
- [10:58]
Zach Goldbaum
In case you couldn't hear that Donziger says he'd be killed, he might not be, but he thinks he will be, which is just as good. To some, that was just off the cuff, gallows humor. To others, like the corporate lawyers hired by Chevron to dissect the footage, it was proof that Steven Donziger was an unscrupulous attorney. And this wasn't the only potentially incriminating clip.
- [11:23]
Steven Donziger
Obviously, in two or three years there's moments of despair and anger and even stupidity, some of the things I said. But it doesn't. It's not like what.
- [11:33]
Zach Goldbaum
What did you feel like was stupid that you said?
- [11:37]
Steven Donziger
I don't know. I think one time I was walking into court and I said, and the only language that I believe this judge is going to understand is one of pressure, intimidation and humiliation. And that's what we're doing today. We're going to let him know what time it is. We're going to go in and tell the judge what time it is. I felt like Mafioso or something, but I was so pissed off. Objectively, if you look at these manipulated alcohol, I look bad in some of them. I look kind of impatient and angry and, you know, imperious. It wasn't my best self, but, you know, that's what a film is.
- [12:16]
Zach Goldbaum
Chevron used the film to fuel a new narrative around the case, that Steven Donziger was corrupting the legal process. We're litigating here in the United States to hold them accountable, and we believe that we will succeed. And we've brought. That's Chevron's lead attorney, attorney Randy Mastro, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. At the time of this interview in 2012, Mastro was in his mid-50s, with white hair and a white beard that makes him look, as one journalist noted, like Santa Claus in Brooks Brothers. Mastro was a partner at Gibson Dunn, one of the oil industry's favorite law firms. Before that, he worked for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. According to the New Yorker, he was, quote, the only person in the Giuliani administration who made the mayor seem like a nice gu. Armed with the recently acquired outtakes from the film Crude Randy, Mastro had apparently decided that Chevron's best chance wasn't defeating the charges, but the lawyers who had brought them. And we've brought a racketeering case against them. I'm a former mob prosecutor. I have never seen such shocking evidence in a case. It's a little ironic, to say the least, that Chevron now wanted to bring the case back to US courts. You may remember from our last episode that it was Texaco's lawyers, and later Chevron's whole, who had fought for eight long years to get the case moved from the United States to Ecuador. And now that they were unhappy with that outcome, they were trying to move the case back. And this time, it seemed like luck was on Chevron's side because the new RICO claims against Steven Donziger and the plaintiff's lawyers ended up on the desk of a corporate friendly judge, the Honorable Lewis Kaplan. Here's Pablo Fajardo.
- [14:00]
Pablo Fajardo
Judge Kaplan's actions were reprehensible. He protected a criminal corporation. He protected Chevron. If US Justices were honest, they would respect Ecuador's ruling or come to see the evidence they didn't.
- [14:21]
Zach Goldbaum
Kaplan ruled that the evidence in Ecuador, the open pits of toxic sludge, the contaminated drinking water, the surge in cancer rates, the birth defects, was outside the scope of the RICO case. Instead, he focused his attention primarily on one man, Steven Danziger. For Pablo Fajardo, Donziger was at least partly responsible for how that came to be.
- [14:47]
Pablo Fajardo
From my point of view, he made a mistake because his image became too large. He amplified his image too much and did not allow indigenous peoples and farmers to be publicly seen as, as the leaders they actually were. And sometimes he followed a Hollywood narrative, the American lawyer coming to save the indigenous people in the jungle, which is an error. That's an ego driven image sold by cinema. And he had some of that. But again, those are image errors, not crimes. I respect him deeply and I respect the work he did with us.
- [15:35]
Zach Goldbaum
But well meaning or not, Chevron seized on those mistakes to put out their own narrative about what had happened in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They created an entire website that looked like a news outlet called the Amazon Post. And every so called report on the site was one sided and critical of Donziger. And they released a video designed to mimic a news report and hired a former CNN anchor to host it. Chevron says it is the victim of a massive misinformation campaign in which facts are twisted and scientific data are ignored. It all helped fuel doubt about the case. Even as people were still dying in the Amazon and toxic waste was still festering in the jungle. Nothing had changed except the story had been flipped on its head and there was now a new villain.
- [16:26]
Pablo Fajardo
Chevron helped create the image that Donsinger was the center of the case, which was absurd, totally absurd, it must be said. Clearly, Steven Donsinger was never the trial lawyer in our case. He did not litigate the case in Ecuador because he did not have a license here. But that led Chevron to believe that by destroying Danzinger they would end the case. And they were wrong.
- [17:13]
Zach Goldbaum
In October of 2013, as he prepared to enter a federal courtroom in Manhattan for his RICO trial, Steven Donziger was a shell of his former self.
- [17:22]
Steven Donziger
I didn't know where I was going, honestly. I was living under enormous stress. My friends, many of my friends, family members, in laws were like questioning my integrity.
- [17:36]
Zach Goldbaum
Here's what Donziger stood accused of. First, there was a report that assessed Chevron's environmental damage at $27 billion. It's part of how the Ecuadorian judge came up with a massive number in the final judgment. But Chevron claimed that Donziger had a hand in crafting that report, and he did. But Donziger says that it's not unusual for lawyers to work with their expert witnesses to craft key documents. And besides, there were other technical reports submitted into evidence for that trial that corroborated those findings. Okay. Second, based on what Donziger said in the crude outtakes, Chevron claimed that he had intimidated the judges and coerced the judgment. But Donziger says that those outtakes were misleading and taken out of context. And he says that Chevron was also intimidating judges. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Chevron accused Donziger of bribing the first of several Ecuadorian judges who presided over the case, a man named Alberto Guerra. I'd love to talk through some of the things that came out in the trial, like they accused you of bribery. I mean, how did that play out?
- [18:47]
Steven Donziger
So we knew he was the star witness for weeks before he appeared in court. We knew this is where it was heading. So we knew what he was going to say.
- [18:55]
Zach Goldbaum
Donziger may have been prepared for what Geddo was going to say, but for everyone else, his testimony was pretty shocking. The now former judge alleged that years earlier, back in Ecuador, he had made a deal to ghostwrite the final judgment against Chevron for the judge who oversaw the trial, Nicholas Zambrano. Then he and Zambrano would share half a million dollars in kickbacks when it came time to identify who had been behind the bribe. Chevron's lead attorney, Randy Mastro approached Alberto Guerra on the standard.
- [19:27]
Steven Donziger
Randy Master says, do you know who Steven Donziger is? And he says yes. And he says, do you see him today in this courtroom? And he says yes. And he says, can you point him out? Like of all the people, who is Steven Donziger? And he, you know, purported to identify me as if I was some criminal defendant as the guy who approved the bribe of the trial judge in Ecuador. And it was just a completely false story. It was a show trial. And I'm thinking to myself, this is what it looks like and feels like to be framed.
- [20:04]
Zach Goldbaum
Steven Dodziger vehemently denied the allegations, but this was a non jury trial and Judge Lewis Kaplan had full authority to decide if he thought Alberto Guerra was credible. The trial wrapped up in late 2013. Judge Kaplan retreated to his chambers to deliberate. Then, on March 4, 2014, he announced his decision.
- [20:28]
Steven Donziger
And, you know, as I expected, I lost.
- [20:32]
Zach Goldbaum
Kaplan issued a lengthy opinion saying Donziger and his team had committed fraud and should be prohibited from benefiting financially from the judgment in Ecuador, which, by the way, he said was unenforceable. To make matters worse, Donziger was on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs and fees to cover Chevron's legal expenses.
- [20:52]
Steven Donziger
That destroyed my personal finances. I had to go raise money to defend myself rather than work with my team in Ecuador to go after them on the enforcement side. It was extremely distracting. They wanted to go after me with such a degree of force that any other lawyer or environmental activist or funder that would fund such a case would see that and not do that anymore. It was an intimidation mechanism.
- [21:20]
Zach Goldbaum
But Donziger decided that he wasn't ready to be made an example of.
- [21:24]
Steven Donziger
If I had just given up, I would look terrible. So the conundrum they put me in is they forced me to fight it.
- [21:34]
Zach Goldbaum
So Donziger appealed. But even as he fought the charges, his reputation was in tatters. He lost the respect of his peers. He was humiliated. He told one interviewer that he felt like a goat tethered to a stake.
- [21:47]
Steven Donziger
And it caused great heartache and pain to me and my wife, son, and, frankly, everyone who was friends with me. I mean, it was painful for a lot of people to watch what they were doing to me.
- [21:59]
Zach Goldbaum
And worst of all, the victims of Chevron's actions in Ecuador seemed further than ever from seeing justice in the US Court system.
- [22:08]
Steven Donziger
The fix was in to prevent the Ecuadoran people from collecting their judgment. It was very obvious. So after the end of the RICO case, we just kept litigating against Chevron in Canada and other countries to enforce the judgment. I mean, Kaplan couldn't stop us, so we kept going.
- [22:23]
Zach Goldbaum
While Steven Donziger set out to appeal the case and repair his reputation, he and Pablo Fajardo set out to find other ways to make Chevron pay. They attempted to take the case to Canada, to Argentina, to Australia, to Brazil, to anywhere Chevron had assets. But Chevron found a new, more favorable forum where they could quash such claims.
- [22:48]
Pablo Fajardo
They filed arbitration under UN Rules in the Hague.
- [22:53]
Zach Goldbaum
That's right. The company retaliated by taking the entire country of Ecuador to the Permanent Court of Arbitration based in the Hague, which exists to resolve international disputes. It is supposed to function as a neutral third party. Arbiter but according to Pablo, that's not how it works in practice.
- [23:15]
Pablo Fajardo
This system protects, in quotation marks, investments. And only Chevron can sue the Ecuadorian state. We, the affected people, are not part of the arbitration. We can never appear in the arbitration. We can never go defend ourselves in that arbitration because it's between Chevron and the government, the state of Ecuador. The arbitrators are generally arbitrators for corporations, for the same companies. So there is a very big conflict of interest. They do not protect human rights or water or the people. They protect investments, nothing more.
- [24:09]
Zach Goldbaum
But something incredible does emerge during these proceedings. Remember Alberto Guerra? He's the former judge that accused Steven Donziger of using bribes to get the verdict he wanted. Well, less than two years later, he's called to testify again, this time before a Permanent Court of Arbitration Tribunal in April, April 2015. And under questioning, he admits something startling. As it turns out, Guerra was getting money, but not from Donziger or the plaintiffs from Chevron. He had a contract with the company where they gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars, a house, a computer, and an immigration attorney for him and his family.
- [24:50]
Pablo Fajardo
Alberto Guerra said that supposedly our sentence was fraud, when in reality he was the one who received money. The fraud was Chevron's.
- [25:02]
Zach Goldbaum
In a recorded conversation with Chevron in June 2012, in the middle of the RICO case, Guerra says money talks, gold screams. Guerra then tells the tribunal that Chevron showed him a Safe filled with $20,000. This at a time when Guerra, by his own admission, owed exactly that amount for construction on a new house and was earning less than a third of what he had made as a judge at Steven Donziger's RICO trial. Guerra had been Chevron's star witness, and now he was backpedaling when Guerra admitted
- [25:37]
Steven Donziger
that he had lied in his testimony before Judge Kaplan. When he testified against me, at that point, I'm like, we're going back to Kaplan to get him to overturn the RICO case. Because the key witness admitted that he just lied. Of course, Kaplan wouldn't hear any of it.
- [25:51]
Zach Goldbaum
In fact, even as Chevron's star witness was admitting that he had lied under oath, Judge Lewis Kaplan was still going after Steven Donziger. After his decision in the RICO case, Kaplan ordered Donziger to hand over his laptop and cell phone, which he refused, citing attorney client privilege.
- [26:09]
Steven Donziger
They were trying to put me in a position where I would have to choose between obeying this completely, you know, baseless court order or being loyal to my clients who hold the privilege of Attorney client privilege over case files. And they wanted me to obey Kaplan's orders, at which point my clients rightly would have fired me because I would betray them in terms of giving our confidential strategic information and all our thinking over to Chevron. So I told Kaplan I could not, given my ethical duties to my clients, abide by his order.
- [26:44]
Zach Goldbaum
The feud between Kaplan and Donziger only escalated from there. Donziger took his case to an appeals court which upheld Kaplan's judgment. Kaplan slapped Donziger with additional penalties for his delay in complying with the RICO judgment. So Donziger appealed those, and on and on it went. Their legal standoff culminated in the summer of 2019, when Judge Kaplan hit Donziger with criminal contempt charges for refusing to pay any penalties or hand over his electronic devices. But later that year, Donziger got what seemed like a long awaited opportunity for relief.
- [27:20]
Steven Donziger
The federal prosecutor refused to prosecute me, rejected Kaplan's case.
- [27:25]
Zach Goldbaum
What was their reasoning?
- [27:26]
Steven Donziger
I mean, obviously they thought the case was bullshit, but they don't want to embarrass Kaplan, so they just refused to prosecute me. That's when that case should have ended.
- [27:37]
Zach Goldbaum
Did you think you might have been off the hook at that point?
- [27:40]
Steven Donziger
I never felt. I mean, look, I knew I'd have
- [27:45]
Zach Goldbaum
to fight it, but even Donziger was surprised by what happened next.
- [27:49]
Steven Donziger
At that point, Kaplan did something I've never seen before. He basically appointed a private law firm to step into the shoes of the US Government and prosecute me in the name of the government with their fees, their private law firm legal fees paid by some slush fund that the judges keep in the southern districts.
- [28:08]
Zach Goldbaum
Yeah, if you're kind of confused, don't worry. So was I. So let's slow this down for a second. Under US Federal law, criminal contempt cases have to follow something called Rule 42. That rule says that if you're being tried for criminal contempt of court by the government, then you've got to be prosecuted by an attorney from the government, unless, and I quote, the interest of justice requires the appointment of another attorney. Well, in an insanely rare move, Judge Kaplan decided it was in the interest of justice to have taxpayers foot the bill for a private law firm to try to get Steven Donziger to hand over his laptop. To add to what Donziger calls a Dickensian farce, Judge Kaplan appointed a private law firm which had Chevron as a client as recently as 2018. Literally the year before this all went down. None of which was initially disclosed in court.
- [29:03]
Steven Donziger
That's never Happened before a blatant conflict of interest.
- [29:07]
Zach Goldbaum
So anyway, after years of convictions and appeals, Steven Donziger is once again called to court in August of 2019 and asked once again to turn privileged communications with his clients over to his legal opponents.
- [29:21]
Steven Donziger
I go down to court and there was something odd in the energy when I walked into court.
- [29:26]
Zach Goldbaum
By this point, this new case had been assigned to a new judge, Loretta Preska. So Donziger arrives in her courtroom, not sure what to expect, but right away the vibes are not good.
- [29:36]
Steven Donziger
I could just tell there was something afoot. I walked in alone. I hadn't had a lawyer.
- [29:42]
Zach Goldbaum
Stephen thought he could buy some time and come back later with representation, but instead, Prescott gestures to a court appointed lawyer sitting in the front row and
- [29:50]
Steven Donziger
says, I'm gonna give you this lawyer. He'll represent you today.
- [29:54]
Zach Goldbaum
Steven doesn't know what's going on or why he's being assigned a lawyer, but he asks the judge if he can at least talk to this stranger before they proceed. So the judge calls a recess and they go into a jury room.
- [30:06]
Steven Donziger
And I said, what the fuck is going on here? Like, what is this? And he basically said, you're like, in a serious thing. He's like, there is no limit to what sentence a judge can impose on you for a criminal. You could in theory go to prison for life for this. So I came out of that meeting and the judge says, I'm going to detain you, put an ankle bracelet on you, and you're going to be detained at home.
- [30:33]
Zach Goldbaum
That day, Donziger was fitted with an ankle monitor and returned to his apartment in the Upper west side of Manhattan, the same one where we were speaking, to begin pretrial home confinement. It had been eight years since Steven Donziger had first been sued by Chevron. But the worst part of his ordeal was just beginning. As 2019 came to a close, Steven Donziger had a lot of time to reflect on how the last decade had played out. He had gone from a titan of the legal world who had taken on Chevron, one of the biggest corporations in the world, and won, to a pariah in his professional community, from a globe trotting environmental defender to a prisoner trapped inside of his own home. The same home I was sitting in for our interview. This was your prison for how long?
- [31:33]
Steven Donziger
Almost three years.
- [31:35]
Zach Goldbaum
What was that like?
- [31:36]
Steven Donziger
I had given up my passport to have a kid. It was a misdemeanor. I mean, it's preposterous. They took all my money, they cleaned out my bank accounts. To pay their legal fees. You can't leave your apartment except for a legal meeting or some school event for your kid. You know you can't drink alcohol. You must allow the court officer into your home to check on you. You must wear the ankle bracelet at all times, including when you shower and sleep. You must keep the battery charged so the signal can go into the control headquarters down here in the court. Like, I live in a two bedroom apartment. Like there's a, there's a garbage bin, like literally two feet out off this door in the kitchen. I was scared to even go two feet out of my apartment.
- [32:19]
Zach Goldbaum
To add to Donziger's plight, Covid hit in March of 2020, which delayed his trial and prolonged his home detention. Then Donziger was disbarred from practicing law in New York. But even as his old life was disappearing, Hauserass also offered an opportunity. In the darkest days of the pandemic, Steven Donziger starts to reclaim the narrative. Steve Donziger, thanks so much for joining us. Why are you under house arrest?
- [32:50]
Steven Donziger
You've been on lockdown for coming up on two years, bro. What did you do?
- [32:54]
Zach Goldbaum
Here to explain his side of the story against the oil giant is lawyer Steve Donziger himself. Himself, he begins to do interviews, telling the story from his point of view that he was a lawyer being punished for in essence, taking on an oil company.
- [33:08]
Steven Donziger
I was a becoming a political prisoner in my mind.
- [33:12]
Zach Goldbaum
And human rights groups around the world agreed. Amnesty International came to Donziger's defense. Progressive politicians urged Joe Biden to pardon him. And hundreds of respected lawyers as well as the United nations working for group on arbitrary detention, demanded his release. But instead, In July of 2021, Judge Loretta Presca sentenced Steven Donziger to six months in prison for contempt of court. Remember, this was the same charge that US Attorneys declined to prosecute. So in October of the same year, Steven Donziger reported to federal prison.
- [33:51]
Steven Donziger
So I drove myself to prison voluntarily, walked in the front door of the prison and said, here I am. Please give me a bed. That was what I had to do.
- [34:00]
Zach Goldbaum
In the end, Donziger only served six weeks in federal prison as part of pandemic era release measures. He was then sent back to his apartment to serve the remainder of his sentence under home confinement. Then on April 24, 2022, Steven Donziger was finally released from house arrest. All told, he had been detained for almost a thousand days, one of the longest periods of confinement for a misdemeanor in U.S. history.
- [34:25]
Steven Donziger
You know, it's not over. There's still restrictions on my freedom. I'm not a typical American person in the sense that I can enjoy all the rights and immunities of every other citizen. They still have my passport. I have a hard time traveling internationally. They took all my money. But I have a rich life.
- [34:49]
Zach Goldbaum
When you take it all in, the whole saga is pretty chilling. Yes, Steven Donziger made mistakes, but the fact that this sideshow has gotten so much attention is evidence of Chevron's success. Chevron created an upside down world where they were the victims. They paid off a key witness to say what they wanted. They ran roughshod over the First Amendment and attorney client privilege and they kept moving the case from courtroom to courtroom, from Ecuador to New York to the Hague until they got the results they wanted. What's somehow gotten lost in all of this are the story's real victims, the people of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
- [35:27]
Steven Donziger
I think it's incredibly tragic that communities who tried to do the right thing by going to court got so screwed over by a police looter. But we're still going and this case is far from over. This case is a beacon of hope and it always will be as long as we keep, you know, talking about it and using it to move forward, to really hold Chevron accountable, really show communities around the world that there is a model where you can get compensation for harms caused by these mass pollution like Chevron.
- [36:09]
Zach Goldbaum
In December of last year, I called up the Ecuadorian lawyer, Pablo Fajardo. We had an interview scheduled, but he said he had no time to talk. A huge new development had just happened in the case. Remember that international Arbitration tribunal? Well, in December of 2025, and in a twist that's fitting of this story, they ordered Ecuador to pay Chevron $220 million.
- [36:35]
Pablo Fajardo
We pursued a lawsuit. We proved Chevron's crime. We won. Chevron was convicted by Ecuadorian justice. But it turns out that now we have to pay.
- [36:53]
Zach Goldbaum
It is an absurd coda to a case that has been fraught with absurdities. Now the victims of Chevron's pollution will be forced to pay their tax dollars to the company that victimized them. But in a story that's been rewritten and revised countless times, Pablo Fajardo wants to make the central narrative clear once and for all.
- [37:16]
Pablo Fajardo
I know that in the United States it has been widely spread that the struggle is dancing girl versus sh like a duel. And it is not like that. The real peoples who fight are here. They continue putting blood, sweat and pain into this struggle. And also their lives. We are still here. This is not over. We will not stop until we have justice.
- [37:56]
Zach Goldbaum
Follow Lawless Planet on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Lawless Planet ad free by joining Audible. On the next episode of Lawless Planet. After Hurricane Maria destroys much of Puerto Rico's infrastructure, a motley crew of corrupt politicians, crypto bros and disaster capitalists swoop in. They were coming like hawks with an idea that they were like saviors. For today's episode, we relied heavily on William Longavichi's Vanity Fair profile Jungle Law, Patrick Radden Keefe's New Yorker article Reversal of Fortune, Joe Berlinger's documentary and the book Law of the Jungle by Paul M. Barrett. Lawless Planet is produced by Audible. This episode was written, produced and hosted by me, Zach Goldbaum. Our senior producer and senior story editor is Derek John. Senior producer for Audible is Andy Herman. Our senior Managing producer is Lata Pandya. Our managing producer is Jake Kleinberg. Our producer is Lexi Perry. Music and sound design by Kenny Kusiak Dialogue edit by George Draving Hicks Voice acting by JD Montalvo Our music supervisor Scott Velasquez for Frisson Sync Fact checking by Brian Pugnant Translation assistance by Nicholas Sotomayor Our Legal counsel is Shepard Mullen Executive Producer for Audible Jenny Lauer Beckman Head of Creative Development for Audible Kate Navin Head of Audible Originals North America Marshall Louie Chief Content Officer Rachel Gyazza Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC Sound Recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originates, LLC thanks for listening. We'll see you next.