Losing Everything While Trying to Make Chevron Pay

Losing Everything While Trying to Make Chevron Pay

In 1993, a young Harvard Law School graduate named Steven Donziger visited Ecuador. While there he investigated reports of pollution in the country’s north. Since the 1960s Texaco had allowed pits of oil flow freely into rivers and streams pollution water bodies which served as sources of water to this rural people. The consequences of this pollution were cancers of the stomach, liver and throat, as well as childhood leukemia.

Making hundreds of trips to Ecuador, he assembled a case on behalf of over 30,000 farmers and indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon’s Lago Agrio region.

From 1993 to the year 2000 when Chevron bought over Texaco, the case got nowhere. In 2011, a US court dismissed the lawsuit and Donziger filed a suit against Chevron in Ecuador. It was in Ecuador that the court fined Chevron almost $9 billion. Instead of paying, Chevron sold all its assets in the land, fled the country, and threatened the victims with a “lifetime of litigation”. As for Donzinger, Chevron expressly said its long-term strategy was to demonize him. What happened next has been called one of the most drawn-out cases in the history of environmental law.

Back in the United States, Chevron sued Steven Donziger. In making its case against Donziger, Chevron relocated a judge and his entire family to the United States. Among other incentives, they paid him what they called a monthly stipend, 20 times the salary he received in Ecuador. All these Chevron did while meeting with him more than 50 times before he provided testimony; testimony that Donziger discussed paying bribe to the presiding Ecuadorian judge who found Chevron guilty. The judge testified that he had struck a deal between the plaintiffs (Donzinger & co) and the presiding judge: he would ghostwrite the verdict, the presiding judge would sign it, and the two would share an alleged $500,000 in kickbacks from the plaintiffs.

However, in 2015, the judge retracted, admitted to an international tribunal that there is no evidence to corroborate allegations of a bribe or a ghostwritten judgment, and that large parts of his sworn testimony were exaggerated and, in other cases, simply not true.

But it was too late. Ideally, in cases similar to these where someone like Donziger is criminally charged with bribery, a jury would have been asked to assess the credibility of Chevron’s witness, but Chevron opted for something called a RICO case where all that’s needed is for a judge to believe the witness. Looking at the case, legal scholars said Chevron got a judge who has a soft spot for it. The judge had once said Chevron is “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.”

The U.S judge ruled over the case concurring with the fraud allegations against Donziger. This was after Chevron had hired private investigators to track Donziger, created a publication to smear him, and put together a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms.

The results: Donziger has been disbarred from his legal practice and his bank accounts have been frozen. He now has a lien on his apartment, faces exorbitant fines, and has been prohibited from earning money. As of August, a court has seized his passport and put him on house arrest.

A growing number of people are becoming outraged by Donziger’s treatment including dozens of Nobel laureates. In 2020 twenty-nine Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against Donziger as “judicial harassment”. The Wall Street Journal has called Donziger’s case one of the biggest legal scams in history.

Steven Donziger has been detained at home since August 2019 awaiting trial with a bracelet strapped to one of his ankles. There is no going outside his door. As he wakes up each day, he knows that if his child falls sick he cannot take a stroll to the nearest pharmacy and get a prescription.

Yesterday marked the 600th day of Donziger being under house arrest.