Julian Dorey Podcast - [VIDEO] - Powerful Overlord's Disturbing Amazon Oil Conspiracy Exposed (INSANE STORY) | Steve Donziger • 194

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Steve Donziger is an American attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, in which he represented over 30,000 farmers and indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador. The $9.5 Billion judgement he won against Chevron has never been paid. EPISODE LINKS: - BUY Guest’s Books & Films IN MY AMAZON STORE: https://amzn.to/3RPu952  - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/3ftDuwXe  JULIAN YT CHANNELS: - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips  - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily  - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP  STEVE LINKS: - INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/stevendonziger/?hl=en  - VICE DOC ON STEVE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikneKQAeUp0  - IG FOR FREE DONZIGER: https://www.instagram.com/freedonziger/?hl=en  - LINKTREE: https://linktr.ee/freedonziger  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Steve Donziger provides backstory on his Ecuador Case against Chevron; Texaco’s Destruction 8:52 - Oil dumping catastrophe; Steve’s 31-Year battle; Steve & team initially file lawsuit 23:42 - Steve’s initial mission trip to Ecuador; Contempt of court arrest; Chevron’s legal team 32:32 - Chevron destroys documents; 3rd World vs US; Donziger relationship w/ Indigenous tribes of Amazon 42:56 - Lengthy court process; Media coverage issues 49:30 - First day of trial in Ecuador; How Ecuador’s legal system works; Chevron & Junk Science 1:00:22 - 60 Minutes piece taken down; Chevron pressure on system; Bribing Judges 1:09:40 - Chevron shareholders; $19 Billion Lawsuit Loss; Chevron refuses to pay 1:18:06 - Steve clears up “Crude” Documentary allegations; Racketeering charge; Oil still there 1:28:22 - The oil’s damage to Amazon Rainforest’s biosphere; Ecuadorian gov controls land 1:35:04 - Future of fossil fuel industry; “Clean Coal”; New York Courts attack Donziger 1:47:40 - Donziger charged 1:54:26 - Raj Rajaratnam’s historic battle against SDNY Prosecutors; Raj’s love for America 2:03:55 - Chevron’s Lawyer serves as prosecutor 2:14:30 - Judge Lewis Kaplan (SDNY) did not like Steve; Steve convicted without a jury 2:23:06 - Collusion against Steve; Middle East War 2:34:22 - Trump; Autoworkers president; Steve disbarred (sham) 2:45:26 - Steve’s assets frozen; Julian Assange & Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) 2:54:24 - Oil Lobby’s firm grip on mainstream; Inside Steve’s memoir 3:01:07 - The importance of podcasting for Steve CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 194 - Steve Donziger Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. What's up, guys? It is yet another beautiful day out here, so I figured we'd do another outdoor pre-roll. The story you're about to hear is with my friend Steven Donziger. As far as I know, he's never sat down on a three-hour podcast and told the whole thing, but the 31-year odyssey that he has been through is nothing short of breathtaking, and it is going to pull out every emotion because this guy has essentially given this life to a cause and has had the entire power of the corruption, the worst side of corruption, of corporate influence used against him. So just get ready for it. I think you're really going to like it.

And if you haven't already subscribed, please smash that subscribe button. hit that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also check out our playlist below at the top of the description. There's a link to it that takes you to other episodes that are similar to this one. Enjoy the show. I met a guy from Ecuador, a student. They were telling me about this situation down there where they described it as like one of the worst pollutions in the world not an accident done deliberately by Texaco American Oil Company in this pristine ecosystem where indigenous peoples had been living for you know thousands of years living off the forest the upshot is what we saw was really an apocalyptic disaster it's the only way I can describe it I mean I

expected to see pollution but this was so much worse than anything I ever could have imagined. Steve, thanks so much for coming, man. I've really been looking forward to this podcast. Your story is absolutely insane, and we're going to go through all of it today. Great. Thank you for having me. your own case, but with other causes I'm sure you'll talk about today. But I had first been turned on to what happened with you right after I initially had in my friend, Paul Rosalie for a podcast. I was telling you about him. On the outskirts of Manu National Park, this guy, local guy started going into the jungle and like leaving them piles of bananas because they're,

they're hunter gatherers. They don't have, they don't have metal. They missed out on the wheel. They've never held a spoon. These are people that are out there. And so he'd leave them a machete and some bananas, and they'd come take it. And then after like a year, he would start being there when they came to take it. And then after some time, he was actually able to interact with them. He could only speak a few words of their language. What did they speak?

They're called the Mashkupiro tribe. And so they speak some sort of dialect of the Yine language. But this guy who was interacting with them, one day they found him. They call it porcupine. Arrows sticking up out of his body, like several arrows. We don't know why they killed him. Before this one, but he's lived in the Amazon for the last 18 years. Very popular episode.

People loved his stories. And a couple fans hit me up and said, hey, you got to have on this guy, Steve Donziger. He's in the middle of this 30-year odyssey fighting for the people of Ecuador over what Chevron did to them. And so then I went in and researched the case and I've talked about it on other podcasts since then. So some listeners are going to be familiar with at least the outlines. But you essentially got into something at the end of law school that you didn't think was going to be anything. And it turns into this – I mean I don't think I'm overstating it to say like a war basically. And you're going to get to how this has ended up for you and all that. But to me, it's a story that's

a prime example of greed and when capitalism goes wrong and other people around the world, to put it very simply, get fucked. Yeah. I mean, when I started working on this back in the early 90s, I had just gotten out of law school. My last year of law school, I met a guy from Ecuador, a student, whose father was also from Ecuador living in Massachusetts. And they were telling me about this situation down there where they described it as like one of the worst pollutions in the world. Not an accident done deliberately by Texaco american oil company in this pristine ecosystem where indigenous peoples had been living for you know thousands of years living off the forest and um they're like we got to do something about this at least go at least go down there and see what

happened see if we can build some sort of legal case out of it. I mean, what lawyers do generally is they're trained to find lawsuits or practice law defending lawsuits. And it interested me because I'm a public interest guy, I'm an environmentalist, and I like to help people. That's why I went to law school. So we organized a mission of roughly 15 people on that first trip, got funding. And it was a combination of law students, lawyers, and doctors, and public health people.

And the goal of the mission was to investigate what had actually happened. And the lawyers were talking to witnesses and taking testimonies from, you know, indigenous peoples and others in the Amazon. And the doctors were sort of doing medical tests and doing water tests of like rivers and streams that people were drinking out of that were near

these oil wells and all this oil pollution. The upshot is what we saw was really... an apocalyptic disaster. It's the only way I can describe it. I mean, I expected to see pollution, but this was so much worse than anything I ever could have imagined. It really made me question my whole concept of humanity, of the human condition. Like, I could not imagine human beings would design this kind of system.

What kinds of things did you see? Well, the first thing you notice, and this is a large area of the Amazon, it's about 1,500 square miles in size. And that was the area of the concession. That is, that's the area that Texaco paid Ecuador's government to drill in, to look for oil in this area and then built a bunch of well sites and produced oil out of this area for roughly 25 years until the early 1990s. And by the time they left in 1992, they had gouged about a thousand waste pits

out of the jungle floor that were unlined. Waste pits? Oil waste pits. And what they had done is when they drilled a well in the jungle, they would clear like the far. I mean, the forest is very thick. They clear out the forest around the well site. And they would, you know, bring in heavy equipment and, you know, sort of drill into the earth thousands of feet. Thousands of feet. Thousands of feet. And the process of drilling into the earth is a very violent process, which has cultural and other implications for the indigenous people, which I'll get to in a second.

But bottom line is what comes out of these holes that go thousands of feet down is what's called drilling muds. That's an industry term. And drilling muds consist of rock and all sorts of chemicals, usually carcinogenic chemicals that the oil company puts in the hole to lubricate it to make the drilling process easier. And also there's natural heavy metals in the earth that come out. And this is all waste. It's very harmful to human health and to the environment and to animal health.

And the question is, where do you put it? And normally you dispose of it properly. But Texaco, because they treated the Amazon thinking they would never be held accountable, they treated it like it was basically a garbage dump. And Texaco was later bought by Chevron just for people following it home. Exactly. Texaco, now Chevron. Um, they would kind of dig these pits out of the jungle

and just dump the drilling muds into these pits. And so when I got there that first trip, I saw like what looked like lakes of oil waste. It looks like oil or thick oil or kind of crusted oil in these open-air pits. And when you get near them, they stink. The vapors are, it's hot there, the sun's out. Vapors are coming up off the ground.

And the worst part is the pits were unlined, so it was all leaking into the soil and groundwater. And they also, for many of the pits, built pipes that they stuck into for many of the pits, built pipes that they stuck into the sides of them to run the contents of the pits, that is the cancer-producing oil waste, out of the pits into nearby streams and rivers.

So it goes everywhere. That the people were drinking out of. They basically took these pits, and rather than disposing of the waste properly, and also in the Amazon, it rains a lot. So they need, you know, the pits would overflow and they put the pipes in to sort of drain them out. They essentially created a system that ended up poisoning the water supply of thousands of thousands of people who were drinking out of these rivers and streams, not just the water supply, but the food supply, because people would fish out of these rivers for their sustenance.

And they would also bathe in the rivers. I mean, it was their environment, was their food and their medicine, their livelihood, you know, provided their shelter, you know, to build houses and stuff. So, what was really the most, the worst thing about this was to really see it with my own eyes and see how extensive it was. I mean, there were literally hundreds of these pits with pipes polluting streams and rivers all over this region.

When they came down to initially do this, what years did you say that was again? Like the 70s, something like that? They started in, they signed the agreement to go into this area in 1964. They drilled their first well in 1967 in a place called Lago Agrio, Ecuador. And then they really built this system in earnest through the 70s and I'd say up to the mid 80s. And then they left in 1992. Were they doing this on lands that quite literally some of the indigenous tribes are living on, meaning like they're drilling a hole next door right here, and I'm sitting in the middle of my community watching them do this.

Was it that close, or was it a little bit out in the woods, so maybe they didn't realize the extent of what was happening there? It was all done on indigenous land, every last well. Let me explain what that means, okay? Because the forest is vast, and you could be in the forest as an outsider, or even fly over it and not see a single person. I mean, it's very, you know, because the trees, the canopy. Um, there are some villages, but even then,

it's hard to really... People lived like a very natural lifestyle, um, based off of the environment. I mean, there were no roads or anything like that. The roads did not really get built until Texaco arrived in the 1960s and had to build the roads in order to create the production apparatus to extract oil. So, all of these wells were built on indigenous territory. They were all done without asking the permission of the indigenous peoples or without sort of offering them any benefit, any of the revenue. Not that they would want it because they lived a completely, um, you know, non-monetary existence.

I mean, they didn't have money as we understand money. But by the way, that didn't mean they weren't wealthy they were very wealthy their wealth was not quantified by how we do it up here in the united states yeah exactly so it was all an indigenous territory the first well was built in what's now called lago agria which is really the territory the kofan indigenous group yeah we have that map unless he has that up on the screen right there so so those are that's interesting that those are all the different oil fields in the concession area so remember i said it was 1500 square miles in that large area which is represented by the outline of that you know kind of squiggly box um are different oil fields and lago agrio at the

top was the first field that they developed and these are i'm looking at the scale of the map here the bottom right corner shows the size of what is 20 kilometers these are huge huge they're this is not this is far more than a mile across oh Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is many miles. I'd say it's from the bottom to the top is probably 100 miles, maybe 50 miles. I don't really know. Yeah, maybe more even. Maybe more, yeah.

It's a big area. And it's, you know, thousands of people live in this area. I mean, when they first went there, there were fewer people. And what ended up happening is as the roads were built for the oil development, people from other parts of Ecuador would come down to this area and squat. They became squatters, non-Indigenous people,

and they would farm the land. So there was an influx of people on the back of the oil development that created the population that lives down there now. Now, the pollution affects Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike. One of the distinguishing features of our campaign and our lawsuit is that the Indigenous

and non-Indigenous people have combined into one group for the purpose of holding Chevron accountable for this atrocity. That's not really a common thing down there. No, no. It's not. I mean, look, when I got there in the early 90s, there were some resentments, because the indigenous people felt not only violated

by Texaco, now Chevron, but they also felt encroached upon by non-indigenous people who were, like, taking advantage of the oil infrastructure development to move to this region and basically live and farm Indigenous land. But you need to understand the Indigenous peoples don't have a capitalist system. Right. Okay, and what does that mean?

They just sort of had an understanding that the forest was theirs. They never marked it with a fence. They never got land title as we understand land title in a capitalist economy. So if one were to come down who's non-Indigenous and sort of take a plot of land and get title to it. They're essentially stealing indigenous land. And the indigenous people, in my experience, at least back then, didn't think in terms of, you know, personal acquisition of property or money. It was all very collective-oriented,

and I think it made them vulnerable to companies like Texaco, now Chevron, to come in and just take over their stuff without telling them. So in any event, it ended up over time becoming an absolutely awful environmental disaster. We think it's the worst oil disaster in the world. It's called the Amazon Chernobyl by many experts. Yeah, it's crazy. And what's different about it from other oil disasters people might have heard of, like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska or the Deepwater Horizon BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, is this was done incrementally and deliberately over many years.

It was not a function of one spectacular event that got a lot of news attention. It was a function of a deliberate policy to pollute in order to save money, but over time it created something far worse not that i like to compare disasters i know they're all bad but far worse than any of those disasters i mean this is um you know a hundred plus times the size of the exxon valdez disaster well what's crazy is you started on this 31 years ago in 93 but when

you get there in 93 according to what you told, it's been going on for 26 years. So what I want to know is where's the Ecuadorian government 10 years into that, 5 years into that, 15 years into that? Why does it take a group of 15 people on basically like a missionary trip, so to speak, in a way, coming down here saying something's wrong for people to start do something about it. Well, you know, first of all, the role of the Ecuador government is interesting, and it's a little complicated. First of all, at the time Texaco and El Chevron first went in there in the 60s, there was a military government. Ecuador did not have an elected government. So the army, the military in Ecuador cut the deal to do this. And by the way, Texaco, Sherman, a lot of these big oil companies love working with sort of non-democratic governments because it just makes it easier and

more efficient for them. And part of their original agreement is the army of Ecuador was going to provide security for them. An army that's purpose is to defend the nation was actually providing private security to a private oil company against its own people. That's what ended up happening over the years. They must have paid well. Exactly. And Ecuador's government, that is the elites in Ecuador,

made a lot of money out of this deal. In other words, Texaco, now Chevron, did all the production. They were the operator of all these fields because no one in Ecuador knew how to do this. And they would then sell the oil and pay a percentage to Ecuador's government for the right to operate down there. I mean, Ecuador's government negotiated some really bad deals and could have made a lot more money,

but that was the arrangement for many, many years. And then when Chevron left, and I'm just going to call it Chevron for purposes of ease here, when they left in 1992, Ecuador by then had developed enough expertise to have its own state oil company called Petro Ecuador, and they took over the entire operation and kept polluting. Oh, so Chevron completely pulled out, and then Ecuador just-

Ecuador took it over, yes. Whoa. So when you get down there, that's what's happening, because you're there in 93. Exactly. But understand that our lawsuit is only against Texaco, now Chevron. Yeah, because they built it. Because they built it.

They were an exclusive operator. They designed it. They engineered a system to pollute. And they are the ones really responsible. Now, when Ecuador took it over, they just kept operating it for the most part in the same way that Texaco had taught them to. And by the way, they have sued Petro-Ecuador,

Chevron has, as a way to what's called, implead them, to try to get them to pay or at least share some of the liability from our lawsuit. But under the law, if you're harmed, you're not obligated to go find every little entity that contributed to your harm. You can sue whoever you want, and that one entity is responsible

for 100% of the harm. Even if some of it was caused by other companies, they are then responsible if they feel other companies should share the burden to sue them. So it's a way to not require the victim of what's called a tort or some sort of harmful act to have to, like, figure out who was involved. You can just sue one entity. But is that the case in both U.S. law and Ecuadorian law?

That's gonna to be important later. Yes. It's the same. Yes. Okay. Hey guys, if you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's all a huge help. It gets new eyeballs on the show and it allows us to grow and survive. So thank you to all of you who have already been doing that. And thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. All right. So how long was that trip in 93 when you went down? How long were you there? Seven to 10 days or so. I don't remember exactly.

By the time you left, did you grasp the, maybe not that this was going to be a 30 year odyssey, but did you grasp that this was going to become a main that this was going to be a 30 year odyssey, but did you grasp that, that, that this was going to become a main focus that was going to be a tough battle for you? Or was that, was it still preliminary? Like, okay, this is a disaster. Let's see how we're going to help and figure it out from there. It was more the latter. I mean, look, the trip ended up changing my life in profound ways, but at the time I didn't know how that would play out or even if it would happen, you know? So like, like after that first trip, I was appalled. Like the others on the trip, we wanted to do something to help the people and to hold Chevron accountable. So when we got back,

we decided to do a lawsuit. You know, we organized a legal team, got some funding. I was very young at the time. I hadn't practiced law for more than a year. And there were others involved who had much more experience than I as lawyers. And we hooked up with them and we designed a case and wrote up a lawsuit and filed it, I think, about six months after this trip. It's pretty fast. Where'd you file it? We filed it right here in New York City in Manhattan. Okay. And the reason we filed it, filed it right here in New York City, in Manhattan. Okay. And the reason we filed it, by the way,

in New York City, people understand, is that Texaco's headquarters at the time, you know, remember, Chevron had not buy, did not buy Texaco until 2001. We filed this in 1993. So at that time, Texaco's headquarters were right here in New York. And actually, White Plains, New York,

right near by Manhattan. And like, the goal of the people of Ecuador who were affected was like, let's file it in the United States where they are. I mean, all the decisions to pollute in Ecuador were made here in New York. And that's kind of one of the ironies of this. So while the problem manifested in Ecuador,

the actual crime or the wrongdoing happened here. Yeah. And also, the people of Ecuador didn't trust their own legal system at the time. In other words... I wonder why. Yeah, exactly. I mean, here's a company that had been dumping openly, systematically, methodically with impunity for, you know, 25 plus years, and they didn't have to pay $1 in damages.

It wasn't a single case. So they're like, let's sue them up there, and we hope to get a jury trial. And that began a whole 10-year period, that is from the early 90s to 2001, where Texaco then Chevron fought tenaciously to block the ability of the Ecuadorian people, the indigenous people, to get into the courthouse,

to have a case done in U.S. courts, because they were absolutely terrified that a jury in the United States would find against them and order them to pay. And it would also obviously generate a lot of bad publicity. So their first line of defense was to kick the case out of U.S. courts, move it down to Ecuador, where they had operated, dumped, polluted all these years, never paid a dollar. So they thought by moving it to Ecuador, they could essentially obtain impunity, avoid accountability just because of their influence over Ecuador's courts. And it didn't work out too well for them. So I don't expect you to remember like exact numbers on

stuff, but just ballparking it to give it some scope I have a few questions about the Stretch of this like we saw the size of the land where they were doing this and obviously a lot of people are affected But like ballpark how many quote-unquote? Potential victims were you filing that class action on behalf of okay? So when we first started we estimated it to be 30,000 people. That's a lot of people. Yeah. But that was in 1993.

There's been a huge population influx since then. And, you know, we think it's a lot higher than that now, maybe 100,000 people. So also at that time, and again, this might have changed too, I don't know if it was from the first trip or specifically on the research afterwards in the buildup to actually filing the lawsuit. Were you able to get data to show, for example, some of the carcinogenic effects on health or deaths that had happened? I mean, it had been 26 years since this started. So did you have data to already show that this had impacted the life expectancy of the region? The answer is yes. And we got that a number of ways. One is the doctors that came down on that first trip did a lot of sampling and were able to produce independent lab results that showed

high levels of cancer-causing toxins in the waters that people were drinking out of, you know, next to these oil pits. And then also there was a doctor down there from Spain, Miguel San Sebastian, who independent of all of our activities was doing his own research. And he produced in the 1990s a number of reports that confirmed extremely high cancer rates in these areas where the pollution was occurring. So we had a lot of data to work with,

and we also had a ton of anecdotal individual testimonies from people who lived there that they were sick. And there's also data kept by, there's a national cancer registry in Ecuador, and we had access to some of that data, which was very disturbing. But, you know, all of this goes to say, I mean, you can't necessarily prove

X person's cancer was caused by this well, it's complicated. But if you look at the overall data and saw the dramatic increase in cancer rates in this region where Chevron was operating, you see there's got to be some sort of connection. So yeah, we had data to begin with that we could use to assert in the initial lawsuit that there was a real health problem caused by these reckless drilling practices. Okay. Now, we're going to take this as much in order as we can because, like we said at the outset,

this is like a 30-year story, so there's a lot that happens on the way. But not to bury the lead here for people who are not familiar with your story, this ends, or at least is up to the point now where you ended up having to do basically more than two years on house arrest due to a contempt of court charge after a whole litany of things involving different cases that were brought against you where chevron's

money was involved in improper places within those cases so this gets to it it starts with and continues to be the main story that we have all these victims from a completely unrepresented area pretty much that you're trying to fight for. And then it also unfortunately adds a second element to it where it's like this attack on Steve Donziger for shaking the tree to try to help these people. So back to when you first filed that lawsuit. I'm not totally familiar with all the legal processes. I hear stories all the time where a big lawsuit gets filed, it gets dismissed by a judge, or it says it's allowed to go to trial or whatever. What did the judge say right away? This is allowed to go to trial. What was the process and how did, at the time, Texaco

respond to this? What were your dealings with them at the beginning? So, okay, this is interesting. At the very beginning in 1993 when it started, they hired a big gun law firm, corporate law firm called King & Spalding, which is based in Atlanta. Specifically, a former United States Attorney General under the administration of Jimmy Carter. It goes probably way before y'all's time, but I remember these years. I know Jimmy Carter. Yeah. He might be dead by the time this comes out.

But... In any event, Jimmy Carter had an attorney general by the name of Griffin Bell, who after Jimmy Carter left office, became a partner in King & Spalding, this law firm. And Chevron hired Griffin Bell to lead the effort to beat back our case. Which, by the way, I took as a compliment, you know?

Because, like, clearly they were taking this very seriously from the get-go. And when we filed the lawsuit on November 3rd, 1993, it was reported on the National Network News on CBS with Dan Rather as the anchor. Now, that might not mean much to your audience, but back in the early 90s, really pre-internet, like all people did at night from like 6.30 to 7 was watch either NBC, ABC, or CBS. I mean, you can still get these shows now.

They have a much lower audience. But it was very- You ever heard of those, Alessi? Yes, I do. You ever heard of a guy named Walter Cronkite? Yes. Actually, look at the top picture on the far wall. It's good. Yes, I do. You ever heard of a guy named Walter Cronkite? Yes, actually. Look at the top picture on the far wall.

That's good. I mean, he was like the closest thing to God in America for many years when I was growing up. shockwaves through the fossil fuel industry, through Texaco, that a group of indigenous people could somehow hook up with lawyers in the United States who knew what they were doing to file a multi-billion dollar lawsuit for damages over pollution caused in Ecuador that Texaco never thought anyone would even think about at the time they did it. So I think it sent shockwaves and they responded with a tremendous amount of Hostility and investment of resources and lawyers to try to get the case dismissed now. What's your role on this? You're one of the attorneys filing it but like how many of you guys did it?

Did you have a main law firm behind it because you're very early in your career at this point as you said and also I Had another job. I was working full-time as a public defender representing juveniles accused of crimes in Washington, D.C. So I did this on my vacation. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink.

And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. My spare time. So the reality was I was a very kind of subordinate, low level player on the legal team. There were more experienced lawyers, but I was, I think I was one, I was definitely on

signing as a lawyer on the original lawsuit. I think I was one of three or five people at the time. And I'm literally the only one left working on it from that original group of lawyers. Like alive or practicing? Well, I will say I'm the only one left still trying to help the people of Ecuador. And I think everyone is still alive. That's good. Some may be a little less so than others, but I think everyone is still alive. I'm a podcaster. I don't have class sometimes. I'm sorry.

All right. So you get that filed. And what's the next process? Did you go in and have like a giant hearing against this law firm from Atlanta but with the former attorney general? Or how did it go? Yeah. So when a case – this is a civil case, not a criminal case, meaning you're suing for money over damages. So the first thing they try to do and what any defendant usually – corporate defendant usually tries to do is get it dismissed, claiming there's no case or the legal claims are invalid or there's no jurisdiction. There's all sorts of defenses you can put up at the very beginning to try to get a case dismissed.

That process of litigating those issues can take quite a long time, and if they're complicated. And it was very clear from the beginning that Texaco or Chevron's strategy was to just make it as complicated as possible. Because they had a lot of money and they knew we didn't. And the harder it is to deal with all, responding to all these issues, the more, you know, our scarce resources get used up. And the idea is to really intimidate us into really not going forward, or maybe to settle the case for a very low amount.

So, you know, getting through that initial period requires quite a lot of dedication and work, which we got through it. And we actually got into what's called the discovery process, meaning we're entitled to get information from them. They give us documents. We give them documents. without a dismissal was a huge victory for the people of Ecuador because it required Chevron to give us thousands and thousands of pages of their internal files related to the Ecuador case and what the history was and when they started. Did they do any internal tests for pollution that they never disclosed?

Did they design the system to pollute? We got all sorts of incredible material through that process including a famous memo where they basically um ordered all internal documents related to pollution and pipeline spills to be destroyed i mean they basically were were you know what year was that this was in uh sorry i'm putting you on that's okay uh this was in i don't know like they had started really building this out in the 70s in a big way i think this was in the late 70s early 80s when they when like their pollution started to get attract attention you know through the media they're like destroy all the documents so long

before they left ecuador oh yeah yeah, yeah. I mean, they knew. They knew as they were doing this that it was not right. Let's be honest. I mean, you know, you could just see it with your own eyes. And they were, you know, and probably in their own minds were like, well, let's just do it on the cheap. You know, there's no one down here to complain about it. These people have no money.

They'll never figure out how to sue us. Um, you know, and what's the big deal? There's hardly anyone out here anyway. And by the way, there's a lot of racism in there too, because... You don't say. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, this whole colonialist mentality, like the indigenous people just didn't count in their eyes.

They weren't really people. They were, you know, you look at some of their documents, they regarded them as savages. You know, I mean, they're the're most did they ever call them that they're the most peaceful people imaginable who really live harmoniously with the environment i mean now as i look at the climate crisis i consider them the frontline defenders of the planet they are like they take care of nature for the rest of us who are not indigenous uh you know texaco chevron regarded them as a bunch of savages yeah i mean they treated them just to give you an example um they would so you know when they started to dump this stuff into rivers and streams

like the local indigenous people were like what the fuck is this no excuse my language they go okay yeah i figured i might be in this podcast they go to the texaco engineers they're like what's this black stuff on our streams they're like oh that's oil don't worry about it it's good for you oh don't worry about it yeah it's good for you it's medicinal they said that to them rub it on your head it will help improve your health. It's medicinal. It's like milk. It has vitamins. But I mean, look, you hear these stories, and I heard this directly from people who are now older. It was back in the early 90s,

but had these types of conversations with the engineers from Texaco. They would just mock the people. I mean, that's a mockery. Of course it is. And that's an indication of how they looked at the indigenous people as inferior, not equal to them, you know, people to be made fun of, to be abused. And, you know, it was really just the kind of mentality it takes to go into someone else's land and just dump billions of gallons of cancer-causing waste in a way that you know is going to kill a lot of people think about it it's crazy it's crazy i mean i i actually this was a none of it surprises me or anything but some of the history particularly in the 20th century which i view i think correctly is like not long ago i was very

unaware of it when paul was in here for the first time he talked to me all about the rubber boom which now i've looked into extensively with henry ford right and like people wonder why some of these uncontacted tribes shoot on shoot on site when someone comes in there i'm like i i get that right you know because it's not even they not only treated these people like savages they killed them yeah you know they and And what you're talking about here is like a mockery, as you said, slow kill, but they're just taking advantage of people for maybe a lack of understanding of things that are in the modern world. But in reality, those people know a lot more about the earth than we do in this world that we take for granted.

Very true. And I would caution people not to assume that the modern world is better than their world. Right. You know, it's an open question to me. You know, I went down there as a young lawyer thinking I would teach them about the law and about how to do a case and, you know, hold Chevron accountable. And like, and I was, you know, I was very anxious to be successful. And it's my first big case and, you know, to help people, I was aggressive and probably arrogant to some degree. I came out of Harvard law school as a young man where at Harvard,

they train you to like be a leader of the world, you know? And I realized over time though, that, that I got very humbled down there. I mean, I... These people with seemingly nothing that we value in the United States or in the North, like they have no money. Um, they have very few clothes. Their houses are made of wood. You know, thatched roof huts often.

And they don't go to grocery stores, they actually hunt their animals and fish for their food. And I realized over time that I learned so much more about life than they ever learned from me about law. I mean, life from them than they ever learned from me about law. And it's just very humbling. I mean, I've lost a lot, by the way, through this materially. But I've lived a very rich life, and I feel very blessed to have had these experiences that I'm talking about now.

But it's just people don't understand here, generally, that you can be rich and not have money. I mean, you can be, you know, the people of the Amazon, before oil came, before these outside extractive industries showed up lived very prosperous happy lives and and never had money and like my son you know i once went to his elementary school to talk about the case and like the first thing i asked the kids was like it's like fifth or sixth grade i'm like can you imagine being rich and having no money and like it was like everyone looked at me dumbfounded like they couldn't figure out how you imagine being rich and having no money? And like, it was like everyone looked at me dumbfounded. Like, they couldn't figure out how you could be rich and have no money because there's such a conflation of wealth with money in our culture. And they have the people, the indigenous peoples of Ecuador and the Amazon and many places around the world have a totally different conception of wealth than we do.

Well, money is just a story at the end of the day it's a story told by you know men and women to other men and women who come after them that this is the thing that we exchanged it tells you what you're worth in this society so if you live in a society that just didn't ever use maybe that paper currency or metallic currency to trade around and and perhaps valued other things that sometimes weren't even material that could be spiritual and things like that and you lived in these in these communities where you relied on each other to survive as well in in very difficult environments you know it would make a lot of sense to me how you know people feel the wealth of the human spirit in a way it's it's just not

i understand though why fifth and sixth graders i know i would have been one of them would look at you like you have 10 fucking heads when you say that because they're just trained from a young age you know they watch mommy and daddy use cash or a credit card to get gas or do whatever and that's how that's how they get what they get it's not it's not just this magic thing that pops into your pocket you know yeah exactly it's it's fascinating to me that you know you can look back on it now though and and see all the work you've done on it and the emotion you've piled into this because that comes across to this day like when people i'll direct people to your instagram as well on in link in description but when people

can watch you talk on instagram and particularly about this case the passion literally comes through the keyboard when it's just you typing out you know the post but for you to see all these people who in many ways to this day have never been paid because of what happened as a that we're going to get to as a result of this case but to see them kind of like take you in as one of them in a way who's fighting for them and have, and it's so clear the appreciation many of these people have to this day for you. There's something that is to me a current happy ending in that story, even if justice hasn't been done. I hope you can see that on your end as well.

Well, I appreciate you saying that and seeing it. You know, look, I don't think of it as a happy ending because there's so many people suffering. But I will say this, the hard work that I and others put in over many, many years has produced some incredibly positive benefits to the world, to the people of Ecuador, even if the cleanup has not happened yet. And I would say one of the main positive benefits is the fact that we created a model of organizing at the most grassroots level possible in the world. You know, with these really vulnerable communities in the Amazon, we're able to deliver to them the benefit of a lot of sophisticated lawyers

and legal talent and backers, donors, funders, people who wanted to help them. And we created a team, an international team that had an enormous impact. And still is having an impact, the case is still going on. And, you know, the, I think the assumption Texaco and Chevron always have made is that these people will never be able to fight back, will never be able to hold them accountable.

And we completely changed that with this model we created, not only a model of people, you know, cross-border international cooperation, people from totally different backgrounds, different educational backgrounds, different places, different ways of thinking about the world, brought it all together and raised a lot of money to fund the litigation. Because you can't just do a litigation without money. You need money to pay experts, to pay expenses. I took 250 trips to Ecuador. I had to buy plane tickets. How'd you raise this money?

Just any way I could. I mean, basically, I went to... Well, the first part of the case was funded by a plaintiff's law firm in Philadelphia. What firm? Cone, Swift, and Graff. I don't know if you've heard of them. My dad has practiced out of Philly for a long time.

He's probably heard of them. Yeah, he probably knows them. They're a small but profitable class action lawsuit firm. And they're good people. And they took this on. So remember I said we took that first trip, came back, filed the lawsuit. They were the law firm that we then went to,

to join our team to file it. And they ended up doing a lot of the financing of the case for many, many years. But over time, you know, Chevron started to make things so intense, so complicated. They started filing all these other cases to attack the original case. Like how, what do you mean?

Well, what I mean is, um, so the fundamentals of the story, let me just get to cut to the chase about what happened. So, you know, we filed here in the US, that period of the case took 10 years and they got it shifted to Ecuador's courts because they wanted impunity and they didn't want to be held, have a trial in the United States with the jury. Are you in discovery for 10 years? Is that what you're saying? In discovery, no.

But then we had to like litigate the issue where the trial should be. And their tactic always is to drag things out as long as they can. So, you know, the courts move slowly. You see that now with all these cases against Donald Trump. I mean, like it just takes a long time to get to trial, usually. That's your judge too, right? You were telling me. Yeah, Lou Kaplan. Yeah, we'll get to that in a second. In any event, yeah, it took a while,

but eventually that first 10-year period ended, and they won that phase of the battle to some degree. But like, I have, I'm kind of an intuitive person. And like I didn't feel they really won it because I realized what we won out of that phase is they had to accept jurisdiction in Ecuador's courts as a condition of a U.S. judge sending the case from U.S. courts to Ecuador. Had we initially filed in Ecuador, they would have never accepted jurisdiction, would have challenged it. as a condition of a US judge sending the case from US courts to Ecuador. Had we initially filed in Ecuador, they would have never accepted jurisdiction, would have challenged it. So when we then refiled the case in Ecuador, which is what I would call phase two of this long litigation.

What year are we in? This was in 2003. Okay. Okay, 10 years in. We had them. There was going to be a trial. And when you're a big oil company and you're sued by indigenous people,

your first goal was to not have a trial. I mean, get rid of the case. So the fact we were able to relatively quickly, once it got moved to Ecuador, we were in a trial six months after we refiled the case in Ecuador. That's fast. We had them in a trial. But they tried refiled the case in Ecuador. That's fast. Okay, we had them in a trial. But they tried to get it moved back, right?

Like, right away? Yeah, but they thought we would go away. In other words, the case being financed by U.S. lawyers. U.S. lawyers can't practice in Ecuador. We had to then go down there, find Ecuadoran lawyers to do it, pay them. It just becomes a lot more complicated. So their strategy by moving it to another country

was we would give up. That was their first strategy. But when we didn't give up, showed up with Ecuadorian lawyers, we made a trial happen. And that was an enormous victory, a trial where they were forced to submit to the jurisdiction of a court in Ecuador with judges who came from the region, who understood the problem, and suddenly the entire dynamic shifted in a way that, like, I'm like, wow, we could probably have a fair trial here, you know? And the people felt that too. So by seeking to move it down to Ecuador,

they, you know, I mean, I understand what they were trying to do at the time, but I think there was also a big silver lining to us losing that phase of the battle. Going back to that 10 years, though, but I think there was also a big silver lining to us losing that phase of the battle. Going back to that 10 years though, getting it pushed there, one of the things that I'm always wondering that I think a lot of people out there, those of us who aren't attorneys, get a little confused by is we know this concept of the powerful will just try to like drag it out in court so that you go away, meaning they spend more money, meaning you have to spend more money.

They can afford it. You can't. Plain and simple. But can you just give us an example of how an argument over – how they can get an argument over where the jurisdiction is can drag out across, I don't know, maybe hundreds of hearings or something across ten years? Like to me, laymen sitting at home, I'd be like, OK, there's going to be a hearing on, is it going to be there or here? Maybe at that hearing, they say, okay, we need discovery for that. Okay. We get one more hearing. We go there, discovery's there. We present the case and it's decided, but that's not how it goes. Like, how would they go in and be like raising a new point to say, oh, we got to get another hearing? So the answer to that is there's not a hundred hearings there's like maybe 10 hearings over 10 years and the real delays are when they're able to take a preliminary issue like jurisdiction and it it a trial judge rules okay there's jurisdiction or or there's not

jurisdiction and the losing party then appeals you know another prior to the any trial you're appealing these pre-trial motions decisions to a higher court. You gotta write appellate briefs, and you have argument over that. It can take a really long time. It's ridiculous, actually, how long it takes. But because the system is so slow,

even in a normal case, corporations that are well-funded know this, so they often use the slowness of the system as a way to grind down those of us who bring these social justice, environmental justice cases as a way to sort of discourage us or make us run out of money and to really win through procedural hijinks, procedural subterfuge, what they can never win on the claims. In other words, they can't win the claims. I mean, we are right, they are wrong. A court, this case, we won this case. But their hope at that time was we would get so discouraged by the procedural burden of

having to keep fighting just to get to trial that we would give up. Were you having, after the initial case gets filed and you mentioned it got onto Dan Rather, maybe some of the other channels too, as the case went on, did you start already to find it harder for the media to cover this and get suspicious about the potential relationship between Chevron

and Advertiser and the media? Or did that part come later in the case that part came a little later okay in the 90s there wasn't a ton of press coverage um there was some and it was usually pretty sympathetic to us and you were like wow this is unbelievable I can't believe what they did down there but again part of the reason they felt they could get away with it is the place was so isolated it was very hard to travel to and see it, and very few journalists, if any, actually went there. And I think they counted on that in their analysis. You know, they're like, well, this is kind of...

a very isolated area, we could probably get away with this here. Or even as they litigated, like, eh, people are not gonna pay that much attention to this. There might be an article here or there. I'd say the press coverage really started to kick into gear when we got them into trial in the early 2000s. People were like, wow, there's a trial. And I remember the very first day of the trial,

in October of 2003. In Ecuador. In Ecuador, in that little town of Lago Agrio, Cofan territory. Town that did not have a paved road or a stoplight. Okay. There were journalists there from at the time were the big four, which was the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and LA Times.

People might not remember, but like those were the big four newspapers in the US. And they still are to some degree, although the LA Times is like, you know, shadow of its former self and, you know, whatever. But there was a lot of media coverage at the beginning of the trial in the Ecuador phase, which is what I would call phase two, which lasted from 2003 to 2011 when we won the case in the trial court. It took eight, nine years.

Eight years. Yeah, because they did the same BS in Ecuador, the Ecuador trial that they did in the first phase, the 10-year phase in the U.S., which is they tried to drag it out as much as they could. They, you know, requested all these field inspections that were just redundant. They filed literally dozens of motions, you know, in an hour just to tie up the judge. You know, in Ecuador's courts don't have the resources of U.S. courts, like they move a little more slowly. And they took advantage of that,

because, you know, the main advantage they had over us was resource, they had money. They were willing to spend it, and they knew we had very little. So, you know, they would, and this has always been their strategy until it doesn't, it's not that relevant at this point, because we won. But for years their strategy was to um you know use their money to pay a bunch of lawyers to sort of throw you know

sand into the gears of the justice system so it would go on for as long as possible because they they would rather pay lawyers to just litigate that have a final decision that would likely go against them. And that was their strategy. Now, this being an Ecuadorian court, though, obviously you're involved with the case. The counter attorneys from the U.S. are involved with the case. But you guys, I would assume, have to have like lead Ecuadorian counsel down there, right? So you're – how would you – like from a layman's standpoint, how would you describe that role? Are you making the case behind the scenes and then they're putting it in court and

arguing it? Or is it a collaboration? How did it work? I would say it was a true collaboration. I mean, basically, they know their system. And by the way, Ecuador has a different legal system than the US system in many respects. It's what's called a civil law system and we have a common law system so people little quick law lesson if i may you know we come out of the british tradition which is like the commonwealth tradition the great britain australia canada the united states basically the place is britain colonized and then a lot of the rest of the world has a civil system, which has its origin in the Spanish legal system. And the places Spain colonized, Latin America, you know, Louisiana, actually in the United States, all the French also were into this, have a totally different kind of system. That's more judge-centered versus, you know,

I would say lawyer-centered, which is ours. You know, in a civil system, the judge has an enormous amount of power. There's generally not a jury. In the common law system, the lawyers have a ton of power, and there's usually a jury. You know, I mean, judges always have a certain amount of power, but they're very different systems designed for the same purpose which is to sort of adjudicate conflicts fairly find the facts find the truth um but we were not qualified as american lawyers and we're not allowed to practice law in ecuador so we were able to take our expertise about science about expert reports

about how to battle this out in the media, you know, and also we could look at their Ecuador's laws and sort of, you know, work with our local lawyers on strategy. But, you know, one of the satisfying things about the experience is the Ecuadorian lawyers who worked on our case, mostly Pablo Fajardo, Juan Pablo Sanchez, and Julio Prieto did a great job really pushing this in a way that over time, they really led this. And they did a great job. I mean, we financed it. We were able to get experts on science and oil contamination from the United States to help, but they were really the lead lawyers during the case in Ecuador. Is that hard with the expert side of things? This is always something that's interesting to me because you'll look at – you can go to websites of guys who make a living off of being a legal expert on something that they're an expert on and then you'll see the cases they work and it'll be and i think in some ways this is good by the way but it'll be cases

on a certain type of issue where they take the opposite side depending on who hires them right so not the same cases but maybe the same family of types of cases and so what i always wonder is is there a piece of like, are you competing with some capitalism here on both sides where it's like, okay, well, you hire this expert, you're paying them, they're happy to be paid, they want to help you out, they're hiring that expert, they're paying them, they're probably even more happy to be paid, but a lot more, and they're helping them out. And then that kind of, you have trouble getting to the actual truth of that?

Well, you know, it's a good question. In US courts, and there's an issue that experts need to opine on for a jury or a judge, both sides hire their own expert, they pay them, and they produce usually opposite conclusions, you know, and the jury has to assess them as witnesses, like who has more credibility, who seems to be doing a better job, who's right, who's wrong, you know, that kind of stuff. So it's a battle where both sides control their own experts. In a civil law system like the one in Ecuador, often the judge will appoint the expert. And there's only one expert. But that has its own set of problems for various reasons because, you know, it's not, you know,

adversarial as much and you don't really get two points of view. In our case in Ecuador, the judge actually adopted the U.S. system and both Chevron and our side used our own experts on all these site visits. So the judge had the benefit of two separate expert views of stuff under the control of the parties. But, you know, yeah, I mean, if a party hires an expert and pays him or her, they expect the report to come out a certain way, and you could argue, well, that's not science, that's not truth,

that's not objective. But the reality is juries are not dumb. Like they can look at these reports and look at the testimony and assess it for themselves. And they often come to, I think, really good conclusions. Okay. So you guys are pulling all these experts during this eight year trial. I don't even know how it lasts that long. That's crazy. Did you also get to bring in witnesses, like some of the people? Yeah. So the way it worked is, the reason it lasted eight years is because in Ecuador, the civil law system, you don't see this in the US, a lot of the trial consisted of the parties going to these polluted sites, you know, these well sites with all these pits, and taking water and soil samples in front of the judge and taking witness testimony from people who lived around the pits and each each of these these are called

inspections site inspections and we would do you know the the weeks we would do this it was like once a month we go out for two days and chevron sort of saw this as an opportunity to delay and sabotage the trial they basically asked for like don't know, dozens and dozens of these inspections. And they're expensive to do. You have to pay people to go and pay for lab tests and stuff. And over time, every inspection showed the same thing, like massive pollution, like incredibly high rates of total petroleum, hydrocarbons, and other harmful chemicals, you know, in these sites that were clearly cancer-causing. So after a certain time, we asked the judge, like, we don't need to keep doing this. Every single one of these sites shows the same results.

Texaco, now Chevron, caused a massive environmental disaster that's harming the environment and putting out substances that kill people if they're ingested. We don't need to continue the trial because they were using these inspections to keep delaying the final result, the final resolution. Was their side like trying to find stuff different and saying, look, it's not that bad? They were using junk science. Yes. I mean, I noticed this constantly. For example, if there's a pit in a certain location, we would go sample like in the pit or right next to the pit

to show the pollution. They would look at the pit and they would walk up a little hill, like 200 yards, and take a sample up there to quote-unquote prove that the pollution hadn't spread. Oh, this is clean, it's no big deal. The pit isn't harming anyone, it hasn't really spread. I mean, it was a... It's in the water though.

No, it is in the water, but they're not sampling where they think they're gonna find it. I mean, it was a... It's in the water, though. Yeah, yeah. No, it is in the water, but they're not sampling where they think they're gonna find it. I mean, they would send their teams out the day before, the week before these planned inspections, and they would sample the site secretly to figure out when the judge shows up, where they could sample that would...

in places that would not produce results. They would sample secretly, like, get these really bad results. We know this because we ended up getting this information of their secret sampling. And then when the judge would come, they would commit, in my opinion, fraud. They would basically go sample in places where they knew there was not contamination as a way to try to deceive the court into thinking they hadn't caused any harm. I mean, this is the kind of crap we had to deal with constantly, constantly. You know, this effort to sabotage the trial,

or to the extent they had to report sampling results, they tried to report deceptive sampling results. How was the media coverage developing during all this though? Because you mentioned at the very beginning, you had the big four sitting there in the trial. But did it over this eight year period, did they start to move away and not cover it or did they continue reporting on it in the us um there was sporadic reporting um i would say that it was difficult to get sustained interest just because the case was going on so long and people were like what you know i've covered that already let me know when there's a result that kind of stuff but as it developed more and more people started to realize there was something really special happening.

Like, it was just unique, and I think it had never happened before, unprecedented to have indigenous peoples go toe-to-toe in court with an American oil company to this extent. I mean, it was very interesting, visually and just for a variety of reasons, since it had never happened before. People were like, wow, I wonder if these people can really hold this oil company accountable.

Interesting that lawyers in the United States are down there. You know? So we got, you know, magazine coverage. I'd say a big, big, big important sort of pivot point was when Vanity Fair went down and did a big story on the case and on Pablo Fajardo, who was a lead Ecuadorian lawyer. Can we find that, Alessi? Yeah, it's called, um...

I think it's called Amazon Crude or Crude. Uh, and it was on... Vanity Fair had an environmental issue they put out every year and Leonardo DiCaprio was on the cover. I remember this well, standing on an iceberg in Greenland. Mm. And in that issue was this probably 15,000 word article on our case and it really put us on the map

and suddenly all these people, like 60 minutesutes then did a piece off of that. It came down. Were you in that? I was, yeah. 60 Minutes did a piece. It's hard to find though, because Chevron convinced them to take it down from their site. I mean, we have a copy. What?

Yeah. So it's like not on YouTube? It's hard to find. It's here and there, pieces of it, but it was really powerful. It came out in May of 2009, you know, as the case was ending in Ecuador. And it made them look, appropriately made them look terrible. I mean, it really captured the extent of the, you know, the pollution,

the intentionality, you know, the lack of concern for the people, the lies, a lot of lies around these pits. You know, they would tell journalists that they didn't harm anybody. And by that time, we had so much evidence from laboratories that they had massive amounts of cancer-causing substances that their lies began to fell apart. They began to collapse. And I think they got increasingly desperate. One of the things they did is they paid a man named Diego Borja, who worked on their team, this Ecuadorian guy,

to go undercover and meet with the judge, he and this other American guy named Wayne Hanson, and they acted like they were cleanup experts. And they're like, oh, where's this case going? Yeah, we want business if the ruling is in favor of the, you know, the communities. We want to see if we can do the cleanup. And we have a company. They lied to the judge. And they taped it without telling him through a pen.

And they... Oh, to make it look like a complaint. To make it look like, and it was it was crazy they took these tapes to the New York Times and got totally manipulated by well explain how in a second they got like a story saying you know it looks like the case is corrupt this is like on the right before it ended wait is this this isn't judge guerra is it no it's another judge another judge um judge uh forget his name now okay but they were they were in ecuador the judges rotate every two years on a case because these cases can last years so in the envi in the case we brought

since it was such an important case under a certain environmental law, they anticipated some of these cases could last a long time. So they had a rule that only the president of the court could preside over this case. And there were four judges on the court, and they would rotate the presidency. So they all presided over the case. They all knew about the case. I mean, it wasn't that big a deal. It was just the way Ecuadorian law worked. So, you know, Chevron tried to, you know, as we were getting close to finishing the case, it was so clear the evidence was against them. They tried to

sabotage the case in a really desperate move, which ended up backfiring because we quickly realized we did some investigation and that, you know, that realized that the person who did this worked for them. And then the other dude he brought, this American guy, was a convicted felon in the United States. And that they were just liars and they lied about it on every level and it ended up, like many things they do, backfiring against the company.

But for a period of time they were gauging in these really desperate measures they clearly have no respect for the law let me be clear you know and they had no respect for us you know like they didn't think we'd ever find out you know they didn't understand that we are very agile we hired an investigator and figured the whole thing out and ended up making them look terrible but they kept doing things like this and we found out through that whole process, because we interviewed people who... One guy who taped Diego Bora, who was the techs...

I'm sorry, the Chevron employee in Ecuador who did this, saying that everything they did was essentially a fraud. Like, they would take soil samples at these inspections, and they would, on the way to the lab, just dump them out and take clean soil and stick them in, you know, in these, in these supposed glass containers that you keep soil samples in. I mean, they were cheating. And then we, we would use a lab in Ecuador for our legitimate, you know, soil and water samples. And they got so freaked out by the fact that the results of this lab were producing made them look bad that they went to the lab and threatened to inspect it they tried to intimidate

the lab into dropping us as a client and if we you know most of the labs work for oil companies so it was very hard to get a lab to process our soil and water samples because we're not an institution that's going to do repeat business you know so they tried to prevent the labs from processing our samples which would have stopped our ability to prove our case you know so they did all sorts of corrupt things you know um and it was something we had to be vigilant about always but we're You know, we can catch them and call them out. And ultimately, I think it shows how they really work out of bad faith and they really don't respect ethics. And they often will violate the law to try to evade a judgment, which is what they did then and what they later did with me. At any point during these years, maybe specifically the years in Ecuador from 03 to this point,

we're at like 08, 09. Did you, not to be like too cloak and dagger like movie scene, but did you get approached by mysterious people representing the other side saying like, hey, what are you doing here? What's it going to take for you to go away? No. Never? No. other side saying like hey what are you doing here what's it going to take for you to go away no never no i mean the reason i mean they would have done anything they thought might be effective so i'm saying they didn't they didn't i'm sure they thought about that but it was very clear to everyone who watched how we function as a team and watch me personally that i was not for sale in

any way shape or form you know so they if someone were to even try that i would call them out and it would just backfire so they didn't mess with that they did try to do that to other people though um including uh what actually the judge who issued the trial court ruling against them they tried to destroy him i mean they basically tried to bribe him and that didn't work they tried to you know destroy his reputation they sent an american lawyer down a spanish-speaking american lawyer based in miami to ecuador to you know basically offer the trial judge a million dollars and he would recant the judgment that he issued against chevron and are they and we caught him and we caught him okay you know catch him because at that point ecuador's

government was protecting him he had been under so much threat from forces aligned with chevron that i think they were taping all of his cell phone conversations, and they taped this conversation between this lawyer from Miami who worked for Chevron, basically offering him a bribe. Well, the first mistake was hiring a lawyer from Miami. That's not the place of like love the law over there. But I'll tell you something. Yeah, remember Miami Vice? Oh. So, you know, what's crazy is they actually...

This is how they do business around the world. Like, you know, this is our first case against an oil company, but this was not their first case being sued. So, you know, they've been sort of extracting oil around the world and taking advantage of communities and legal systems for 100 plus years. Like, you know, they've been, they've been sort of extracting oil around the world and taking advantage of communities and legal systems for a hundred plus years. Like, they know what they're doing. And they use all these tactics as a way to evade liability.

And they pay dearly for the people who do this. I mean, they pay them a lot of money, but it's much less money than they would have to pay if they actually paid the people they harm for the damage they caused. When they, you know, obviously, as a public public company they have to do their quarterly reports and everything the CEOs It's a fortune 50 company CEOs pretty public some of those senior people are public Were they all?

Did they ever never comment on this case? Were they able to kind of stay quiet on and say well we're letting it play out in court Or was there also some? Involvement where things were maybe seeping through on investor calls and stuff like that like yeah we got this rogue team in ecuador trying to take us down but you know we're going to beat them like how was the tete-a-tete there outside the courtroom that actually was a key component of what was happening that's a good question the way that worked is there were a lot of Chevron shareholders who were challenging company management for not settling the case for like, you know, paying lawyers over the people they harmed. And, you

know, there were shareholder resolutions submitted that got a massive amount of support. I'm talking about 40, 45%, but we never hear of like that much support when management opposes a shareholder resolution. We cause management a lot of, or I should say the shareholders, but we work with them. They cause a lot of consternation among the CEO of Chevron, among the top management team. They spend a massive amount of resources to beat back this, what I would call a shareholder revolution, over their failure to deal with this problem in Ecuador, over the fact that people were dying down there, and because of their pollution,

they weren't really acknowledging it or dealing with it. And that went on for years and years. I mean, and also the people of Ecuador, some of the indigenous community leaders would fly up for their shareholder meetings and confront the CEO directly in the meeting of the dramatic showdowns. Do we have any video of this? Well, they wouldn't let cameras in.

But this video of people, you know, who had just done it walk out of the meeting and talk about it. And, you know, I don't know if people know this, but in corporate law in America, public companies have to have regular shareholder meetings at least once a year. And any shareholders allowed to go,

and there's a part during the meeting where anyone can speak. I mean, raise a question or speak for a minute or two. And it was during these parts that a lot of shareholders, including some of our own clients in Ecuador, come up and speak. I mean, they were not shareholders, but there's proxies. So, a shareholder would say,

hey, bring your guy up and he can speak on my proxy. So, you have these dramatic showdowns with, say, the leader of the Kofan indigenous group against, you know, Michael Wirth, the CEO of Chevron. And just extraordinary stuff. Now, every time that happened, by the way, and their whole board's there, it's very... They don't like it. It's kind of embarrassing.

And their canned response initially was, look, we hear you, but it's not our responsibility. Talk to your own government. They should clean it up. You know, total cop-out. initially was, look, we hear you, but it's not our responsibility. Talk to your own government. They should clean it up. You know, total cop out. We only dug the whole fucking thing. And then over time, they started to blame me. Your own lawyer's a criminal.

He defrauded us. Now, when did they start saying that? They started saying that around 2010, 11, when they changed their, we had won the case in ecuador okay understand we won the case in two you know i've lost track of time i think the the decision came down in 2010 for roughly 19 billion dollars which was unheard of and by the way in retrospect it's if you can believe it it sounds like a lot of money it's kind of a modest amount because bp by the way ended up paying 75 billion dollars over the deep water the gulf of mexico spill alessi can you look up market oh my god why am i blanking on wall street terms right now

market cap for chevron and let's get a chart up i'd love to know what their market cap was in 2010 just to put that in perspective because like you said it's a lot of money to you and me so right now it says 282 billion but that's today so yep you got it spot on alright so let's do yeah right there September 10th 2010 it was looks like 78 well that's the share price sorry so 78 is call it roughly half of the 150 it's at right now so their market cap was in the neighborhood of 150 billion at the time yeah so that's but they're they're okay but that's a huge that's like a 13 percent hit to the company now when they get that ruling was it one of these situations where the judge says you have to pay it over 30 years or something like that or is this no you you got to pay now no it's to pay the whole thing now but they appealed it and that again started in ecuador

ecuador's courts an appellate process that was still ongoing, you know, for a couple of years. And ultimately won the appeal unanimously in Ecuador's highest, their Supreme Court. They won the appeal? We won the appeal. Okay. In other words, the judgment against them was affirmed unanimously.

But they did lower the cost they had to pay. They lowered the amount from roughly 19 to half that. Because half of the 19 was punitive damages, which people don't know there's actual damages that is the harm caused to people in monetary terms but if it's something particularly egregious like really reckless and intentional you know often courts will impose an additional amount on top of that to deter you know companies from doing this again. So in this case, they doubled the amount, half of it being punitive, half of it being actual,

and the Supreme Court of Ecuador took off the punitive part, not because they didn't deserve it, because under Ecuadorian law, that was like a U.S. legal concept. Under Ecuadorian law, there was no punitive damages law, so we couldn't use that. So the case got cut in half on appeal. The amount of damages did, but otherwise, the case was affirmed totally, the liability portion.

And that was a huge, you know, defeat for Chevron. And did this cause, they had to pull out of a lot of places because of this, right? Or am I off on that? Well, they pulled out of, they had places because of this right or am i well they pulled out they had sold all their assets in ecuador in anticipate anticipation of losing the case given how the evidence was coming in so and what assets did they still have in ecuador at the time a bunch of gas station hundred gas stations and just other stuff bank accounts i mean they still

had operations that but they weren't drilling for oil. They were in the retail business, lubricants, that kind of stuff. So, they had assets in Ecuador, but they didn't have oil wells or oil extraction operation. They had given that over to Petro Ecuador by that time. But they were clearly setting themselves up to, you know, not pay us. Because, you know, one of the problems in the law, if people can sort of get their heads around this,

is the law operates on a, generally on a national scope. That is, every country has its own law, its own case. So you can win a case in a certain country, but if the defendant doesn't have assets in that country, it's hard to collect. You have to go to another country. But if the defendant doesn't have assets in that country, it's hard to collect. You have to go to another country. If they won't pay you, you have to go to another country where they do have assets and try to get them. You guys tried to do that with several places, right? We did. And that's sort of where the case is now, but it makes it... It's basically you win the trial and then you have to have a whole other legal proceeding to go collect on you know money they

won't pay and it just again shows their bad faith so what happened here is we won you know the whole thing affirmed on appeal at the highest level in ecuador and they refused to pay and they pulled all their assets out of ecuador and that forced the communities in ecuador to go find lawyers in other countries where they had assets like canada being an example, and go start a whole new lawsuit over the lawsuit. I mean, this again is what they do. They just try to drag it out, drag it out, drag it out. Now, in the buildup to that ruling in sub-2010, there was also a documentary that came out, I think in 2009, called Crude, which you were involved with.

And Joe Berlinger directed it who i think is a friend of yours and what it did i i haven't seen it but my understanding is that it essentially told this story and it went through what they did what was happening now there was this case actively going on in ecuador to try to raise awareness to it and when i when i look through your whole story and again there's so much we have to get to with different basically tricks they tried to pull on you and sometimes unfortunately successfully but when i look through it every time it looks like you made a mistake on something it then has proven oh no they actually kind of them on that like they they inserted in a bad actor and

and made him do something and blamed you on it in the documentary though there was an argument about the way it was edited which to me is a little questionable because documentaries in an ideal world you capture hundreds of hours of footage you put it out as a documentary but that's not really how it works you know you have to edit it down to 100 minutes 110 minutes whatever it is and try to tell the story so i wanted to get your take on the i guess the one scene in there that they tried to then paint the whole documentary with my understanding is that essentially there was some guy who later served as some sort of expert involved in your case who was videotaped, I guess, by Joe doing the documentary at some point, meeting with your legal team or something like that. And so there

was a question of conflict of interest or something. What happened there? And they were trying to say that you said, okay, we can't put that in the documentary. How did that all go down? And what was up with the narrative that they pushed on that? So, Joe was filming a lot of the case, our meetings. I mean, you know, we made a decision collectively as a team that we would give him access because we felt like it... We were not sure we'd even finish the case

the way Chevron was delaying it. We're like, well, we should try to make a documentary film so people can understand how bad their atrocities are and, you know, what the people are dealing with. So, we decided to work with Joe. I mean, it wasn't our film, it was his film, just to be very clear, it was an independent film. Um, what you're talking about is, um, at the end of the trial,

after all these inspections were completed, there was one final phase called the damages phase, where we appointed an expert, this guy, Richard Cabrera, to go figure out, based on all the evidence that had been collected, what it would cost to clean it up. Chevron was rabidly opposed to this guy's work because they knew once there was a damages number, they were gonna be in serious trouble

because it was likely to be accepted or something close to it accepted by the court. So they tried to undermine his work. They took out ads in the local newspapers attacking him, claiming he was biased, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it is true, and this is, there's nothing wrong with this, that he was our expert, not theirs.

And they tried to cast that as, oh, he's not independent, the damages expert has to be truly independent of both parties, which is not true under Ecuadorian law. They could have appointed someone too, but you can only appoint at the very beginning, the first six days of the case way back in 2003 and they never they never did that i think was a mistake big mistake actually

on their part but we did so you know when 2010 rolled around and this guy's doing his work they couldn't have their own expert but we had ours so they tried to frame it like we were um doing something wrong by working with our own expert. And that was just completely false. They work with their experts, we work with ours. So it was a real bunch of BS that they put out there as a way to undermine the credibility of this guy's work. In terms of the movie, there were a bunch of scenes

of us meeting with our own expert, this Cabrera gentleman. And I think there was one scene that Joe edited out at the request of not me, but one of our lawyers for whatever reason. Well, they tried to say it was you. Yeah, it wasn't me. Well, I mean, everything happened down there.

They tried to claim it. I mean, they had a racketeering theory that we were like, you know, a bunch of... We had a conspiracy and I was the lead. So, ultimately, everything that happened, good, bad, ugly, they tried to attribute to me as the mastermind of the whole racketeering conspiracy, which is a false, totally false narrative.

Um, but in any event, Joe showed us a rough cut of the film. I mean, it's his film. And one of our lawyers suggested that he edit out a scene of like 30 seconds. It was very short. And in the discovery process, when they sued me in the United States for $60 billion, and I'll explain that in a second, they got the rough cut from Joe and realized there was like a 30 second scene that had been removed. And they tried to build a whole theory around that that we thought it was all wrong and asked them to remove it when in reality it really was not relevant to much of anything and you know our position was vindicated by the courts in ecuador when they i mean chevron

put all this before the courts they're like that is so irrelevant to the fact that you guys dumped 16 billion gallons of cancer causing oil waste you're not going to distract us and they rejected it's a red herring they're trying to remove i mean i think i read they ended up and we'll get to that case with more details but they ended up forcing joe to hand over like 500 hours of footage or something all of his outtakes over 600 hours yes so they didn't essentially they're they're clinging to 30 seconds in there. Yeah. Pretty bad odds on their side. I feel like you have a few more hours on your side. If you get 600 hours, you know, you figured you'd find something.

Yes. They also, you know, when they got all these hundreds of hours of video, I think they hired like 15, 20 editors to look at them. They had a whole operation. They probably spent millions just to look at his film that cost him less than a million to make. And they tried to, they basically manipulated the editing and they tried to splice together stuff

that didn't mean what it said. And, you know, we deconstructed the whole thing. We have a 70-page memo on what they, they took what they call, they call them outtakes. And they probably put out 20 clips of me and others from Joe's hundreds of hours. And everything was either taken out of context, manipulated. It was all a bunch of BS.

It was all designed to create the impression that they caught us at something, you know? And then they took that to US courts as a way to try to frame the counterattack against me. But, you know, bottom line is, Joe Bollinger made a damn good film. It's called Crude. And premiered at Sundance 2009. And, you know, hundreds of thousands of people have seen it. It was on Netflix. And it really tells a good part of the truth about what they did down there and it captures a lot of what happened during the trial in ecuador okay so i saw something about

chevron i guess like admitting publicly maybe on one of their calls that when the case is involving you they at least publicly admitted to it at least over a billion dollars spent on these cases. You know, hindsight's 20-20, but I'm curious, like, if they'd come to you in 03, the day, you know, the day before that trial and said, all right, we're going to pay you $300 million, would you guys have taken that? Well, first of all, those types of decisions are made by the clients, not by the lawyers. Just to be clear, like whether to settle a case is a client decision. Look, we had multiple meetings with them, by the way, to try to settle the case at different points. You know, they would sort of hint at certain amounts of money or ranges that they might be willing to consider.

They never struck us or the clients as sufficient to even really make a dent in the problem in terms of a cleanup, what it would actually cost. So the client groups made a decision to just keep going. And they're still keeping going because you literally need billions of dollars. This is so bad, you need billions of dollars to begin to sort of mitigate it to such a degree that people can live safely in this area again. You know, there's so much damage, by the way, you'll never be able to truly restore it

to what it once was, the environment, and the way of life of the people impacted. You just can't, but you can get somewhat close and that costs a lot of money. Does it still look like somewhat it did in 93? Yes. Today? Yes. So you still see all these wells, there's still, I mean, I don't really know how, I

don't know the science of this, but there's still like oil waste running through the waterways in the soil, basically in the people's sustenance? Yes. It's still there. And you can see it. You can smell it. You can touch it. I mean, some of the pits have grown.

There's been like vegetation that's grown on top, but like you can literally just put your hand in there like below the grass. It's like this, you know. And it's there you know i mean the 60 minutes piece is extraordinary scott pelly was the reporter he went down um and he literally like there was a one pit that was like encrusted and he literally walked on top of it was like walking on top of a water bed i don't know if by the way you guys know about water beds they used to be popular like in the 60s and 70s.

Oh, like an actual bed. Yeah, the bed is full of water instead of a mattress. Yeah, those are the things that would pop. Yeah. They started to go out a little too hard. Yeah. They forgot what... But, you know, they were like waterbeds.

Like you could walk on them and there was all this oil underneath. So, it's still there. I mean, you can go down and see it and it's a tragedy because think about it. We started the case in 1993. You said 31 years. I think it's 28 years or 20. Well, we're in 2024. That's what I'm saying.

That's 31. I heard you say 28. I've been saying 28 for a few years because I wasn't always detained. I didn't correct you, but I will now. Yeah, it's 31 years. You're right. And it's just a tragedy that it's still there. What about the damage to the ecosystem too?

I mean, we keep talking about obviously all the people who live there and what's happened to their health. But you look at the spills like Deepwater Horizon. A huge impact was that all the biosphere died in that area. All these animals were killed in the sea in that case. But do we have data to talk about certain species in the Amazon that were affected greatly by this? Well, it's been disastrous for animal life and human life, for all life, you know, plant life, trees. You've got to start with the fact that this is probably one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet. I mean, you know, it's just the richness of life in the pristine jungle in terms of animals and plants and, you know, food and, you know, fresh water.

I mean, you couldn't have a more beautiful environment, you know, before the oil came. So, yeah, I mean, the impact has been absolutely devastating. I will say this. One of the impacts is, you know, the amount of clean water and animals who also have been hit by the oil diet of cancer. You know, the whole food supply has been so diminished that people being forced to leave their traditional lands that have been polluted and move into like these little cities

like Lago Agrio and get jobs and make money for the first time. Whereas before, they did not need money and were able to rely on the natural environment for all their sustenance, all their needs, and they lived quite prosperously. So, you know, that's what, when people talk about how this decimates traditional lifestyles and cultures, that's what they're talking about.

Like, when you can't live off the land anymore, you're indigenous, your culture dies. I mean, you know, you can survive because you have your language and you try to keep it together, but ultimately you're swimming upstream and it has a really big impact in terms of weakening these cultures, which has happened in Ecuador and obviously happened in the United States and many other countries. And you also at the same time have a couple of, one of them you already mentioned, but you have a couple other major environmental disasters going on between the logging to clear out for roads and for product where they overdo it and kill biospheres, start wildfires. That's something Paul Rosely obviously fights extensively in the Madre de Dios region.

But also another thing he fights is the gold mining and how they just tear out all this land it's what you talk about with the oil to me just picturing it in my head is very reminiscent to what they do on a size and scale with the gold mining perhaps you know with the gold mining there's a mercury issue there so that that's not good i think the oil actually getting into the water sounds a little worse to me, but it's kind of like, you know, pick your poison. It feels like, especially in this area, call it Peru, Ecuador, you know, there's multi-pronged attacks that are taking away so much of the biosphere that eventually is, you know, going to continue to shrink the Amazon, which provides 20% of the world's oxygen. Right. Well, I mean, it's, you know, look, what's happening in Ecuador's Amazon because of Chevron,

I think is a metaphor for what's happening in a lot of countries around the world right now where these oil companies or mining companies come in and like pull stuff out of the ground, ship it out, make money from it, while the communities where this resource exists are completely ignored or harmed, you know, and not paid a damn penny. And we see this model, this extractive model all over the place. Like when people, particularly your generation, talk about capitalism and the harm that capitalism causes, this is how it manifests in the developing world. I mean, you know, these big mining companies come in from Canada. Canada is a big mining nation, the United States, and they just

dig and dig and dig. And, you know, it's very hard to stop them once they get going, you know, and if they have the protection of the local government or the army, and they almost never ask permission of the communities whether they indigenous or non-indigenous for the right to extract stuff on their land i mean in ecuador this is very typical um ecuador's government will give title now to indigenous groups for the land but they retain the subsoil rights what what does that mean? Meaning anything under the surface, they own, not the indigenous group. So they basically say,

we'll give you your land, but we're going to control your resources and we can sell them to a foreign oil company and you're not going to get a penny. That's how they design these laws and these contracts and it's completely unfair. I mean, obviously, if you own the land, you own what's under it.

What can the indigenous groups even do about that? Well, they can fight their asses off, and many of them do, to prevent them from coming in and drilling. They'll say, you're not coming in, I don't care what the law says. And they fight. But can they fight before the Ecuadorian government

comes and gives a new contract like that? They can, they can, but the companies are very powerful and often they will fight it successfully, but not, you know, it know it depends but these are battles but they shouldn't have to be fought i mean this is their land and their resources well i mean the 64 trillion dollar question here is is how do we fix something like this and you know i'm a realist about things. I try not to be too cynical. Sometimes it's hard to because I understand what incentivization and money and power can do to anyone in this world. But especially when you look at advantageous governmental structures versus perhaps disadvantageous governmental structures, it gets weird. And to put that in English, what I mean is, okay, we see problems from, say, let's stick with the United States where some of our companies are doing things. We live in what we like to call a first world country where there's a democracy

and people can stand up for things and maybe get some legislation through. That's great. How do you stop Russia and China from doing from doing that though they don't give a fuck i mean like the stuff paul's fighting against the u.s is buying and china's funding so he's like standing there like oh my god somebody please like how do you when when they tried to do the paris climate accords that's great but then you have a you have you have china you know polluting the whole fucking world so what do you it, it's a great intention, but how do we even legislate this? You know, I pride myself on, excuse me, being an optimist and trying to figure out

pathways forward for people who care about these issues. Like you just, you know, pose this important question. I mean, I don't really know. I mean, some of the solutions have to happen on a national level, some on a global level. One thing I'm certain of, though, is they have to come from the people. They have to come from the bottom up because there is no way that governments, which are almost every government around the world,

is to some degree bought by the fossil fuel industry. They have so much money that any elected leader, they just don't have the ability, the constitution, the strength to really truly take on the fossil fuel industry. Sorry, but I haven't seen one government yet in this entire world who can adequately take on the fossil fuel industry, much less the United States, which is a fossil fuel country. I mean, Joe Biden came in as the climate president,

and he's approved more oil and gas leases on federal lands than Donald Trump did. I mean, Joe Biden is a fossil fuel president. Now, he's not... He tries to also do some pro-environment things as well, like a mix of things, but ultimately, we're moving in the wrong direction on fossil fuels in the United States.

I'll give you another example. Everyone talks about how we need to transition to clean energy. Clean coal. Yeah, clean coal. Where's the plan? There's no national plan that's ever been written by our government or even by an independent commission

to come up with an orderly transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy? Why is there no plan? What about even, let's take a step back. What about even more responsibility on how we do fossil fuels and to what extent we do them? Because this, to me, this is where I'm one of these middle ground guys. I'm like, there's got to be a way we can at least find some common ground, so to speak, so that, for example, different communities around the world, like the ones you fight for, don't get fucked, for example, by the fossil fuel industries. Maybe they do it in more advantageous places where everyone can get behind it. Aren't there ways we can look at that? Or are we really just stuck in

this Democrat-Republican system where you're going to have the people who are bought off, and it's going to be hard this or hard that? None of it or all of it. It's complicated. And bottom line is only an organizing strategy. I think that led largely by young people at this point is going to do the trick. And I think that, you know, we just need to keep fighting. I mean, our case against Chevron is an example of one way to go about trying to deal with one big problem that contributes to the overall bigger problem, you know? So everyone's got to sort of think to themselves about, if they care about this issue, what they want to do, because right now we're in serious, serious trouble. I mean, you know, we have passed the point of no return, or at least some experts think that, you know? So, you know, for the law to work properly and for judges to sort of start to deal with these cases, and they are to a significant degree, there's a lot of climate cases now in U.S's going to be very hard to create meaningful change. So people need to get involved one way or another in some form in their community or

nationally or globally. Yeah, we got to have dialogue though, too, on that. We have to have... Well, we need leadership, too. I mean, we need leadership at the highest levels. You know, we have to have that. And we really, I think, lack that to a great degree in the United States. I mean, look, the Biden administration has done some good things, while at the same time, it's really giving a lot out to the fossil fuel industry, which by the way, are making record profits. I mean, last year was the most profitable year ever

for the fossil fuel industry. You know, because of the war in Ukraine and other things going on. I mean, it's just, you know, they are flying high right now at precisely the point that we are facing an acute climate crisis. And there you go, though. We make, we're constantly drumming up war beats around the world, too, which puts money in the pockets of these very companies. It's not just fossil fuel either, but it's these huge companies that have corrupt holds on that government-corporate relationship.

Well, I mean, look at the defense industry. Do you think their need for profit has any relationship to why we seem to be in this forever war for the last 30 years? Of course it does. You know, obviously. So, you know, does the fossil fuel industry like dependence on oil and gas? Of course they do.

Do they like war? Hell yeah, they do. Because, you know, usually the price of oil goes up and they have to supply, you know, oil and gas for all the weaponry and everything associated with these conflicts that seem to never to end. You know, so I say the relationship between government, the fossil fuel industry, and the defense industry is very tight. And I think they all are in on this way of looking at the world. And it's a very aggressive, violent way. I mean, I look at what Chevron did to the people of Ecuador. And, you know, Chevron committed violence against the people of Ecuador.

And it wasn't necessarily at the point of a gun. You know, when you dump cancer-causing oil waste, you know, in the water of people who rely on it for their sustenance, you are inflicting violence on a culture. And it's no different than Russia, you know, firing missiles into apartment buildings in the Ukraine. Or we see this in other places right now in Gaza, where apartment buildings are being literally blown up by 2,000-pound bombs made by the United States. It's all connected, I think, to the same problem I've seen in Ecuador,

and we really need to open our eyes and connect the dots because the system that allows this kind of thing to happen again and again and again in so many different places needs to be brought under control and fundamentally change for us for this planet to survive in my humble opinion i think that's fair i i think when you look at history though you see a lot of people i'm being a little us-centric because I know our government better than others, but this exists everywhere. You see a lot of people in government who in their back office can get real logical with things, and that's not a compliment. They get real mathematical. Cold War of these guys in the Pentagon who would openly have conversations and you know some of these conversations happen today with people where they'd

say well you know according to our estimations if the Soviet Union tried to hit us with a nuke we'd lose sub 60 million people but we take 240 of them out we'd win 180 yeah that's 60 million people who died on your side and then you're gonna kill 200 that's that is 300 million people wiped off the face of this planet, but they're – and luckily, that never happened, right? But that's how some people in there legitimately approached it. And so I think about some of the people that get to these positions that kind of get above society in a way like maybe they don't try to but then they feel that way and then you look at these different at these different battlefields around the world whether it be the one that's slowly not all of a sudden like what's happening in ecuador or it be the one that's bombs

everywhere like ukraine we're in gaza and there there's guys sitting in offices in different government buildings around the world who are just, you know, doing their calculations. Like, okay, well, we can lose 10 there because we'll win 90 here. Yeah, I agree. And it's really scary. I mean, I wish we could have leadership that had compassion and led from a place of compassion from the heart and not from the idea that we have to just get more and more and accumulate more and more money. I mean, a lot of this is like money-driven, you know. And I would say one example of what we're talking about, just to transition slightly,

is what Chevron did to me after we won the case, you know. Yeah. I mean, you know, so people understand this. We won the case. It was affirmed by Ecuador Supreme Court. And their next move was to sue me back in the U.S. in the very same court where the case was originally filed where they refused to litigate the environmental case. They sent it to Ecuador. Southern District of New York.

Right here in New York. They came back here after we won in Ecuador in their – the court of their choosing. They came back here and sued me personally for $60 billion. So I got sued for more money than anyone in the history of our country. And it was an attempt to intimidate me and others in the United States from working on the case in an attempt to basically screw over the people of Ecuador a second time. You know, they'd already screwed them with the pollution. Now they're trying to screw them by not paying the judgment that they legitimately lost in the court of their choosing by suing the lawyer who helped make this happen.

Why didn't they sue the other lawyers too? They did sue other people, but I was the only lawyer at that point left in New York and I'd had such a high profile. I mean, I think this is what they were thinking. And they assessed everything and they're like, if we can knock him out, the case will die. Because it was to a great degree,

even though other fabulous lawyers led the case in Ecuador, they knew I was raising the money, and to a great degree, I was making a lot of the media appearances. And they just wanted, they felt like if I was removed from the picture, it's unlikely any other lawyer would come in and, you wanted, they felt like if I was removed from the picture, it's unlikely any other lawyer would come in and, you know, the case would. Truck month is on at Chevrolet. Get 0% financing for up to 72 months on a 2025 Silverado 1500

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I know know but the problem was they weren't paying and then so they knew the only legal path we had was to file a lawsuit to enforce the lawsuit we needed to file a second lawsuit and they wanted me out of the game thinking that if that happened we wouldn't be able to do that or raise the money to do that so they started to attack me and it was also a way to just distract attention from what I believed to be their environmental crimes. I mean, they essentially did stuff that was killing people. They wanted people to think about me

and what I had supposedly done wrong as opposed to what they had done, this atrocity they had committed against indigenous peoples in Ecuador. So they tried to build me up. I'm sure they focus group this, studied it, like, this is gonna be our strategy. We have proof of it. We have emails. They said our long-term strategy is to demonize Donziger.

That was their defense after we won the case. Did you get that in discovery from this case? Yes. From the $60 billion case where they sued me, I got that in discovery. They wrote that? They wrote that. A Chevron PR guy wrote that in an email that I have. I can show it to you.

Our LT strategy is to demonize Donziger. Okay? That was their strategy. LT, I love that. How corporate of them. They had a hard stop at five. Yeah, exactly. But I then proceeded over a period. It's still going on to some degree, but I'd say a

period of 10, 12 years, I got hit with probably the most intense corporate retaliation ever targeting a single individual in the history of our country. They use 60 law firms and roughly 2000 lawyers and legal personnel to go after me and other people on our team. How does that even, how do you use 60 law firms? This is where I'm clueless. Well, over the course of the whole litigation, they do 60, but they used a bunch, specifically to go after me, hundreds of lawyers. And they used Seward Kissel.

Seward and Kissel was one of the firms. Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher was the main firm. King and Spaulding, Jones Day. I mean, there was hardly... Oh, you got the who's who. Yeah, I mean, there was hardly a big firm in the country they didn't use. So, they... the main firm king and spalding jones day i mean there's how you you got the who's who yeah i mean there's hardly a big firm in the country they didn't use so they i mean you knew they were pissed at you because they weren't getting their way but did you see that coming maybe not 60

billion but like i didn't see it coming let me be clear okay because i'm i, you know, I consider myself sophisticated, right? And I try to game out risk and scenarios before I do something and assess the best strategy. And, you know, we thought of worst case scenarios, but I never imagined they would sue me personally for billions of dollars. I never imagined they would figure out a way to prosecute me directly in the name of the U.S. government, which is what they did in the nation's first corporate prosecution, which they did in 2019. Yeah, we'll get to that. That's fucking crazy.

I never imagined they would be able to get me disbarred as a lawyer without a hearing. That happened. I never imagined they would be able to go into my bank accounts without telling me and take all my money. They did that. I never imagined they would be able to take my passport to prevent me from traveling out of this country. They've done that and that still is going on. You still don't have a passport?

I don't have a passport. I can't leave the country. They have an enormous amount of control over my life right now. And it's really out of anger. They're trying to punish me and they're trying to scare other people... so they don't work on this case. You know, the other lawyers can come in now and take over the case to make sure the judgment gets enforced against their assets.

And they're trying to create a situation where I can't do that. And that situation then is designed to intimidate other lawyers into not doing that. So again, the people of Ecuador can be screwed over a third time. The first time being the pollution. The second time being not paying the judgment. The third time being, you know, locking up their lawyer. Um, but it really is a extreme cautionary tale to everyone in this country and the world

that engages in activism or human rights lawyering. I mean, I was a human rights lawyer locked up in the United States of America for winning a case in Ecuador. That's what happened. And that's scary. And I, you know, the government locked me up, but Chevron controlled the process. So Chevron was able to, as a private corporation,

take over, you know, a little piece of our federal judicial system in New York. I mean, they prosecuted me directly. They essentially controlled the judges. Meaning the judges were sympathetic and they were working together. They denied me a jury twice. Um, they had me locked up on a misdemeanor for 993 days when the maximum sentence is 180 days.

And I did nothing wrong. But even if I had done something wrong, I still served over four times the maximum sentence. They were trying to destroy me. And I had an ankle bracelet on my ankle for two years and two months on a misdemeanor before I could even get a trial. No lawyer in the history of this country had ever been locked up pre-trial on a misdemeanor charge. That's the lowest level charge. You were telling me right before we went on camera. Yeah. I mean. Taking the path to to come in here you used to take the path because that was the only thing you were allowed to do to go see your lawyer yeah because he lived with an ankle yeah he lived right

near you here and and you know across the river so um yeah i mean my whole life changed um and i have a kid by the way and when they first put the ankle bracelet on he was 14 or 13 i mean it was 2018 so he was he was he was 13 pretty good basketball player too yeah he's a good basketball player he had 19 yesterday there we go um senior in high school now but but he was like in maybe eighth grade ninth grade and you know for three years he lived with his father locked up and mostly at home but also in prison um he's our only child and that you know that was just really hard for all of us to deal with even though we were able to deal with it and we you know my wife laura miller and i um you know had many discussions about how to handle this.

And the thing I said that we really adopted as our principal response to this was let's not let a trauma turn into a pathology. Think about that. This was a trauma. But what we really fought hard to do was not let it become pathological in our home where it's like all we talked about or i was always upset and i'm like this is a pivotal test because we have to take this experience and turn it into a positive turn it into draw strength from it you know and um you know when it started i didn't think it'd last more than a couple of weeks like this is insane we got to go back to court get the ankle bracelet. And I went back multiple times and after six months, I'm like, they're not taking my ankle bracelet off

because it's not about neutrality, the law. It's about like they're trying to completely screw me and they control these judges and I can't get this ankle bracelet off. I'm gonna have to go to jail and serve a prison term to get this ankle bracelet off. I sort of started to feel that. And I worked my butt off. People are like, oh, you're on house arrest.

You know, what do you do all day? Here, let me bring you a book. I mean, no, I work harder on house arrest than I ever worked in my life to deal with this and build support. You're working against 60 law firms. Yeah, and you know, I was on podcasts, and I started to speak out from my home.

Yeah. With the ankle bracelet on, and ended up getting a massive amount of support, including 68 Nobel laureates signed a statement on my behalf. I got 120 NGOs, I mean, some of the most prominent environmental and human rights organizations in the world, including Amnesty International, Global Witness, Greenpeace, you know, Amazon Watch,

all backed me. Because people saw this as much bigger than Steven Donziger. I mean, they cared about me. It is. But this was really an attack on the entire environmental movement. It was an attack on the entire idea of progressive advocacy because they were trying to... Chevron and the corporate sector writ large was trying to create a new playbook where they could silence any, you know, critic of theirs by weaponizing the law and the courts to lock them up.

And it's really effing scary. And it's happening in the United States and it's happening not just to me but to other people. I happen to be maybe the most high profile guy because I engage the media and the story is so crazy. But it happens. But it happens. Yeah, I mean... I obviously have a ton of empathy for what happened to you.

You're a human being and what they put you through. And I do want to go back to 2011, so we can go through each step of this, because it's pretty maddening. But before we do that, you know, as much as I empathize with you, what really draws me into a story like this is you are a symbol. I had another guy on this podcast back in 2022, this guy Raj Rajaratnam. You might remember from 2009, 2010, 2011, he was on the front page every day. He's one of the greatest investors to ever live. He's a huge hedge fund guy. Government went after him and got the biggest insider trading conviction of all time.

They painted him in the media, same court, Southern District of New York. They painted him as the worst thing ever. I remember following the case when I was like a freshman in high school. And I ended up talking with him and he's one of the few podcasts I really prepared for. We're so busy doing this thing. I really just got to talk with people and get them going. But my dad's a lawyer, and he reviewed a lot of the legal stuff with me ahead of him coming in. And we're looking at it, and I'm like, this is a really unpopular thing to say that a billionaire hedge funder got fucked.

But he got fucked, and I don't care. I've held that stance since. The evidence shows it. And one of the things that I had asked him is, why are you, after standing up and refusing to rat on anyone and spending seven and a half years in prison and a couple more on house arrest, why are you coming out here with probably four or five billion dollars in wealth wasting your time maybe fighting you know in public for and that's the wrong phrase to use but i'll get to it for you know criminal justice reform and he said julian i spent i think it was 50 60 million dollars on my defense i could have spent that a thousand times over. It was really no money to me.

And I lost 14 to nothing. They have a 98% conviction rate in federal court. What does that say about all the guys who don't have money? He goes, who's going to talk for them? He goes, when I was in, he's a very analytical guy. He's like, when I was in prison, he said, don't get me wrong. There's plenty of people who belong there who did it. Like that's true. But he said roughly the percentage was around 25% were at least partially innocent of what they ended up copping to or getting found guilty of, and around 10% were pretty much completely innocent. And he goes, none of those people had resources, and I was in there, believed myself to be completely innocent, and I had resources. He's like, so how do we change this system and so when i look at a story like yours what drives me mad is you seem it's almost like you have all the answers right you have all the answers to the test the evidence is there just look at that wall it's white let me bring back

the ghost of leonardo da vinci and the ghost of michelangelo to give us the scientific and artistic representation of why that wall's white and you point to it and people in society look at it and go, no, it's black and walk away. And so I can't even imagine what that's like to, in some ways, while you have all this support from all these organizations, kind of fight alone because you're fighting a machine and you're one guy. I would say that's true. I know the case you're talking guy. I would say that's true. I know the case you're talking about. I remember following it closely. I'm going to tell you something about that case that's going to blow your mind.

You ready for this? Okay. The main prosecutor of Raj, that's his name? Preet Bharara? Are you talking about the prosecutor? Well, no, Preet was the U.S. attorney. Yes. I'm talking about the guy in court.

Preet was the boss who engineered the case against him. Yeah, I forget the name of the lead. His name was Ree Brodsky. That's it. Do you know that because of that case and after that case, Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, Chevron's main law firm, hired him to do the same thing to me in my case. I faced Ree Brodsky in court.

Ree Brodsky has made millions and millions of dollars by virtue of putting that gentleman in jail. Whoa. And, you know, getting all the media attention because the New York Times reported on that case extensively when it was happening. And Raj became the symbol of insider trading. And, you know, and Reid was the main guy.

And then Chevron, I mean, Chevron really asked him to come in. He did my trial, my racketeering trial, my non-jury trial. He and others, he wasn't the only one, but he was like one of the main ones. He's a very good lawyer with, in my opinion, very low ethical standards, very low. Um, and he abused his power, in my opinion, Reed did. In the case against me, I can't speak to the details of what happened to Raj, but the way you're describing it, it's consistent with what I experienced in my case with Reed.

So, yeah, I mean, these what I experienced in my case with Reed. So, yeah. I mean, these lawyers just cycle in and out, and then they go into private practice, and they do the same thing on behalf of corporations that commit crimes, that they do to abuse those charged with crimes who are either innocent or overcharged or put in prison, even if they did something wrong. I mean, I was in prison six weeks. I was in a federal prison with eight doors between freedom and where I was sitting in a cell for six weeks, which is nothing compared to Raj

and most of the people in there, but it's still awful to experience that. And I was the only person in my prison ever to be in that prison on a misdemeanor charge. Everyone else was a felon. This is in Danbury, Connecticut. And I also learned a lot about how people were serving massively long sentences, far longer than they needed to be. So prosecutors and politicians and judges could score political points at their expense you know and that's the problem one of the problems with our problem of over incarceration in the united states it's not that we have more crime than other countries we don't it's just that

we impose the longest prison sentences for minor crimes drug crimes non-violent crimes and even violent crimes in any country in the world. Yeah, what is it? We have like 5% of the world's... No, it's more than that. No, we have 5% of the world's population, like 25% of the prison population. That's it. We'll double check that, but I'm pretty sure that's it.

Something along those lines. Yeah. That's so interesting. So you had him on? Yes. How's he doing? Great. What is he doing now? I mean, he spends a lot of time fighting for those who can't.

Obviously, the guy's got more money he can spend for his whole life. He's a genius. He was one of the best investors ever. But there's another story I've told on the podcast that gets me every time. I had a meeting November 2022 here in midtown at raj's townhouse office and it was raj this guy jason flom who is one of the founding board members of the innocence project and then i had my friend jim diorio who's a former FBI special agent there, my friend Ryan Tate who runs this amazing organization protecting wildlife from poachers in Africa who – Jason Flom is on his board. That's why he was there.

And Jim and Ryan are both veterans. Ryan was a Marine. Jim was a West Point Army special – Army Ranger, the whole bit in the Special Forces. And this meeting was kind of like raj and jason talking about some reform and so it would you know we're sitting there for two hours and it was pretty much jason would be talking about cases he's working on and then he would ask raj about his case just to kind of like go through it and whatever and about an hour in you could see you know jason's pepper and raj with some questions and you could see raj you know reliving this in his head he's still pissed off about it so you could see him start to get frustrated

and then out of nowhere he like takes a deep breath and he stops and he's like because he's from sri lanka originally he says you know i am so grateful to live in this country i love this country all right there's a reason come here. They don't go to Russia. They don't go to China. They come here because America has all these opportunities. And I always paraphrase this when I tell this story because I don't remember the exact words, but it's pretty similar. And he's like, obviously what happened to me I'm upset about. It was wrong. I think the system was rigged against me, but long before me, it was rigged against so many other people. And so I'm not here to attack America. I'm here to take the system that we have put in place where the people can talk about this stuff and do something about it to help it and improve it. And so when I see guys like you or like him, who may raise some issues that look extremely more than concerning and look

completely corrupt and anti-constitutional. It looks horrible because these things do happen. People feel power, they have money, they have interests, and suddenly they do things that are evil. I'd call it that. But I don't view it sometimes like other people can view it where it's like, oh, we're just attacking America because you don't like how things went. I view it like, hey, they did this to me. Let's make sure they can't do it to you in the future. And forget just what they did to you too. Let's not forget the crux of this, which is you spent, even before your cases, almost 20 years fighting for people who can't fight for themselves somewhere else, who were victims of an American conglomerate coming into another country and saying, fuck you, we're going this here you know those those are the stories that have to be

in my opinion whether it's putting it on platforms like this hopefully getting it on huge platforms like joe rogan and stuff like that they're the stories that have to be told because they're not they should have the happy ending of and then the system changed it got better that's what that's what i want to see. If we can help with that in a little way here, that's why we're doing it. Yeah, and I think that's totally right. And I think of all the things that I experienced, you know, in terms of the United States of America, the one thing that I think is most extraordinary is the fact that I was prosecuted by Chevron, a Chevron lawyer directly, in the name of the US government. People say, well, how could that possibly happen?

And I'm gonna tell people if I can, how it happened. Please, this blew my mind. This is unbelievable. So, when, you know, when we were enforcing the judgment against Chevron, from Ecuador, against Chevron and Canada's courts, we were getting a lot of traction. We got a unanimous Supreme Court decision

from the Canadian Supreme Court in our favor, 2015. Whoa. That blew Chevron's mind. Okay, we had lawyers in Canada litigating the case. And they then got Judge Kaplan here in New York, the same guy who presided over this non-jury racketeering, uh, civil case against me where he really rigged, in my opinion, rigged the trial against me with no jury.

They got him to issue an order that I give them my computer, just so you know. My computer has all the confidential case file of my work that is privileged. It's, it's, it's. Because you're an attorney. Yeah. It's attorney client privilege. And they were trying to get that order to basically, like if I had to comply with that order, I would have completely betrayed my clients and violated my ethical duties to my clients in Ecuador who are really vulnerable. On the other hand, if I didn't comply with the order, I'd be out of compliance with the court order. So they set me up. This was a setup. And I told the judge, I can't comply with your order.

I'm going to appeal it to a higher court. I didn't just say I'm not gonna comply. I'm like, I need to appeal your order. And when I appealed it, he charged me with a crime, criminal contempt of court, for essentially not complying with an order that I was appealing. I mean, think about that. Isn't that't that i mean i'm not a lawyer but isn't that part of the legal system you can appeal yes it was what he did was so wrong but he did it when a judge charges someone a lawyer

with criminal contempt of courts because the lawyer disobeys an order or tells the judge to f off in court i mean there's you know it's The idea of a contempt charge is to keep the decorum of the court, the administration of justice proper. It was not appropriate. I was abiding by the law by appealing a decision, but he wanted to screw me, so he took advantage of that situation, charging with criminal contempt of court, and the charges were then taken to the prosecutor, the US attorney in the Southern District of New York

at the time, who was appointed by Donald Trump. His name was Jeffrey Berman. I remember him. Jeffrey Berman said, no, we're not gonna prosecute him. They wouldn't prosecute him. What year was this again? This was in

2019 Okay, so he turns it down. He turns out my prosecuting so judge Kaplan being completely rebuffed By the prosecutor which by the way almost never happens like if a judge They usually just as a courtesy of the judge will try to prosecute. I'm not doing it Kaplan then appointed Seward and Kissel, private law firm, to prosecute me in the name of the U.S. government. Listen, you can't make this up. Is that legal? I don't think it's legal at all.

And I'll tell you what happened. But this is not the end of the story. Seward and Kissel. So we're like, who is this law firm? He appointed a lawyer there named Rita Glavin. He worked there. She was a partner. And we researched this and realized after a certain number of weeks that Seward and Kissel had Chevron as a client.

Seriously. So I got prosecuted by Chevron, and they would sign their papers U.S. government. But they were a private law firm, a private Chevron law firm. This is the first time in history that a oil company or oil company law firm has taken over a governmental function to prosecute someone. And the bizarre thing is when I showed up in court, they put an ankle bracelet on me and locked me up on the very first day. Do you think a normal prosecutor, by the way, the normal prosecutor refused to prosecute me at all? A misdemeanor. It's a misdemeanor.

Would have ever locked me up? It's only because I was prosecuted by Chevron that they locked me up. And the judge overseeing the case was appointed by Kaplan. And she's a member of the Federalist Society, Loretta Preska. Chevron's a big donor to the Federalist Society. Loretta Preska. Chevron's a big donor to the Federalist Society. This was all an inside... They gave like 50,000 in 2012 or something. Yeah, they were giving every year to the, like,

you know, buying tables and stuff. But bottom line is, this was all just a big kind of fix by certain individuals, judges in the Chevron law firm, um, to lock me up, punish me. And what was so shocking to me is the appellate court wouldn't intervene and stop it. You know who ended up actually speaking on my behalf more than anybody? Who? You're not going to believe this. Three judges appointed by Donald Trump. Sensing a pattern here. Let me tell you. Interesting. Yeah, let me tell you. And I'm sensing a pattern here. Let me tell you. Yeah, let me tell you. And I'm not a supporter of Donald Trump at all. That's kind of interesting.

But this is what happened. The sort of neoliberal Democrats were all in with the corporate sector and all trying to help the oil company. When it got to the – when my criminal conviction non-jury case, I think bogus charges, got to the federal appellate court in New York. There was a three-judge panel. And they affirmed the conviction on the thinnest of grounds. But one of the three judges wrote a 20-page dissent. A Trump-appointed judge whose last name is Menashe. He was brilliant in saying, this case is unconstitutional. I mean, that's what it was. So we then took that to the US Supreme Court. You know, the nine justices,

six of them are highly conservative, ultra-conservative, three are centrist slash liberal. And they met five times to decide whether to take my appeal. And they ultimately decided to not take my appeal. But two of the justices, Trump appointed, Neil Kavanaugh, I mean, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, wrote an amazing dissent. And by the way, I agree with these two gentlemen

on virtually nothing, but in my case... In my case, they wrote an amazing dissent to the decision to deny the acceptance of my appeal. They didn't rule my appeal on the merits of the court. They just wouldn't take it as an appeal. They only take one out of 100 appeals. And they wrote a five-page dissent where they described my case as unconstitutional. Gorsuch wrote it.

He said, the Constitution does not allow what happened here. I love that sentence. So simple. The Constitution does not allow what happened here i love that sentence so simple the constitution does not allow what happened here in other words the constitution does not allow a private corporation to prosecute somebody someone appointed by a judge but you know so i have allies you know in interesting places yeah but but that i think underscores the how offensive yes the everybody because it it this is a case that that kind of blurs away political lines it's just common sense when i read that that that a private corporation forget even the chevron's a client of theirs let's hypothetically let's pretend chevron's not a client of theirs for a second.

Just on the surface that the Southern District of New York said, we don't want to prosecute this case. My understanding, and obviously my worldview has now been blown up by this, was that the different federal prosecutors are paid by our collective tax money to represent us and make those decisions. And the judges and the federal prosecutors do not work together. It's supposed to be like, of course, they know each other, like, you know, whatever. But they decide what to prosecute. The judge oversees the case and lets justice win out. The idea that a judge, also federally appointed, our tax dollars, can then go say, I don't like the fact that you're not prosecuting this

i'm going to go hire a white collar law firm you know where every guy there is making three million dollars a year to come in here and prosecute the case and pay u.s tax dollars i don't where they paid at their rate yeah i mean they were paid at a big rate i mean they're paid millions of dollars by taxpayers right the private you know law firm yes to put me in jail right so i mean i mean tad insult to injury i mean yeah not only they were profiting off of this human rights abuse locking up a human rights lawyer so they bring that in and also you're an attorney You're being sued for your – prosecuted for your work as an attorney. And then to go back to your point about them asking for your computer, this gets really foggy to me. So if we had a different case, not yours, where an attorney actually was like a scumbag and i don't know like murdered people something

would he also have an argument technically for them not to get his computer if there were going to be client files in that yes but it you know there's something called the crime fraud exception so if there's a crime committed under the guise of attorney-client privilege, you can sometimes get the files. But that's not what happened here, obviously. So, you know, it's not like you can never get the stuff, but it's very, very rare. And in this case, it was completely inappropriate. So where did Reed Broski end up coming into this from there reid broski essentially was one of the lead lawyers going after me before judge caplan on behalf of chevron chevron was paying him

okay even i keep trying to go back to one thing i want to make sure we cover it before we get on with this but in the build-up to this because now we're up in 2018 2019 when this goes down when they initially sued you for 60 billion dollars my understanding is that there were two separate cases that took place there was i guess the suit involved them accusing you of like rico or something racketeering okay civil racketeering like they they accused you of what john gatti did yeah they basically tried to portray our entire team in ecuador that worked for, by that point, 18 years on the case as some sort of mob-style

racketeering conspiracy designed not to get justice for the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, but designed to extort money from them. That was their theory. Okay. And they knew that was BS, but that was, they had to come up with some theory that would fit the elements of the Rico statue.

So that's how they portrayed it. And so that's how they portrayed it. And so that's a civil RICO case that Kaplan oversees. Did they win that one? Yeah, they won that case, but there was no jury and Kaplan was completely biased. I mean, it was a fix is what I'm trying to say. You know, there was no evidence. In other words, Kaplan, for example, prior to that trial, denied me a jury.

He issued an order saying if I or my lawyers use the word pollution in court, we would be held in contempt. He tried to erase whatever Chevron did in Ecuador, all the pollution from the trial, focus 100% on me. They paid this witness $2 million to come up and claim he was in a meeting with me where I approved the bribe of a trial judge. And it's completely false. Why do you think he disliked you? There is no evidence at all

other than the words that came out of this guy's mouth. And they paid him millions of dollars. I mean, it was just all, it was corrupt as hell. Why do you think this guy disliked you so much? It seems like he had it in for you at the start. I think that he... You know, I think he's a totally pro-corporate judge. I think he was affronted, offended by the fact

that I spent... I went to Harvard Law like he did, and I spent the bulk of my career helping people. I think he's racist, meaning I think he really didn't like the fact that indigenous peoples in the Amazon were coming up to, you know, initiating a case against an American company. I think there are a lot of factors. I think he's a bully. I think he likes to, you know, help the powerful at the expense of the weak. I don't think he's fair. I think he engineers outcomes of cases before they start.

Like, he's really clever and he can manipulate how juries get evidence or not get evidence. And I think he's a game player. I don't think he's a judge. I think he's an activist who hides behind the robes to engineer outcomes that help the powerful, the expensive,

the needy, or the vulnerable. And I think that's what he did in our case. Well, that's a damn shame as a government appointed judge. But there was another case that happened, I think in The Hague, right? At the International Tribunal, you know, I want to say 2015 after this ruling, where I don don't I'm getting some of the outcomes mixed up but essentially there was one key witness the judge where a guy or Guerra who I well that was the guy who in the racketeering case against me well yeah denied a jury was the guy paid money by Chevron to claim that he was a this yeah okay so basically for chevron to somehow get you know even a bogus decision in a non-jury trial from a biased judge um that a

fraud had happened in ecuador which is their whole strategy to prevent us enforcing the judgment in canada and other countries because they want to say oh it's a fraud look what this u.s judge said they needed some evidence i mean there's no. So they paid this guy, this former judge in Ecuador to come up and lie. They moved him up here, moved his family up here, bought him a car, bought him a house, paid him a salary, paid his taxes, his federal taxes. They got him an immigration lawyer. I mean, they created this fake situation. Is any of that legal? I don't believe it is.

It's a fraud. But in exchange, he gave them testimony against me. They coached him for 53 days before he took the stand, obviously to lie. Ree Brodsky was totaling in on it, by the way. And this guy got up there and lied. You had said earlier that there were by the way that's why there wasn't a jury a jury would have seen through this in five seconds chevron was would not do this case if they had to have a jury yeah was this guy one of you had said there

were four rotating presidents two years yeah he was one of them he was one of the four yeah so they pay him this twelve thousand dollar a monthend, give him a whole life, pay his taxes, coach him for 53 days. He comes in and what did he say exactly? He said you approached him or something? No, he said that he was in a meeting with me and another lawyer on our team in Ecuador. They tried to make me like the mastermind. So his testimony was that I told that other guy to go bribe the trial judge to get him to rule in our favor, which was just false. I mean, first of all, the whole case, the evidence was totally in our favor.

We would never do such a thing, consider such a thing. But they needed something to hang their hat on so when they went to Canada or other countries, they could say, oh, look what happened. This guy testified, Donzigerziger you know is a criminal and that's a way they can try to beat back the enforcement of the judgment in other countries and then what happened when he went to the Hague my understanding is that he gave the opposite the Hague he recanted basically so the Hague was a private international arbitration I know this is getting complicated. Bear with me. But this is how the legal system works when you have a lot of money.

So Chevron, knowing it was losing and would lose our case, sued Ecuador's government looking for a taxpayer-funded bailout of its liability to the people of Ecuador. They're trying to get the government to pay it rather than them, government being taxpayers, taxpayer money. And that ended up going into this secret arbitration, which was housed in The Hague. It wasn't really in The Hague. That's kind of a misnomer. But in any event, they used the clerk's office of a court in The Hague in the Netherlands. And there were these arbitrators, and we weren't allowed to appear or present evidence. And ultimately, they basically adopted Judge Kaplan's view based on Guerra's testimony. And they completely discounted that Guerra admitted in the arbitration proceeding that he had lied about several significant issues before the Kaplan court. Whoa. So what kind of liability, like what kind of jurisdiction does the Hague have over your life,

or was that just kind of like salt in the wound? I think it's more optics. Right. I mean, I'm not a party. That decision is not binding on me or the people of Ecuador. But Chevron's trying to use it to intimidate Ecuador's government into somehow killing off our case. I mean, it's an awful thing they're doing. They basically got an order that the executive branch of Ecuador's government, the president, should order his country's independent judicial branch to engineer a certain outcome in a case that's already over. I mean, they're not going to do it. It'll never happen.

But they can waive this decision, so-called decision from a secret business court, corporate court around to try to strengthen their position. And a lot of people don't understand. Like they say, the Hague, like you did. It's really a BS secret court that just used the Hague's administrative office to keep its files. I mean, these hearings they have were like in hotel conference rooms. There's no court, you know what I mean? And they wouldn't let the Ecuadorian people even appear. So in my

opinion, that whole decision not only is not worth the paper it's printed on, but it's actually an illustration of the desperation Chevron feels to try to block justice in this case. Do you think some of this is like those proverbial, you know, I hinted at like a movie scene thing earlier, but like the proverbial movie scene where you have the evil Chevron executive making a phone call to, you know, Chris DeBall in the Hague, you know, and Joe working the front desk at Kaplan's office. And there's this almost like a conglomerate within governments to be like, yo, we got to make this Don's girl guy go away. Like you saw in that email from some of the actual Chevron guys, but like in the government as well, governments. I think there's a lot of collusion among individuals i mean there was in my case to destroy try to destroy me i think they failed i mean they they

did hurt me for a while but i think i'm stronger than ever but yes i do think there was a certain amount of collusion i'm generally not a conspiracy theorist. Like I think the system functions a certain way. So people just do things in service of interest in the system and they don't really understand how they're colluding. But I also think in my case, there was conscious active collusion among a lot of people in the judiciary and in the private sector and the company and in the law firm, the Chevron law firms, Gibson, Dun & Crutcher, and Seward & Kissel, to strategize and to cooperate and coordinate so I would be unable to overcome what they were throwing at me. Yeah, I do believe that happened, and I think we have a lot of evidence of that. The word that comes to mind, and it's come up today several times when you look at this case

and all the people involved is power you know it starts with power of a corporation being able to go to a foreign country with people who maybe don't know what they're going to do and exert their will and not care about what happens and it it even ends with power of them coming after together in collusion in a way like you just laid out the the guy who's willing to fight for those people what do you think it is in people besides just you know wanting to make a lot of money that in your experience makes people get off on that feeling of holding advantage over other people yeah i mean you know i've seen that a lot in different contexts my whole life. I mean, you see it in school.

Some teachers just love having authority over students. You see it in prison. There's low-level prison guards who just love the job because it gives them authority over, you know, convicted criminals. Um, you see it, you know, in a lot of places, uh, you know, where people abuse power. You see it at the highest levels, the lowest levels. I don't know what to say about that, you know.

I personally always try to hold myself to a very high standard of ethics, compassion, go high. You know, I think people ultimately are desperate to get money, earn a living, get security, and I think they're willing to do some really, really bad things to do so. I mean, I've been studying Germany in the 1930s and 40s. I mean, there were so many millions and millions of people who just carried out this whole philosophy

to exterminate an entire class of people who just carried out this whole philosophy to exterminate an entire class of people. I, frankly, I'm... not to get too political here, but like, I think we're seeing this in other places in the world right now, including in Gaza, where you're seeing, you know, soldiers supposedly following orders and just destroying people, killing people, children, women,

blowing up apartment buildings with people inside, you know, blowing up hospitals. So I think we're seeing a lot of behavior now in different parts of the world that I experienced in a small way in this case. Um, you know, obviously not to the extent of the horrors that we're seeing in other parts of the world, but like, you know, what we're really talking about,

what they have in common is there are people who choose to put themselves in service of some interest and some power, knowing they're harming other people, just so they can get ahead or make money or keep their job or something. And, you know, I think if that ethic isn't consistently challenged by the majority of people on this Earth,

we're going to not be able to survive as a planet. I mean, I think this is sort of what has led, to a great extent, to the climate crisis. You know, there's just this breakdown where everybody's out for themselves. I mean, I think one of the biggest dangers of Donald Trump and the damage he has caused and continues to cause, in my opinion, to this country,

is just this everyone out for themselves mentality. I mean, he's like, and he brags he doesn't pay taxes, he rips people off, he has people do work for him, he doesn't pay them, sue me, threatens, you know, he asks them to, you know... He's an extremely, like, his ethic is so self-centered, it's so selfish, it's so fraudulent, that I think people, and it's racist, you know,

and I think people take their cues from that, and it affects the larger culture. And I think there's been a degradation of civic life in this country to a great degree in the last, you know, eight years since he appeared on the national scene in this way. He definitely has. And I think once he, if he gets back in,

um, it's going to have even more devastating impacts on how people treat each other and how people see ethics and, you know, corporate power. I mean, you know, there's so much inequality in this country. I mean, there are so few people who have so much. And that's the thing, too, because I get so disappointed by the options we have these days. I'm like, this is the best we can do. I know.

We've got a dead guy versus Trump. You know, like, come on. Like, there's got to be better solutions. But think about that question. Why aren't there? It's not because the talent doesn't exist. I mean, damn, there's talent out there. to think about that question. Why aren't there? It's not because the talent doesn't exist. I mean, damn, there's talent out there. I know a lot of incredible people who wouldn't even think about running for office. And that's the point. Who wants to do it?

And the system is designed to discourage talent from running. They don't want the real talented, ethical people, because those are the people who would challenge the power structure that benefits all these people we're talking about. And by the way, you know, I've studied the hell out of Israel, Gaza. I'm Jewish, and I've always been very sympathetic to Israel until recently, where I'm just really upset about what's happening over there. Israel, by the way, the U.S. press almost never reports this, as for years and continues to have a policy of targeted assassinations, meaning murdering, moderate Palestinian leaders. Why?

Israel wants two types of Palestinian leaders. They want open terrorists, or they want corrupt, incompetent people, okay? And in the Fatah faction in the West Bank, they have, like, people who are not strong. Like Mahmoud Abbas. Yeah. And, you know, they're not competent. They're corrupt. Yeah.

And in Gaza, they have, you know, essentially an organization dedicated to the extermination of the state of Israel, Hamas, that Israel has funded, by the way, for 20 years under Netanyahu's direction. They funded them because Netanyahu wants to keep the Palestinians divided so there can't be a state. Now, in Gaza right now, they're dropping 2,000-pound dumb bombs from the Vietnam War era on civilian population centers, killing thousands of people, while they're using precision-guided drones to assassinate the intellectual class, you know, academics, writers, poets, doctors, lawyers, okay? They are trying to wipe out those who could emerge out of this

as moderate, responsible leaders that could actually negotiate for a Palestinian state or a two-state solution. Israel doesn't want moderate, competent leadership. In our country country you know although people aren't being openly killed we have come to a situation where no competent responsible leader really wants to run for office because it's so impossible i mean marianne williamson is a friend of mine has been running for months no one's even heard of her she ran last time she ran last time i mean she's got some really good progressive policy positions and the media won't

cover her. So you see this time and time again, the two-party corporate duopoly controls the political system. And it's what's really driving us to the brink and gives us a choice that we have now between Trump and Biden, which is not really a choice. I mean, they're both representing corporate interests to some degree. By the way, between the two, I much prefer Biden. But I'll say that where are the young leaders who are willing to sort of tell the truth about stuff, take on corporate power, deal with the climate crisis, deal with our inequality issue, deal with our economic issues so people have better lives, deal with our democracy issues, the fact our democracy is being eroded, and the fact that my unfortunate situation being put in detention for almost three years for doing a human rights case is an example of that. It's

an example of how our democracy has fallen into major disrepair because of corporate power and influence. Well, you used the divided society example in that case in Gaza and within the Palestinian community over in the Middle East. But, you know, you look at that anywhere to your point, a divided society is a subservient society because people get, they get focused on the one, two or three issues real important to them, right? And then suddenly all the other things happening maybe they'll ignore or get behind things blindly on either side of the political aisle that actually if they thought about it, wouldn't make sense. There was a story on my friend Danny Jones' podcast. There's another one I'd love to see you do. He's got a huge show down in Tampa.

But a few years ago he had on – I forget the guy's name. Maybe we can look it up, Alessi. He was a longtime New York Times reporter who was one of the guys at the forefront of the MKUltra investigation. And so this guy, unrelated, told a story on that podcast that sticks with me to this day where he was talking about i believe it was in the early 80s he was the bureau chief for the new york times in south america and so he knew president jimmy carter from his years in office they'd known each other and so carter was down there at one point and he he got together with him and so this was maybe i'm trying to remember it like a year or two after he

lost office so the reporter was thinking like okay you know we're having a drink let me ask him you know what he thinks the the autopsy of it and so carter told him a story that he said when he took office in 76 he called every living president including nixon and said hey give me advice you know this forget politics let's just talk about the the executive running of this office and the New York Times guy said so who gave the best advice and Carter laughed and said Nixon and he's like really what'd he say and he said well Nixon came in there and and said you know all that domestic the health care the taxes no one gives a shit about that.

You're going to move it 5% either direction. You can't get anything done. Everyone fights you in Congress. You can't do anything. But the foreign policy, that's where you can get shit done, and nobody cares. And his point was, let everyone, let all the common folk fight over these – whatever the two things of the day are here and the things that actually affect the world 20 30 40 years from now we can go do that behind closed doors and you know that's the last story on abc news and it makes me think about that with what you say because

you know you're you seem to be very passionate about a whole litany of issues and also knowledgeable on a whole lot of things but to the average person out there working a nine to five feeding their family stuff like that you know they get their social media feed at night they watch a little bit of news you know maybe they're passionate about one or two things and like that's what they get behind and then whatever gets behind that whatever party they're going to get fully behind that you saw that with with trump going to talk to these people in middle america whose industries have been forgotten about right someone came in there and said god damn it everyone's taking away your son's jobs they took away you're getting you're making half of what you used to made make and he was right about this you know you've been forgotten

about but i'm going to represent and those people i understand. They heard that and they said, wow, someone really gets it. And so they may not care about his policies vis-a-vis who gets immigration from certain countries. We're going to be divided on these one or two things because it comes down to the bottom line is what am I putting in my pocketbook to be able to support my family? It's a hard problem to solve. Well, I'll say this. I think that Trump was defrauding the working class the way he approached it. He was very clever to go in and act like he cared about, you know, working class issues. In reality, he goes into government and he appoints all the corporate lobbyists to run the EPA and to run all these executive agencies. He implements the biggest corporate tax cut in the history of the country, including one that benefited him personally in the real estate industry. I mean, I think Donald Trump is a fraud. I really do. However, I understand that

he's pinpointing certain issues that the Democratic Party is not dealing with. And that leaves a major opening for a charismatic guy like him to convince people he's the answer because the pain people are feeling is fucking real. Like it is real. People have lost massive ground the last 30, 40 years in this country, really since Ronald Reagan came into power. You know, there's been a complete shift in, you know, income from the poor to the rich. I mean, you know, the one-tenth of 1% are making massive sums of money, whereas the massive, you know, the bulk of the working class hasn't really gotten ahead at all in the last 30 or 40 years, maintained their ground, maybe. So, there's been a big shift,

and I think the pain caused by that is real, and it has left our country really vulnerable to charlatans like Trump, who sort of manipulate people. I think a real leader would deal with this directly, speak honestly. I'll tell you who's a great leader who could do that is the president of the United Auto Workers, who just settled, you know... Who's that?

Um, his last name is Fein, F-E-I-N. I think his first name is Sean. And he's one of the most brilliant labor leaders I've ever seen in our country. I don't really know anything about this. Yeah, so basically, you know, they started these very intelligent strikes against General Motors and other auto giants in the u.s and just got a huge contract that is going to increase you know worker wages by like 30 percent um yeah that's him what's his name yeah

sean fane yeah and he's just a regular guy he's a labor union leader he's honest and he's just a regular guy. He's a labor union leader. He's honest and he's extremely effective. A labor union leader honest. There's something. Yeah. But I mean, you know, I mean, maybe your generation isn't that familiar with this, but, you know, after the New Deal, the labor union movement, the labor movement was really strong. We had like, I don't know, 50%, 60% unionization rates, now down to 10%. What's happened in 40 years is unions have lost their clout

because of laws, largely in attacks on unions, and that's depressed the wages of the whole working class. I mean, if I were running, I'd be talking about that because that's a way to really get wages up. And it's not like the corporate class wouldn't make a ton of money still. They would. But there needs to be a more even distribution of wealth in this country for us to have a return to

really a more robust kind of democracy in my opinion yeah you look at those charts you see that the it's essentially a slow elimination that happens faster and faster of the middle class you know we have a we have a clear divide like you said and there's got to be ways to do it that can still celebrate the spirit of people being able to innovate and be compensated for that and do that well without the government being involved in certain things they do. And I think there are, but it does come back to the fact that – and you've seen it throughout your life and some of the stuff you've worked on here. Human nature looks out for numero uno, right? And as long as you have a big enough society, right? This isn't like the old cultures where there's groups of 100 people that serve each other as a tribe to take care of all each other. We've got 340 million people in this country, 330 million people or something. Everyone's got a goddamn opinion on social media and like I said, the one thing they care about.

I try not to be cynical about it, but it's hard sometimes to see that forward and you used the word charlatan in there. I'll even take it a step farther than you did. Go look at social media and some of the people that get the biggest followings and that people follow every word they say. I'm not saying they're all charlatans. They're not. That's scary. I can pick out a few that very easily that's like – I'm not going to say names here, but like how do you not see this? But it's because they pull on you.

And I've fallen victim to it before and pulled out. But like they pull on you with something that gets you, that before and pulled out but like you know they they pull on you with with something that gets you that speaks to you and you're like yes you hear me and then you're willing to like explain away cognitive dissonance explain away in your mind before it comes in like some of the other things they so clearly do that are they're giving you red flags and i you know i'm i'm a victim to it too. Like, I think that's human nature. Yeah. We have some real challenges.

For sure. As a society. But I mean, you know, I work in the legal profession and like, you know, I see so much possibility and I see so much, you know, sort of counterattacks by corporations, by the fossil fuel industry to control the legal system so they can continue making these profits, record-breaking profits at the expense of the planet.

And, you know, we just need more balance. And we need politicians with the courage to speak truth to power. And right now, the system is set up so those who do that, it's virtually impossible for them to run for office. You know, it just doesn't happen. You know, the first thing you do is you gotta go call up all the wealthy people to raise money. And like, they're not gonna give money to someone

who takes on what they represent. Correct. You also mentioned earlier that you got disbarred with this. You didn't even get to hear it. How does that work? Yeah, that was just extraordinary. Um, basically, after Cap, Judge Kaplan ruled against me in the non-jury civil racketeering case, he wrote a letter to the Bar Grievance Committee.

Every state has a... The legal profession regulates itself, for starters. And these grievance committees that determine what lawyers can be licensed or disbarred is generally dominated by corporate law firms, lawyers from corporate law firms who are judging human rights guys like me. And there's a whole history in this country that's been written about of lawyers that take on entrenched interests of power who get disbarred for political reasons. It's happened throughout our history.

And Kaplan wrote a letter to them saying that they should disbar me without a hearing based on his decision in a non-jury trial where this witness paid by Chevron lied about me. So I challenged that for a year. Without a hearing, though? Is that even legal? Well, they gave me a hearing, but they wouldn't let me present factual evidence. They would only allow people to come in and testify as to my character.

Do you follow me? Yes. In other words, Kaplan found that I bribed the judge in Ecuador based on false witness testimony. Guerra. Guerra. In the bar hearing, that had to be accepted as fact by the adjudicator. Even though he had testified the opposite... Yeah.

...in the fake hate. It was required by law... that is the New York State Courts, that Kaplan's finding be accepted without any challenge by me, even though it was totally wrong and I could challenge it. So that when I say I was denied a hearing, I was denied a fact hearing where I could challenge

Kaplan's findings, because they didn't want to disturb. You know, that would have blown apart Kaplan's whole decision. So, they blocked me from doing that. That's where the collusion comes in. I promise you there were discussions... Yeah. ...between the Chevron lawyers and these judges.

But they wanted to, like, not completely screw me because I was very vocal and had a lot of people paying attention to me, like, we'll give you a hearing. So roughly 15 lawyers came in, I mean prominent lawyers, to say that they love working with me, practicing law with me, I'm a man of high character, I'm fit to practice law. And the hearing officer, who was a former federal prosecutor, um, named John Horan,

you know, we had two, three days of hearings. I testified. Uh, by the way, this was extremely time consuming. I mean, this is another thing they do to you, is that everything's a struggle, and time, and it's exhausting. He ruled that I should get my law license back. I won the hearing, even though I couldn't even challenge Kaplan's facts. What did they do?

They appeal his decision to the higher appellate court in the state of New York, because the licensing decision of lawyers is not a federal issue, it's a state issue. You're licensed state by state. And those judges overturned his decision and disbarred me. Yeah, I never had a hearing. And I got completely jammed once again by collusion between judges.

That screams collusion. It's so collusive. That screams like... You ought to see, I have a tape of that whole hearing. It was extraordinary. Chevron had eight lawyers in my bar hearing. collusion it's so collusive screams like you ought to see i have a tape of that whole hearing it was extraordinary chevron had eight lawyers in my bar hearing and they were clearly colluding with the chevron put eight chevron and eight lawyers watching supposedly watching from the back sounds like the godfather scene where they bring in the cousin yeah yeah yeah he looks at him he's

like don't you say nothing yeah yeah yeah you, yeah, yeah. You know what it is? The hearing room was really little. It was like a conference room. And they were like jammed up against the wall. And they were clearly texting the prosecutor who was a retired corporate lawyer from a huge Hubbard Reed, a big law firm, who pro bono volunteered his services to prosecute the case against me. And he was, you know, it was just pathetic. And they were basically running my bar prosecution, Chevron's lawyers, through this guy. What year is this?

This was, actually I was on detention. I went with my ankle bracelet. This was in the fall of 2019. Good little marketing touch right there yeah but you know i had no choice and the reality is i really think kaplan when he locked me up he knew i had my bar hearing coming up he knew i was enforcing the judgment in canada and he just tried to completely destroy everything i was doing he thought i'd just give up and you didn't you're i didn't i kept going in here and i listen my philosophy is they're really

corrupt and i'm gonna challenge them every step of the way to the best of my ability you're doing i mean in court and out of court what when did their goal is to silence me they have failed when when and how and on what legal logic or because again you they they got you on a misdemeanor on what legal logic did they freeze your bank accounts and and then take money out that's another interesting aspect i'll tell you yeah well first so part of chevron's strategy was to just borrow me destroy me lock me up and destroy me financially so i had assets you, you know, liquid and some stuff, not a lot, saved up. After the end of the Rico case, this non-jury case where Kaplan ruled against me

based on false witness testimony, Chevron submitted an application to the judge to have him order me to pay them $32 million to reimburse them for a small portion of the estimated billion dollars they paid in legal fees to Reed Brodsky's firm. Oh, my God. To persecute me through this RICO case. And the judge ordered me to pay them millions of dollars, okay, that I didn't have. So on the basis of that order, they got an ex parte order. I didn't know about it. And they garnished all the money out of my bank accounts and just took it. One day, it was gone. I have no money. I don't have a bank account to this day.

And you're disbarred now. Like, what are you... Well, I have a legal defense fund that I'm always raising money for, by the way. And I know I haven't even talked about this, but to the extent anyone listening wants to help me and my family, you know, we are heavily dependent on people making donations to the legal defense fund, which is held in a law firm in Seattle. The law firm's called Friedman Rubin.

Um, and they pay bills. They pay my lawyers. They pay some of our household expenses. My wife has a job at a nonprofit, does not make enough money sufficient to support us and our son here in New York. And I just have a lot of expenses. And because I can't practice law, they've tried to basically starve me out of advocacy and get me to give up. And I refuse to do it. But this is the crazy part. You know, I've had thousands of people. I've had this fund for the last three years.

I've had thousands of people around the world donate small amounts of money. I mean, I'm honestly carried forward by people, by regular people. 99% of them I've never met personally. But they are engaged in this battle because they know the stakes are really high, not just for me, but for... you know, for everyone faced with this kind of stuff.

So... You're also working on other cases. I'm working on a lot of other things. Not as a lawyer, as an advocate. Right, right. You know, and I use my... And I would urge people to follow me on Instagram at Steven Donziger.

Link in description. It's right down there. Yeah, and I comment on all sorts of human rights and interesting issues. I mean, I'm... You know, I'm always speaking out about various issues. What I try to do when my detention ended is kind of rebuild myself into a broader human rights advocate which has always been my plan i just got so tied up by their attacks on me in one case you know but i'm much bigger than that although i'm still very much you know fighting for my exoneration and also fighting for justice for

the people of Ecuador. How'd you end up getting involved with Julian Assange's case? I saw you were doing some stuff with like, Roger Waters on that. Yeah. Like six months ago. So, um, when Julian Assange was locked up

in Ecuador's embassy in England, I don't know if people remember that, but he took asylum there, um, in, I don't know, many years ago. He's now in prison, in Belmarsh Prison, right outside London, the harshest prison in the UK, even though he's never been convicted of a crime. People won't believe that. I was in the embassy to meet with the ambassador, who was a friend of mine, and I met him.

We talked. I'm not close to him, and I met him. We, you know, talked. I mean, I'm not close to him and I haven't talked to him for years. But I sympathize with him because I think he's being wronged. I really do. I think he is being completely mistreated. And I can relate because something similar, albeit not nearly as harsh, happened to me. It's where, like, in this case, the U.S. government wants to destroy the guy because he exposed, you know, war crimes committed by the U.S. military in Iraq,

among other problems. In my case, an oil company wants to destroy me because I help indigenous peoples hold them accountable, you know. And these are things that oil companies are not used to having have happened. They want to destroy me. The U.S. is not used to a guy who is able to get information to so clearly expose the wrongdoing of our military, the human rights violations of our military. So, you know, the reactions to Julian and the reaction to me by these powerful interests, to me, are similar. Um, in terms of the motivation,

although, you know, he is really in an awful position. You know, I mean, I think they want to kill him. I really do. I mean... Yeah, there's been reports that they tried to. And I don't think at this point, like, they're not gonna kill him. They're going to induce his death, either hoping he harms himself

or he just gets sick and dies because he's living under such harsh conditions. Yeah, he's not doing well. Yeah. I mean, some of the reports out there are... You know, he's not doing well at all, but I, you know, he's one of the people. Alexei Navalny's another, the Russian guy.

Oh, yeah. You know, look, there's so many people imprisoned for their political beliefs around the world. I mean, look, there's so many people in prison for their political beliefs around the world. I mean, thousands, tens of thousands of people. You know, people don't understand it can happen in our country too. Yeah. In the United States. And, you know, I've tried to highlight a handful of cases over the last couple of years to, A, get help for certain individuals, but also so people in our country understand, like, we have these issues. Yeah.

Just like a lot of other countries. And they need to be dealt with. My friend David Satter has been on this podcast a couple times, episode 92 and 133. He has basically reported on Russia for the last 50-some years. Before the KGB, there was the NKVD. In the 30s, it was responsible for murdering hundreds of thousands of people. Like the pogroms and stuff? No, no, no. Pogroms were ethnic, anti-Jewish for the most part. Right.

Riots. No, this was the great terror during the 1930s that Stalin launched against real and imagined opponents in order to bring the country completely to its knees. He was literally a station chief for or the bureau chief for the Financial Times in Moscow in like 1976. And he's the only reporter who holds the distinction of having been kicked out of the Soviet Union and kicked out by Putin. Until the war broke out, he was the the Soviet Union and kicked out by Putin. Until the war broke out, he was the only Western reporter ever kicked out by Putin. Excuse me. You're good.

Yeah. And, you know, he was friends with the guy who was before Navalny, Boris Nemtsov. Yeah. And not only did they kill that guy, they killed him right next to the Kremlin. I know. You can watch a video of it. I know. You know, so there's multiple ways they could do this thing. can go bleach out in prison and then oh maybe you know he hung himself in his jail cell or you know die slowly like you said maybe they're trying to do with

assange or sometimes they're just you know in that case it is russia like he's a little more aggressive obviously but they'll just kill you in the street if they don't like what you say and i'll add this i mean the the, the crimes they commit to silence people. Yes. Either, you know, locking them up or killing them. You know, sometimes they like doing it in the open because it just intimidates people. It's basically like saying,

hey, you're never gonna stop me. I got the power and, you know, I've obtained impunity and you're never gonna stop this. And it's sort of a psychology to it to intimidate the population, you know, when you do it openly. And I think Chevron, I mean, in the context of the legal system, tried to do that to me, where they basically like, there's nothing this guy can do to stop us. We're going to just keep going, you know. You know, and the point of that not only is to avoid paying the people of Ecuador the $10 billion that Chevron owes them for this massive environmental damage, the point of it is to scare the heck out of any other young lawyer or young environmental activist that wants to get involved in holding this company accountable. I mean, it's an intimidation tool. It's a mechanism to intimidate people so they don't exercise their free speech rights. That's what it is. And they want to hold up people like me as an example.

Has there ever been someone at Chevron to maybe not publicly, but privately approach you with sympathy for what's happening to you? Anyone? No. Not one employee? Not one like whistleblower? No.

That's crazy. that's scary because like you said you know the media ended up like not reporting on a lot of this your story personally in the last whatever you know since the ruling in ecuador largely is uncovered you know there's a great i mean it is a little documentary on Vice. It was like 12 minutes. It's great. That's it. I'll put the link in there. But, you know, you don't get the 60-minute sit-downs or anything. Chevron intimidated 60 Minutes.

They just stopped covering this. Yeah, you said they went in there and told them they had to pull the one from 09 from their archives or something? Yeah. And it won an Emmy. And they pulled it down like three years later under pressure from Chevron. Is that because Chevron is a media buyer? Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons.

Oh, boy. It's just, it feels like at every turn they have some control. They have a lot of power. Yeah. 100%. The media, you know, we have a lot of power yeah and like the media you know we have a profit-based media system and chevron buys a lot of and other oil companies buy a lot of advertising i mean magazines that are supposedly liberal like harper's the atlantic they don't do anything on this because they get a lot of oil company advertising. MSNBC, the same thing.

CNN, you know, I'm not saying they don't occasionally touch it, but like generally they don't really want to go there because they're going to lose money. Yeah. Like I said, I hadn't before a few fans pointed out, I hadn't even heard of the story. I've gotten some attention on some of the independent podcasters like Katieie halper crystal ball obviously you now um but you know the main corporate dependent uh you know the the outlets dependent on corporate advertising haven't really wanted to get near this but you're you are you were telling me you're working on your memoir now because you you hadn't had a book out about this or anything. You should have been so busy with your case and this case. But are you looking at getting that out next year?

Well, yeah. I mean it's going to probably be a year and a half if I'm able to get it done. I'm in the process of writing it. And it's a lot to pull all this together and to write it in a way that it will be accessible to the average person. Yeah, I'm curious to see how that'll come out because I was telling you before, I mean, you could write 300 pages for what's supposed to be each chapter if you really wanted to tell it. Oh, I know. It's such a long story. But you got to write it in a way that people can get through it and it's accessible and not necessarily write about every little detail. Sure. Well, I do hope to see you do some sort of media with that as well, like whether it be after it comes out, like a complimentary podcast where you delve deeper.

Oh, that'd be great. You could definitely tell the story well. But I love the willingness you have to fight and that I can tell in talking to you today, the spirit is still there. It hasn't been broken after all they've done to you. I mean I haven't lived 31 years. I can't even imagine how much that – what kind of fortitude that takes to be able to have that. But it's because you believe in what you did. Well, thank you.

And you believe in the people you fight for who apparently, according to the United States legal system, don't have a voice, which is very sad. But I'm glad we can give that a platform. I hope when you do put out this book, we can have you back on. And I'd love to check that out before we do it and we can dig deeper into it. But you had said people could follow you on Instagram. Are there any other things people can do to help you out?

Follow me on Twitter, now X, Instagram, you know, just, oh, my website, freedonziger.com. Freedonziger.com is where people can donate. And look, even if you can't donate, that's cool. Give us your email if you can and we'll keep updating you on the case. One other thing is I'm going to be launching a campaign to get a pardon from President Biden. And while I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it, I am going to push for it because we should not allow private corporate prosecutions anywhere, much less in the United States of America. So we're going to be going directly to Biden to get him to pardon my misdemeanor criminal contempt conviction. How does that work? Like what do you, when you say you're like, well, we're going to write the guy a letter. I got 10 lawyers to sign it. Okay. And then we're

going to get, try to get a million plus people around the world to sign a petition, and we're gonna push. You know, we're gonna lobby the White House and be vocal. Um, and at a minimum, use it to call attention to what happened. You know, they want this to go away. Like, they don't want people to know what happened. So we, it's on us to keep pushing and putting it out there.

And this is a great way to seek justice for me and my family, but also to seek justice for everyone who, you know, fights for climate justice and fights for justice on any issue. You know, that we cannot allow corporations to step into the shoes of the government and prosecute and detain people. I mean, we just can't let it happen. And that's why I should be pardoned among other reasons.

Oh, you definitely, I feel, obviously, if people have listened to this podcast, I fully support that. You didn't do anything wrong and i you know i'm going to need the support of people so keep checking out the website freedonziger.com and look for the announcement yeah i i just wonder because like if you get a pardon that will not only do justice to you but it will also righteously ignite more awareness on the case too totally and i hope they don't hold that against you because it's i mean at least it's not a felony but still like it's a crazy crazy conviction especially what they were asking for in court it's like totally

illegal so this has blown my mind you did amazing i'm so glad we could finally do this thank you for coming in we'll put those links down in the description and thanks for doing what you do and i look forward to your book thank you julian thank you for having in. We'll put those links down in the description. And thanks for doing what you do, and I look forward to your book. Thank you, Julian. Thank you for having me. And thanks for doing what you do. It's, you know, let me just say this about what you do and what you're doing. You know, when I was really isolated in detention at home,

like, it was independent journalists like yourself who brought my story out, and it just grew and grew. And like, if you guys didn't do what you do, people like me would be living in tremendous darkness. Instead, like there's light shining on it and it's really helpful. What you do is more than just talking to a guy and having interesting conversations.

It really does have an impact. So I appreciate it. Well, it's great to hear. Thank you. I hope we can keep doing that. But until next time, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast,

or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.