Steven Donziger
Steven Robert Donziger is an American former attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc. and other cases 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 Ecuadorian court awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 billion in damages, which led Chevron to withdraw its assets from Ecuador and launch legal action against Donziger in the US. In 2011, Chevron filed a RICO suit against Donziger in New York City. The case was heard by US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who determined that the ruling of the Ecuadorian court could not be enforced in the US because it was procured by fraud, bribery, and racketeering activities. As a result of this case, Donziger was disbarred from practicing law in New York in 2018.
Donziger was placed under house arrest in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan's RICO decision, when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron's forensics experts. In July 2021, US District Judge Loretta Preska found him guilty, and Donziger was sentenced to 6 months in jail in October 2021. While Donziger was under house arrest in 2020, twenty-nine Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as "judicial harassment." Human rights campaigners called Chevron's actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation. In April 2021, six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Donziger's case. In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that the pre-trial detention imposed on Donziger was illegal and called for his release. Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Donziger was released on April 25, 2022.
In June 2022, a federal appeals court affirmed Donziger's criminal contempt conviction. In March 2023, the Supreme Court declined to hear further appeals.
Early life, family and education
Donziger was born in 1961 to Hester and Michael J. Donziger. His maternal grandfather was Aaron E. Koota, the Brooklyn District Attorney from 1964 to 1968 and later Justice of the New York State Supreme Court from 1968 to 1976. His mother, a social activist, raised him in a Jewish community in Jacksonville, Florida, and he attended The Bolles School. She took him to picket in support of César Chávez's Salad Bowl strike.Donziger studied history at American University where he also wrote for his college newspaper. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991.
Career
After graduating from college, Donziger worked as a journalist. His first job was in the United Press International bureau in Managua, after which he freelanced in Nicaragua for The Fort Lauderdale News, the Toronto Star, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He also founded Project Due Process which offered legal services to Cubans who arrived in the US in the Mariel boatlift.After working as a journalist for three years, Donziger went to Harvard Law School. He graduated from law school in 1991 and worked as a public defender in Washington, D.C. In 1991, he visited Iraq as part of a mission that produced a report on the impact of bombing on civilians during the first Gulf War. The report was adopted by the United Nations. Donziger was the editor of The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission, published in 1996 by Harper Perennial. The book described the role of media in increasing fear of crime, racial injustice in the criminal justice system and argues against mandatory minimum sentences.
Class action lawsuit against Chevron
Starting in the 1970s, Texaco conducted oil drilling operations in the Amazon in partnership with Ecuador's national oil company, Petroecuador. In the 1990s Texaco came to a $40 million agreement with Ecuador to clean up some of the resultant pollution, and was released from liability.Donziger was asked by Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía to help win compensation for the pollution and health effects caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field, a region that became known as the "Amazon Chernobyl". He visited Ecuador in 1993, where he says he saw "what honestly looked like an apocalyptic disaster," including children walking barefoot down oil-covered roads and jungle lakes filled with oil. In 1993, after he visited Ecuador, Donziger and other attorneys brought a class-action lawsuit in New York against Texaco on behalf of over 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people from the Amazon region. Since the plaintiffs had no money, Donziger, with FDA support, funded the case by selling shares to investors, offering a small part of any eventual settlement. The lawyers chose to file in New York because at the time Texaco's headquarters were in New York. The lawsuit charged that Texaco's oil drilling in the Amazon had resulted in massive contamination. Chevron bought Texaco in 2001 and argued that Texaco had cleaned up its area of operations and that its partner, Petroecuador, was responsible for any remaining pollution. Chevron requested that the case be tried in Ecuador and, in 2002, the US court dismissed the plaintiffs case based on forum non conveniens and ruled that Ecuador had jurisdiction. The US court exacted a promise from Chevron that it would accept the decision of the Ecuadorian courts.
When the case moved to Ecuador, Donziger conducted a public relations campaign to inform Ecuadoreans about the pollution of the Amazon. He said that "the indigenous people would never get a fair trial in Ecuador if they did not illuminate what had happened to them and get public support". Donziger appeared in the 2009 documentary film Crude which explored a two-year period in the case. A provincial Ecuadorean court found Chevron guilty in 2011 and awarded the plaintiffs $18 billion in damages. The decision was affirmed by three appellate courts including Ecuador's highest court, the National Court of Justice, although the damages were reduced to $9.5 billion.
To avoid paying the damages awarded by the court in Ecuador, Chevron moved its assets out of the country, leading the plaintiffs to seek enforcement actions in Canada, Brazil, and Argentina for confiscation of Chevron's assets. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal stated that appeals courts in Argentina and Brazil's Superior Court of Justice rejected Donziger's petitions to have the Ecuadorean judgment enforced. In 2017, a Canadian court held that the Ecuadorean plaintiffs could not be awarded assets of Chevron's Canadian subsidiary as the subsidiary was legally distinct from its US parent. In 2019, the Ecuadorean plaintiffs ended their Canadian lawsuit against Chevron.
In 2018, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the $9.5 billion judgment in Ecuador was marked by fraud and corruption and "should not be recognised or enforced by the courts of other States." The amount Ecuador must pay to Chevron to compensate for damages is yet to be determined. The panel also stated that the corruption was limited to one judge, not the entire Ecuadorean legal system.
Counter-litigation against Donziger
Chevron stated that a scene in the documentary film Crude presented at the Sundance Film Festival showed an environmental scientist present at a legal strategy meeting of plaintiffs' lawyers; the same scientist was later appointed by the Ecuadorian court as an ostensibly impartial expert to write a report on technical issues, but the scene was cut from the theatrical release. Chevron lawyers wanted to know what other potentially compromising scenes were left out by the film's director, Joe Berlinger. On May 6, 2010, federal judge Lewis Kaplan sided with a petition submitted by Chevron and ruled that Berlinger turn over more than 600 hours of original footage created during the film's production. Chevron had sought to subpoena the footage as part of the ongoing lawsuit discussed in the film. Berlinger's legal team has maintained that the footage is protected by reporters' privilege and appealed the court's decision.In his appeal, Berlinger stated that he was a highly awarded and respected independent filmmaker, that he was independent of Donziger, and argued that he had in fact gone to great lengths to make Crude a balanced portrayal. Berlinger acknowledged that he had "tweaked" some scenes at Donziger's request. The scene showing the environmental scientist at the legal strategy session had been cut from the theatrical release after one of the plaintiff lawyers objected to Berlinger that showing the scene was "so serious we could lose everything". The US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed the scope slightly, but in 2011 upheld the lower court ruling against Berlinger, Judge Pierre Leval writing for the court: "Those who do not retain independence as to what they will publish but are subservient to the objectives of others who have a stake in what will be published have either a weaker privilege or none at all."
In 2011, Chevron filed a civil RICO suit against Donziger in New York City, accusing him of bribing an Ecuadorean judge, ghostwriting the damages judgment against it, and "fixing" scientific studies. Chevron's civil suit initially sought $60 billion in damages which would have required a trial by jury. Chevron removed the request for damages two weeks prior to trial, allowing the case to be tried by judge alone. Chevron stated that it wanted to focus "the RICO case on obtaining injunctive relief against the furtherance of Donziger's extortionate scheme against the company". US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan was assigned as the judge.
In 2014, Donziger estimated that the legal fees Chevron was paying to appeal had already exceeded $2 billion. In 2021, Chevron estimated its legal fees at nearly $1 billion.