Donziger was caught saying on camera: “ ‘Facts do not exist. “I once worked for a lawyer who said something that I have never forgotten,” Mr. Donziger and his “co-conspirators,” including Patton Boggs and Kohn Swift, of extortion and fraud. Donziger to court in 2011 under federal antiracketeering laws, accusing Mr. Though the film, “Crude,” helped gin up publicity, Chevron’s lawyers subpoenaed the outtakes, which placed his efforts to corrupt Ecuadorian justice in a stark and unflattering light and allowed Chevron to bring Mr. As part of his PR campaign, he had invited documentary filmmakers to follow his case. Unlike so many other bogus environmental torts, Mr. Donziger from the start was this paper’s editorial page. About the only journalistic outlet skeptical of Mr. media, notably “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair, which delighted in what they saw as a real-life David and Goliath story. By the admission of one of Stratus’s own executives, the report was “not supported by reliable scientific bases.” Then there was the U.S. Also lending a hand was a Boulder-based consulting firm, Stratus, which ghostwrote an environmental assessment report for a supposedly independent investigator. Which provided legal and financial assistance in hopes of a giant payday. Donziger’s case were law firms such as Patton Boggs and Barrett writes, against the judge to get him to rule in their favor.Īll this was in the service of the $19 billion judgment-among the largest environmental verdicts ever-that an Ecuadorian judge issued in 2011. After the women objected to the assignment, he alighted on another idea: “use sex-harassment accusations,” Mr. Donziger employed, the author reports, was “dispatching female interns” to flirt with a judge. “In the end of the day, it is about brute force.” One gambit Mr. Barrett quotes him at one point as saying.
Though he had little experience as a practicing attorney, he had a keen sense of what it would take to win the Ecuador case: “All this bull- about law and facts” didn’t matter, Mr. to maintain hierarchical authority and take advantage of ordinary people.” Barrett, a former editor and reporter at the Journal, explains, “CLS taught that corporations and the politically privileged systematically manipulated legal concepts. “Prevalent within Harvard’s faculty,” Mr. Later, at Harvard Law School, he came under the spell of a Marxist approach to the law known as Critical Legal Studies. The Florida native had become enamored with Latin America as a young reporter covering the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s. But that release did not prevent suits by private citizens, nor did it matter much in a country where evidence could be manufactured, judges could be bought and governments could change overnight.
In 1998, the government of Ecuador had “released, absolved, and discharged forever” Texaco from “any claim or litigation” related to its oil operations. Texaco had also spent tens of millions of dollars on cleaning up its well sites and spill areas as required by its agreement with the Ecuadorian government. Texaco had not been the majority operator in Ecuador since the mid-1970s, when it had ceded control of oil operations in the country to its partner, PetroEcuador, a state-owned firm with an execrable environmental record. Yet as attractive as such details might have seemed, the case was no slam-dunk. Donziger described the environmental damage as “larger than the Chernobyl disaster,” though he later recanted that testimony. Visitors to Ecuador’s Oriente region, where the wells had been drilled, could easily find open pits of gooey black oil. In 2001) had left behind a toxic dump in the jungle. The plaintiffs alleged that the oil company (acquired by It had begun in 1993 as a $1.5 billion class-action against Texaco, which had operated a subsidiary in Ecuador from the late 1960s to the early ’90s. Donziger hosted the Amazonians in Manhattan, the case was nearly a decade old. In “Law of the Jungle,” his well-crafted account of the epic suit, “they would have preferred roast monkey.”īy the time Mr.