American lawyer, Steven R. Donziger, has found himself in the crosshairs of an effort by Chevron to discredit him. Chevron has said that a pollution case judgment against the company in Ecuador was rigged by Donziger, making the claim repeatedly during the past two years. The company claims that the lawyer tampered with witnesses and bribed an Ecuadorean judge. While originally set at $18 billion, the award was recently lowered to $9.5 billion by Ecuador’s highest court.
When Mr. Donziger heard stories in the early 1990s about how Texaco, later acquired by Chevron, cut through Amazon forests, drilled wells and poured toxic oil waste into unlined pits in the 1970s and 1980s, he became interested in the case. Mr. Donziger plunged headfirst into a class-action lawsuit brought by the inhabitants of the Amazonian village of Lago Agrio, even though he had only been out of Harvard Law School for two years. The legal battle has stretched for 20 years. Mr. Donziger helped manage the case, eventually building it up to the multibillion-dollar level, and was the lead legal organizer for the plaintiffs when the judgment was finally rendered in 2011.
In a Manhattan federal courtroom, the company’s lawyers confronted Mr. Donziger with the claims that Chevron is making against him. At one point during the hearing, a lawyer for Chevron questioned Mr. Donziger over a string of emails received by him from an Ecuadorean colleague that included words like “puppet” and “puppeteer.” Quoting from the emails, the lawyer, Randy M. Mastro, asked, “ ‘The puppet will finish the entire matter tomorrow’ — do you recall that, Mr. Donziger? The puppeteer is pulling the string and the puppet is returning the package.”
The company maintains that the words were references to two judges who were bribed by Mr. Donziger and his associates. Mr. Donziger responded that the messages were of little importance, calling them “nicknames, jokes, that kind of stuff.” When Mr. Mastro pressed the issue, asking if “puppet” referred to Nicolas Augusto Zambrano, the judge who issued an $18 billion award, Mr. Donziger replied, “I have no recollection who it referred to. I don’t think I paid a lot of attention to these emails.”
Mr. Mastro repeatedly sought to raise doubts about Mr. Donziger’s credibility with his series of questions. Mr. Donziger has denied bribing anyone and accuses the company of taking many of the actions he is accused of taking, including manipulating evidence, meeting privately with court officials and paying witnesses. Chevron denies all of the allegations against it.
