Pod Insights Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin Paul Paz y Miño and Steven Donziger from Rainforests to Courtrooms About this episode Two leading voices in the fight for environmental and human rights justice are Steven Donziger and Paul Paz y Miño. Steven Donziger is an attorney and activist known for his decades-long legal battle against Chevron on behalf of Indigenous peoples and rural communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. His work has drawn international attention to issues of corporate accountability, climate justice, and the criminalization of human rights defenders. Paul Paz y Miño is the Associate Director of Amazon Watch, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the rainforest and advancing the rights of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. For over 20 years, he has worked to build international solidarity, expose corporate abuses, and amplify the voices of frontline communities resisting environmental destruction. Together, Donziger and Paz y Miño discuss their work for environmental justice, the ongoing struggles of affected communities, and the broader fight to hold corporations accountable for human rights and ecological harms.
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Transcript 8,993 words · 14 speakers
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1:36 Alec Baldwin? This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guests today are two of the leading voices in the fight for environmental justice, advocacy for Indigenous communities, and the protection of their homeland. Paul Pazaminho is a human rights and environmental justice advocate, is also the deputy director of Amazon Watch, a nonprofit organization that works to protect the Amazon rainforest and support Indigenous peoples in South America. Pazaminho has also worked for Amnesty International and directed human rights programs for Indigenous communities in Mexico and Guatemala.
2:20 Alec Baldwin? Pazaminho joined Amazon Watch in 2007 to oversee its Cleanup Ecuador campaign.
2:27 Alec Baldwin? It was during this cleanup campaign that he met Steven Donziger, a human rights and environmental lawyer, who has famously been fighting the Chevron case for over 30 years.
2:39 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Steven Donziger.
2:41 Speaker 05 Hi, I'm Paul Pasimino. We met in 2007 when I began working at Amazon Watch as the, I think, managing director at the time. And one of the campaigns I was overseeing was the Cleanup Ecuador campaign. Steven came into our offices in San Francisco and shook my hand and said, "It's really great to meet you. You're joining at a great time. This case is just about to be wrapped up." And we're gonna win.
3:09 Alec Baldwin? Famous last words, right? Famous last words. Anyway, and where was the case at at that time, Steven? Where was the case at?
3:16 Speaker 04 Well, we were in trial in Ecuador. And I completely, all of us completely underestimated how long it would take to do the case. So the trial started in 2003. That was four years later. We were winding down, but Chevron had a lot of tricks up its sleeve to keep delaying the trial because they never really wanted the trial to end. They were very comfortable paying their lawyers lots of money to keep litigating the case because they knew once it ended, they were gonna lose. So the case was in a procedural posture where we really had put in a bunch of evidence, thousands of chemical and water samples proving their pollution. And at that point, they started again engaging in all sorts of dirty tricks
4:01 Speaker 04 to delay the end of the trial. So we were on the cusp of ending it and winning it. And we eventually did win it. But at that point, it would be another four more years.
4:12 Alec Baldwin? Now, I want to just clarify a couple of things. What year was Kaplan shoved into your life?
4:18 Speaker 04 Kaplan appeared in 2009. The lawsuit was filed way back in 1993 in New York. Chevron wanted the case moved to Ecuador. They succeeded. That took 10 years. So the case, the trial began in Ecuador in 2001. And then we litigated for eight years. They were about to lose. They then sued me in New York under civil Rico theory. And that's when Kaplan came into my life.
4:47 Alec Baldwin? Explain to people how the mechanism of how Kaplan is injected into this process. Meaning you win, they want to go back to New York and appeal that decision. How are the Kaplans of the world enabled to function in that role? You won a case, I'm assuming you're going to go to an appeal, but then the gates of hell open. How were they able to install that judge that way?
5:10 Speaker 04 Well, first of all, I believe the whole entry of Kaplan into the case was not an accident. I think it was by design. And I think the way it happened is Kaplan is known for being very pro corporate, very anti-planus lawyer, doesn't like lawyers like me. And I think Chevron's law firm at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher steered the case to him from behind the scenes, and I think he was totally in on it. The case was not assigned randomly, and voila, they sued me for $60 billion and he's the judge. And like to this day, I don't know the details of how that happened, other than to say that the case was not assigned through random lot.
5:50 Speaker 04 Kaplan had overseen a minor aspect of an action against Joe Berlinger, the filmmaker that Chevron had filed. And he used the fact that he presided over that very minor discovery matter to claim jurisdiction over this major, major, major lawsuit. They were filing against me, and I'll say it was against me, but I was really a stand-in for the communities in Ecuador in the Amazon rainforest who had won the judgment. They were trying to destroy me so they didn't have to pay the communities they poisoned. But Kaplan's entry was not an accident. He's always been a very pro corporate judge, and I think it was all part of a design by Chevron.
6:28 Alec Baldwin? There was the discussion, the notion that you were allowed to ultimately sue Chevron. In any country, they did business, correct?
6:36 Speaker 04 Yes. In other words, once we won the judgment and the amount of $10 billion, and it was affirmed on appeal by Ecuador Supreme Court, we, meaning the communities and their lawyers, had a right to go try to seize Chevron's assets wherever they existed, anywhere in the world. As people know, Chevron is a huge global company. They have assets in dozens and dozens of countries. The irony is the one place where we were legally barred from pursuing their assets is right here at home in the United States, because Judge Kaplan, at the outset of the case, issued what to me is a baseless nationwide injunction.
7:13 Speaker 05 What's fascinating about the Kaplan Gibson Dunn situation is it's similar to what we're seeing in the Greenpeace case. The process of filing the RICO charges preemptively against Stephen and the Ecuadorians, one, blocked the Ecuadorian people from seeking access to justice in the United States. It basically served to make the indigenous people and the communities invisible. That's what they've done in the Greenpeace case, too. And what they did was, before the judgment was finalized in Ecuador, they sued to prevent a judge in the United States from looking at the Ecuadorian judgment. Now, any fair judge would have looked at Chevron's claims and said, well, they've
7:57 Speaker 05 just got a judgment in Ecuador, presumably they're going to bring it to the United States to enforce it. At that time, you can bring up your claims of fraud or anything else, and a judge will make a determination. Is that legit? Or is it fraud? And then the Ecuadorians can either get their payday or not. But by suing preemptively under RICO and going after Stephen, they said, these people don't matter, this is a fraud, and we shouldn't ever look at the evidence of what happened in Ecuador. And that was the Kaplan piece that is so diabolical. Prevented the real crime of Chevron's admitted contamination from seeing the light of day in a US courtroom, which was Gibson Dunn's strategy.
8:42 Speaker 05 And that's what they did in the Greenpeace case, too. Instead of going after Standing Rock, instead of saying, these are the indigenous peoples that have protested, these are the people that have caused the harm, quote unquote, in their eyes, to energy transfer partners, they targeted Greenpeace, who had virtually nothing to do with it. And they make the indigenous people invisible, which is part of Gibson Dunn's strategy and one of the reasons that they should be identified as a diabolical law firm.
9:08 Alec Baldwin? Now, Gibson Dunn wasn't involved in Dakota.
9:11 Speaker 05 They were the lead lawyers in the trial against Greenpeace.
9:15 Alec Baldwin? Oh, they were? I didn't know that.
9:17 Speaker 05 Yes.
9:18 Alec Baldwin? But so you're saying that Gibson Dunn, so this is, you only named two cases, not that you need to name more, but you named Dakota and you named Ecuador. Was this their playbook? Do they do a lot of this kind of thing?
9:28 Speaker 05 It is their playbook, and that's just two cases. They actually pro bono have been taking a case to try to undermine the Indian Child Welfare Act. So this is a pattern of this law firm. There's actually a report people can read on the website license2spill.org, which goes through all of these, what they call legal thuggery, and judges have called them legal thugs, not just people that they've targeted. This is their pattern. This is what they've built their reputation on.
9:57 Alec Baldwin? Are they assuming that they have a better chance at achieving their goals now that Trump is in office? Is that a part of that playbook as well?
10:04 Speaker 05 Well, certainly in the Energy Transfer case, because he's buddies with the CEO of Energy Transfer.
10:10 Alec Baldwin? Now, what did they say? What did they maintain that they proved in court that Greenpeace had done or orchestrated or organized? What was the damage? Whatever it was defamation. How can you avoid a conversation about environmental disaster without the perception you're going to talk down about somebody? Wasn't defamation, was that the main complaint? Or were there other things they said that they did?
10:33 Speaker 05 There was defamation, trespass, and I believe was property destruction.
10:41 Alec Baldwin? What was the property that was destroyed?
10:43 Speaker 05 Well, they, all of, basically, everything that took place during the Standing Rock protests, they said Greenpeace was responsible for. So at some point during the protests, things were set on fire. Greenpeace sent lock boxes allowing people to essentially chain themselves to equipment to prevent that equipment from operating, which delayed their work. Then they were eventually cut off and work continued. That was really the only thing Greenpeace did. But they said because Greenpeace did that, everything that happened during the entire protests at Standing Rock was Greenpeace's responsibility, including Greenpeace International, Greenpeace, Inc., and Greenpeace Fund, three different entities, one of which didn't have any staff.
11:29 Speaker 05 In North Dakota and the other which didn't have any staff at all. They're the fund. They're not activists. They fund other groups doing work.
11:38 Alec Baldwin? And Standing Rock refers to a reservation of indigenous people?
11:42 Speaker 05 Yes, exactly. Their traditional lands were violated by the Dakota and still are by the Dakota Access Pipeline.
11:49 Alec Baldwin? How is that so?
11:51 Speaker 05 It crossed over what the Standing Rock Sioux tribe believe, according to their treaties, is their territory. Now, the reservation line, which was accepted by the state, is slightly different. But that doesn't negate that in the eyes of the Standing Rock Sioux and in the eyes of the United Nations, this is all indigenous land and indigenous water that they're protecting. And so the pipeline crossed and violated their territory. It spilled. It polluted their lands. It was done without their consent. And when they protested, it delayed the construction of the pipeline until Trump came into power. And then he gave the go ahead and it went through. Ultimately, the pipeline is operating.
12:34 Speaker 05 Energy Transfer has made billions of dollars. But they wanted to send a message to Standing Rock, to indigenous peoples, to environmental justice activists, and to NGOs like Greenpeace that they don't want to accept this kind of protest against the fossil fuel industry. And that's what that case was about. And now it's 660, I believe, million dollars. And there's a trial, there's a hearing actually today, right after we finish talking, about the amount because it's clearly an absurd amount. And Greenpeace has been requesting that the judge reevaluate that award and reduce it because it's absurd on its face. But also, it's well above the damages that were even claimed by Energy Transfer.
13:17 Alec Baldwin? Is the entity that's been, of Greenpeace that they're referring to in the litigation, is it Greenpeace US, Greenpeace North America? Which exactly, which Greenpeace is it?
13:26 Speaker 05 In the United States, there are two entities for Greenpeace. There's Greenpeace Incorporated and Greenpeace Fund, 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4). And so, Greenpeace Fund just redirects funds to Greenpeace and to other environmental activists.
13:42 Alec Baldwin? Is it safe to assume, from what you and I have discussed in recent weeks, that they're facing potential bankruptcy?
13:47 Speaker 05 Absolutely, yeah. It's $660 million.
13:51 Alec Baldwin? But that doesn't apply to other Greenpeace?
13:53 Speaker 05 It applies to Greenpeace, Inc. in the US and Greenpeace Fund in the US. That's collectively referred to as Greenpeace USA, but also Greenpeace International.
14:03 Alec Baldwin? Oh, they are going after international?
14:04 Speaker 05 Yes, which was also defended in that case.
14:07 Alec Baldwin? I didn't know that. I thought it was just restricted to the US only. And therefore, if they went bankrupt, it wouldn't affect their international funds. But the international was sidelined as well?
14:15 Speaker 05 Yes, and Greenpeace, Inc. and Greenpeace Fund also help support the global movement of Greenpeace, the various Greenpeace entities, because they're the largest body there. So if they're damaged, it does damage the entire movement.
14:29 Alec Baldwin? So my question becomes, is it safe to assume that in the Ecuador case, Donziger is Greenpeace? They dumped it all on one guy, as opposed to in Dakota, they dumped it on a company. They're always looking for a scapegoat, someone to blame. And so, as Greenpeace in the United States, those two entities, and also internationally is the fall guy in the Dakota case, was Donziger alone, or was there another organization, a similar organization like Greenpeace, involved in the Ecuador case?
14:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's the way it is. Donziger is the Greenpeace in this case, because one of the things Stephen was most successful at doing was raising financial support for the Chevron case. He continued to be, even after the RICO judgment, in order to pursue that enforcement that we mentioned in other countries, right? Which is part of the reason, not only was he targeted in the RICO case, but the subsequent contempt of court attacks that led to his house arrest and incarceration. Those were to prevent him from moving forward, raising support to keep trying to enforce the Ecuador judgment, which is valid anywhere in the world outside of the United States.
15:41 Speaker 05 And the other thing that was the challenge, obviously, for Gibson Dunn is, Stephen's the only one based in the US. So they could try all they want to go after the Ecuadorians and their lawyers based in Ecuador, but Kaplan has no jurisdiction there. There's nothing he could do. The person he could target was Stephen. But one of the other elements of that RICO case was targeting Stephen's allies, not necessarily by making them plaintiffs, by identifying them like Amazon Watch, I was served at my home, as a non-party co-conspirator. So were there journalists that worked on the case, bloggers, other NGOs, shareholder activists, all targeted
16:21 Speaker 05 during discovery as co-conspirators. And we had to go, Amazon Watch, into court in San Francisco to defend ourselves against their absurd subpoenas. All of our documents for that point, almost 20 years, they were trying to get us to have to turn over, which is really meant to intimidate like a slap suit and scare us into dropping out of the case. So they used to send us boxes of legal documents weekly, saying, if you continue to work on this case, you're going to be in violation of federal law. We have a lawsuit against Stephen Donziger, trying to intimidate us. So at the end of the case, I dumped all of those boxes there at their San Francisco offices and left them there in their waiting room. How did that work?
17:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, they weren't too happy that day. I think it was like 45 boxes.
17:12 Alec Baldwin? Paul Pazimino and Stephen Donziger. If you enjoy conversations about the environment and environmental activism, check out my 2015 conversation with Antonia Huhas about her reporting on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
17:31 Speaker 06 There are places like the bottom of the ocean where naturally releasing oil actually lives over thousands of years in harmony with the environment. What this industry has done is taken a natural resource and turned it into a weapon of mass destruction. So I say, do we really want them? Because they've done such a bang-up job with oil, do we really want to give them the wind and the sun? Do we really want them doing alternative energies? So my answer is no.
17:57 Alec Baldwin? To hear more of my conversation with Antonia Yuhas, go to hereisthething.org. After the break, Paul Pasamino and Steven Donziger talk about the similarity between the Chevron case in Ecuador and the current Greenpeace case in North Dakota, and their impact on indigenous lands.
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20:58 Alec Baldwin? I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. An unfortunate truth facing environmental and human rights activists. Fighting big corporations is legal retaliation. Many of these lawsuits are designed to intimidate, silence, or exhaust activists, and stifle their freedom of speech. The legal term is called a "slapsuit", which stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. I wanted to know more about how these lawsuits worked and whether any states in the US had protections against them.
21:35 Speaker 04 A "slapsuit" is very simply a lawsuit designed to intimidate and silence someone from expressing their views rather than to actually litigate meritorious legal claims. It's essentially a powerful entity, like a corporation, in this case Chevron, or a government, a municipality, uses the process of the law to so burden the target that they can't even keep up, and they just bow out and stop advocating, even if the lawsuit never gets resolved. So it's a law, it's really a weaponization of the legal procedure. To intimidate and silence your opponent, it's illegal.
22:15 Speaker 04 It violates the First Amendment, but far too many corporations still use it. And judges let it happen because I think half the judges don't even know what it is. So that's a slap suit. It's designed to shut people up.
22:28 Alec Baldwin? So it's not a federal statute. It's state by state?
22:31 Speaker 04 No, it can be, I'm sorry, a slap suit can be brought under federal law or state law or any, any law.
22:37 Alec Baldwin? Was the claim of a slap suit, Paul, brought by Greenpeace's lawyers in accordance with what happened in North Dakota?
22:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, so Energy Transfer first tried to sue Greenpeace in federal court. And it was thrown out because it was so obviously a slap. But the problem is in North Dakota, there's no anti-slap legislation protecting people like Greenpeace or entities like Greenpeace from these kinds of suits. There's actually legislation being proposed, hopefully this Congress, to have federal anti-slap legislation that would have protected Greenpeace in a state like North Dakota. But only some states have those laws on the books. California actually has a slap-back statute that says that if you are slapped and you can prove that you are slapped, you can actually go after the slapper
23:27 Speaker 05 and get them to pay for having brought a frivolous lawsuit against you. It's very rarely used, but some cases, some states are seeing this problem and taking action. But we need federal protection so that they can't just forum shop like they did in North Dakota. And, you know, if we get into the case in North Dakota, it's absurd on its face. There's not a single person listening to this podcast who would sit in that courtroom and not realize that that was a sham trial. It was a complete joke. There was no justice happening there. And that's the scary thing when you have a rich litigant like Energy Transfer or Chevron and lawyers like Gibson Dunn that are willing to play dirty in North Dakota or in Kaplan's court.
24:09 Alec Baldwin? Would you say, is it comparable that, because I don't know the facts of this in terms of what was spilled or what damage was caused by energy transfer, but is it safe to say that just as the indigenous people of Ecuador were damaged by the water pollution, Texaco or Chevron, whoever was responsible for that pollution, was there a similar victim of that in the energy transfer case? Was there leakage? Was there damage? Was there toxicity?
24:32 Speaker 05 Yes. The pipeline has leaked already and construction caused environmental damage. And when you add what it's pumping and being burned, the destruction of our climate is much worse because of the amount of oil that continues to flow from North Dakota through the Dakota Access Pipeline to be refined and burned. But the sacred sites, the lands, the rights, the water, all that area in North Dakota has been abused and violated by energy transfer and Dakota Access Pipeline, and it's still happening to this day. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is still in court fighting against the Dakota Access Pipeline and energy transfer.
25:14 Speaker 05 But that wasn't even brought up in this case because, again, this is about invisibilizing the indigenous people and targeting another entity and trying to punish them.
25:24 Speaker 04 These cases, the similarity between the Greenpeace case in North Dakota and the Chevron problem in Ecuador, they both have two fundamental components. One is massive, in the case of Ecuador, massive environmental pollution. The case of North Dakota, leaky pipeline. But equally as important in both cases is the desecration of indigenous ancestral lands and the violations of indigenous cultural rights and the uprooting of really decades, centuries of, you know, of practices by indigenous peoples. And energy transfer didn't give a flying hoot about the land that the Standing Rock
26:07 Speaker 04 Sioux Tribe has in North Dakota. They just rammed their pipeline right over it. And just as in Chevron in Ecuador, didn't really, did not care about the indigenous peoples in the northern Amazon. They just built all these waste pits and oil operations and dumped stuff into, you know, rivers and streams that people were drinking out of. And it's the same deep arrogance by corporations toward indigenous peoples that I think both that outrages people like Paul and I.
26:34 Alec Baldwin? Just as a, out of curiosity, is there a terminus in the country for this pipeline? Does it end in some midsection of the country that goes all the way down to Louisiana?
26:45 Speaker 04 It starts way in the top of North Dakota, in the Bakken oil fields, and crosses multiple states. And it terminates, the terminus is in Illinois on the Mississippi River. So the idea is that the oil flows from North Dakota down to the river, it's loaded onto barges, it's taken down to the Gulf of Mexico for either refining or export.
27:06 Alec Baldwin? Who is, I'm always curious, in terms of my ceaseless hope for some heroism in terms of enforcement appointments, which of course, that's a dead issue now with Trump, but members of Congress, members of the Senate, anybody beyond NGOs and your colleagues and other organizations, who are people who you think are sensitive to your issues in the government now, who are political leaders in the Senate or the House that you have their ear?
27:34 Speaker 04 Well, there's not a lot, honestly. But I would say, look, on the House side, Jim McGovern, representative for Massachusetts, human rights champion, is the only member of Congress ever to have visited Chevron's cancer zone in Ecuador. He's really led so many other members in caring about this issue, you know? And then others, including Sheldon Whitehouse, Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, you know, Pat Leahy, retired, was very helpful when he was in office, Barack Obama, when he was a senator way back in the day. So we've had, we've had champions in the Congress for this particular cause, but if
28:15 Speaker 04 you're looking for like a real environmental champion in the Congress, it's, it's difficult to find, to be frank.
28:22 Alec Baldwin? They might have the sympathy, but they don't have a voice for it right now?
28:25 Speaker 04 Well, I think that the structure of the Congress and our political system is, in my opinion, I think it's been so degraded over the last 15, 20 years by corporate money that it's very hard to get any of these individuals to form enough of a critical mass of people to really get anything significant done. It's like you have a lone voice here and a lone voice there. And it's very hard to get movement on a lot of these issues now in the Congress, and particularly hard under Trump for obvious reasons.
28:57 Speaker 05 There's two people to add in there. One, Jamie Raskin, is the lead on that anti-slap legislation that I talked about. And the other thing I think is important to say, and I know Stephen's not going to say this himself, but his representative, Jerry Nadler, didn't respond to a single call. We sent him thousands of emails when Stephen was under house arrest. He was walking distance from him. Did he send a staff person to visit? Did he respond? No, for years, nothing.
29:28 Alec Baldwin? And why do you think that is? Somebody who's been typically, on average, a reliable colleague of your concerns, why do you think he turned around and ran and hid?
29:36 Speaker 04 I think that it had to do with his lack of courage. I think a lot of it's personal. And also, it turns out that his son is a major lawyer at Gibson Dunn.
29:48 Speaker 05 There you go. Bingo.
29:50 Speaker 04 You know, Gibson Dunn is a lot of lawyers there donate money to Nadler, and I don't think he wanted, you know, they were making a lot of money off attacking me. But again, it really shows a lack of courage, you know, a lack of integrity. I was very disappointed in Jerry Nadler. I mean, Alex, I was trying to get support in Congress and I was detained in my apartment. And I can't tell you the number of congresspersons who said, well, what about, what's Nadler doing? Like, if Nadler, who's my, if my own guy wouldn't do anything, they were like, well, why should I do anything? So it really cost me a lot of support, the fact that Jerry wouldn't move on it. But ultimately, others did move despite Jerry and helped me a lot.
30:30 Alec Baldwin? Paul, what's next in terms of, are we at the stage now where the appeal of the decision against Greenpeace is coming, or is it going to be a while?
30:39 Speaker 05 Well, like I said, today, there's a hearing about the award amount. So we'll find out whether or not it's going to be adjusted or will it still remain at
30:47 Alec Baldwin? A single judge would adjust that amount?
30:49 Speaker 05 Yes, in this case, it could be Judge Guyanis is a name who is, as he said himself, I thought I was going to be handling divorce cases. I never thought I'd have a case like this. So he's way in over his head on this. Then it will be appealed for sure, but that will go to the North Dakota Supreme Court.
31:06 Alec Baldwin? You think they're in the bag for energy transfer?
31:08 Speaker 05 Well, they have not proven very helpful. For example, during the trial, we were trying to get access to send the video and the audio out to the world. So everyone could witness what was happening here. And the North Dakota Supreme Court denied the Washington Post, major news outlets requests, just get access to the live stream of the trial. They want this to be done in the shadows. This is the North Dakota Supreme Court. So I don't have a lot of faith that there's going to be a good judgment coming down from them.
31:39 Alec Baldwin? Who's in possession of that footage? The state?
31:42 Speaker 05 You have to pay, what is it, Stephen? $20,000 if you want to buy the transcript.
31:47 Alec Baldwin? 25,000.
31:47 Speaker 05 If you want to buy the transcript of what happened in that courtroom, which is why Stephen and I and others were there every day taking notes to have our own accounting of what happened in order for the truth to get out.
31:58 Alec Baldwin? And were you allowed to release your notes?
32:00 Speaker 05 We were, we were. But, you know, trying to write that fast and capture every word is quite a challenge.
32:05 Speaker 04 Look, normally a trial has a court reporter and it's public, especially post-COVID, like a lot of trials you can watch on Zoom. I would say, especially at state court like this, Energy Transfer and the Gibson Dunn lawyers went out of their way to prevent people from watching this trial. I mean, it is unbelievable, for example, that there's a live feed of the proceedings, but they kept it private. And a journalist, say, in Washington, to cover the trial, had to travel all the way to Bismarck, North Dakota, in the dead of winter and sit in court for three weeks. And it really limited the coverage, limited the scrutiny, and that's what it was designed to do. What's aggravating, I get why Energy Transfer wanted to shroud it in secrecy. They're embarrassed. You know, they want
32:50 Speaker 04 to go after Greenpeace quietly. What is more mystifying to me is why the judge went along with it. But again, we're seeing sort of a mini version of Kaplan. In the Greenpeace trial, in terms of his willingness to just give the big fossil fuel company what it wants to go after, you know, an activist group that was fighting, you know, fighting the abuses that were being visited upon indigenous people. So it's very disappointing. Not every judge is bad. Let me be clear. Most judges are not bad. You know, but I think Gibson Dunn is expert at finding those judges when they bring these types of cases who are going to facilitate them.
33:35 Alec Baldwin? Paul Pazaminho and Steven Donziger. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Paul Pazaminho and Steven Donziger talk about how the current Trump administration's policies will affect future slap suits, climate activists, and environmental legislation.
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36:44 Alec Baldwin? I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Steven Donziger traveled to Ecuador to represent indigenous communities. The plaintiffs were accusing Texaco and their parent company Chevron of severe environmental damage and pollution. This lawsuit continued for 30 years, leading to Chevron suing Donziger in the United States for fraud and racketeering. The lawsuit culminated with Donziger's disbarment and a two-year house arrest in his Manhattan apartment. I first spoke with Steven Donziger on the podcast almost 10 years ago about the Chevron case in March of 2016.
37:27 Alec Baldwin? I was curious for an update on how things stood for him now and what his career is focused on today.
37:35 Speaker 04 I had no idea, just as a frame of reference, at that point, no idea, not in my wildest imagination, not in my most, you know, you game out negative scenarios, right? You're going up against, I never thought such a thing could possibly happen. It was a shock to me and my family. My son at the time was 13 and he came home one day and his dad had an ankle bracelet and couldn't leave the apartment. And, you know, I thought it'd last a week. It lasted two years and two months. So, you know, we had to adjust and we made a couple of vows, my wife and I, my wife Laura Miller and I. One vow was that we would not let them steal our happiness, but we would maintain within
38:18 Speaker 04 the walls of our homes, joy. And we wouldn't just obsess over this and talk about it all the time. We would live, continue to live to the extent that we could. And we also refused to let a trauma, because it was very traumatic, turn into a pathology. We're like, we're not going to let that happen. And even though we had to sort of endure a lot of pain, I think in the end of the day, we grew from it and got bigger, better and stronger. And one of the reasons is Paul Posse Mino, sitting here on this podcast, really kept the cause alive in the environmental community. And many other people stepped up, you know, you being among them, Alec, Roger Waters,
39:03 Speaker 04 another one, Susan Sarandon, and the Ecuadorian diaspora in New York, I got huge support. I had people coming by our two-bedroom apartment almost every day for, to visit or to express support or to have dinner. My wife and I were like laughing because like our social life ironically got so much better when I was detained because everyone wanted to come, talk to us and see me and find out what was happening. But the crazy part is the maximum penalty I could get under Kaplan's contempt charge was six months in prison. I served over four times that amount before I could even get a trial at home. And when I told the judge that Kaplan appointed Judge Prescott, I said, you gotta let me free.
39:49 Speaker 04 Because I've already served over four times my sentence. And she's like, actually, you are free. She gave me this Kafkaesque response. You are free. I let you go home. You're not in jail. And all I did was impose some conditions on you. So she called my two-year, two-month home detention freedom. And, you know, that's sort of how they tried to justify it legally. But right now, we're well, I mean, moving on. I'm writing a book, doing some speaking. My son's in college. He's doing great. You know, we're good. But it has made a huge dent in aspects of our life that can never be recovered.
40:26 Alec Baldwin? Right. What else are you working with? Are there similar? I mean, a country under Trump, this country under Trump is, it seems like every day, you know, there's something to be dismayed about and upset about. Do you feel like this is the time we're going to see more of this kind of thing? Are you going to see corporations moving toward slap and other kinds of activities on a greater scale in the coming three and a half years?
40:51 Speaker 04 I do. So this is my quick take on that. The slap threat comes from both government and private corporations. We're seeing more and more of it from government. I mean, it existed prior to Trump, but it's intensified greatly with the politicization of the Department of Justice, you know, slapping political opponents of Trump, crazy cases happening, investigations of climate activists and that sort of thing. But, you know, if you look at what happened to me back in 2013, you look at what's happening, you know, to Greenpeace, you look at all of the people Chevron tried to sweep up in the attack on me, including Paul and Amazon Watch.
41:32 Speaker 04 I think we are seeing a real danger out there that this is going to happen more and more. All we can do is keep talking about it, keep educating. And when people ask me, what do they do if they get slapped? I just spoke last night, by the way, to a group of animal rights activists who are, you know, rescuing animals from poultry farms, you know, that are whatever. I mean, it's not my, it's not my world so much, except that these people are facing enormous slap attacks from like Purdue and some of these poultry companies. And what I tell people is, A, don't be intimidated. B, make sure you have a good legal team. C, build solidarity.
42:17 Speaker 04 And D, build your own power. You know, a lot of people who get hit with these cower because they don't know who to turn to. And they gotta look at this battle as a multi-front battle, a multi-platform advocacy exercise, you know? As a lawyer, I never really thought of myself, oh, I'm just a lawyer. I'm gonna solve the Ecuador problem and the four walls of the courtroom. Never thought that way. I'm like, big oil company, huge money, huge power. My clients have nothing but their moral claims and their, you know, their right to life. And we are gonna raise hell about this in every corner of the world that we can that will listen to us through the media, through social media, through shareholders, through state attorney generals who can investigate Chevron.
43:02 Speaker 04 So it's very important that when people deal with these slaps, they build broad-based advocacy campaigns to beat them back. And they really take the offensive and go after the entities that are bringing them. And for that, you need, you know, you need a team of people, good lawyers and the like. But you can, people can build this. So it's very important to fight back and but really look at it as a broad-based effort involving lots of people, lots of angles. So these companies or the law firms, like in this case Gibson Dunn, which by the way Chevron used against me and Energy Transfer is using the same law firm against Greenpeace, that they also pay a price. You know, they're in it for the money.
43:47 Alec Baldwin? Yeah.
43:47 Speaker 04 They make, they make, I mean, I can't even tell you the hundreds of millions of dollars of fees that Gibson Dunn has charged Chevron and Energy Transfer. And the Energy Transfer case has gone on eight years. My case has gone on 15 years. These are the biggest fees this firm has ever collected.
44:04 Alec Baldwin? They don't want it to end.
44:06 Speaker 04 They don't want it to end.
44:07 Alec Baldwin? Yeah.
44:08 Speaker 04 And they need to be called out.
44:10 Alec Baldwin? Now, Paul, let me ask you. There are slap suits. Can you name a slap suit? Where the villain, where the Energy Transfer, if you will, or the Chevron, were they lost? Were they were challenged on this? Was there any big cases you know of where they lost?
44:24 Speaker 05 Oh, sure. There's a case called the Weed Nine, which was a case brought against local activists, I believe in Oregon. Who were fighting a company to try to protect the rights to their water. And they were slapped for a conspiracy, alleged conspiracy against this corporation. And they fought and won, had the case thrown out. And there are multiple cases like that. Some Devin Nunes cow, right? This was a Twitter, a fake Twitter account. Devin Nunes slapped him for making jokes about it. And that case was thrown out. So at times when this comes before a judge who's reasonable, you have a chance to win. But you've already had to defend yourself.
45:08 Speaker 05 So it's done part of its job just by being able to bring the slap suit. But I did want to add that the thing about Trump now is that free speech, as we all know, is completely under attack. It's being literally criminalized. So this unholy alliance between a federal government that will make speech illegal and then corporations who will sue on top of that to say, yeah, what you did was illegal. Even according to the government, we're going to sue you on top of that for more money. So when Greenpeace locks down a protest or stops a bank from operating by protesting in front without using any violence or any property destruction, that can be determined illegal.
45:48 Speaker 05 And then that bank is going to go and sue those activists for stopping their operations and prevent them from the next protest.
45:56 Alec Baldwin? You can't rule out anything with this administration.
45:58 Speaker 05 Yeah.
45:58 Alec Baldwin? No matter how nefarious, no matter complicated and kind of insane, you can't rule it out. And I'm thinking they're going to get closer and closer and closer to, you know, sequestering and corralling people in terms of their rights to where they're going to declare martial law in order to kill the election in 2028. Uh huh.
46:16 Speaker 04 Where this is really moving, and I think what we have to be most concerned about, it's already started.
46:21 Alec Baldwin? Right.
46:21 Speaker 04 It's trying to equate activism with terrorism. That's where this is heading.
46:25 Alec Baldwin? Bingo.
46:26 Speaker 04 Okay. If you look at the pro Palestinian students essentially snatched off the streets with no warrant in New York, the Bakud Khalil case, the Rumeza Oz Turk case at Tufts University, the Columbia students and others, okay? The justification for that, according to Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is that these are terrorist sympathizers, that the mere fact of protesting peacefully, as protected by the Constitution and the First Amendment, somehow turns them into terrorist sympathizers. And once you throw around the word terrorist.
47:03 Alec Baldwin? That's what they did to the animal rights people in the years I've been involved in, PETA and so forth.
47:08 Speaker 04 Totally. And even someone, Jessica Rezisak, who's someone I've gotten to know, who protested the Dakota Access Pipeline that Greenpeace protested, she ended up vandalizing the pipeline in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. She faced a maximum three-year term. She got to court, the judge not only gave her the maximum three-year term, put a five-year enhancement on it by calling her a terrorist. She called her a terrorist for trying to vandalize an oil pipeline. That's not terrorism. You know, protesting the policies of the Israeli government is not terrorism. I'm sorry. But this is where they're trying to shove all this stuff. So, you know, we start as these slap cases, oh,
47:51 Speaker 04 I'm suing Steven Donziger for defamation, or I'm suing Greenpeace under a civil racketeering theory. And then it goes from there. It's a very short hop to trying to criminalize all the people involved as terrorists. And of course, once that happens, you're facing 20, 30-year jail terms, life in prison. And, you know, look, I'm not necessarily saying they're going to get away with that much, but it's looming on the horizon, and it really is intended as an intimidation mechanism. It's intended to shut people up by instilling fear in the populace. And we have to really understand what it is.
48:31 Alec Baldwin? Would you say, Paul Pazimino, that the path now is whatever money you can give to donate to Greenpeace, donate for their legal defense fund? Is that accurate or no?
48:40 Speaker 05 I'm not sure about Greenpeace's legal defense fund. I think they actually have a lot of support they've gotten internationally to come together. But what you need to do, in my opinion, is look for the local groups that are challenging, who do need your support. If you look around at what, what issues are happening where you are locally, you will find a group, an environmental justice group, or a civil rights group that is challenging those actions and needs support locally to be in the streets and needs to know, one, that you have their back, and two, that you're going to financially support them because with the cutbacks that we've seen from the federal government, everybody is turning to nonprofits.
49:21 Speaker 05 They're turning to foundations. USAID disappearing has put a burden on Amazon Watch, for example, in Peru. We, we have indigenous allies who've been threatened because of their work against illegal activity in the Peruvian Amazon. USAID was helping keep them alive. They're getting death threats. All that money is gone. And now they're turning to NGOs, they're turning to nonprofits, they're turning to foundations. So there's an increased need to step up to fill the gap where the government was in some way supporting.
49:50 Alec Baldwin? Well, in this country, we're forever turning to NGOs to do things the government used to do.
49:54 Speaker 04 Yeah. And, and, and other civilized countries, the government does do. And, and yeah, totally true. But I would say if people want to help, I would suggest donating to Amazon Watch. We're always frontline defenders in the Amazon. The other thing I would recommend is take a look at the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, Oregon. They came to my rescue when I was under attack, you know, in this trial. Lauren Regan is their executive director. They are probably the leading group in the country, sort of protecting people who were hit with these slaps in the protest context. It's the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene, Oregon. But they operate
50:36 Speaker 04 on a national scale, and they do amazing stuff in the courtroom, and they could use more support. And I really like them. And they helped me. So it's the Civil Liberties Defense Center and Amazon Watch. This is really about us, the people, banding together to protect those of us who are on the front lines, speaking out and facing the brunt of these attacks. And, you know, we want to get this to a place where we're not just on the defensive. We take offense to really try to create the world we all deserve.
51:12 Alec Baldwin? My thanks to Paul Pasamino and Steven Donziger. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
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