S5, Ep9 | The Judge

S5 Ep 9 The Judge

[00:00:09] We left off last time with each side accusing the other of bribing Ecuadorian Judge Alberto Guerra, and we're going to get back to the end of that story today, I promise. But first, we need to talk about another judge, the American Lewis E. Kaplan, senior district court judge in the Southern District of New York. Kaplan approved Chevron's various subpoenas prior to the RICO being filed. He oversaw the RICO trial itself. And he's the judge behind Steven Danziger's current troubles, too. He's the guy who charged Donziger with first civil and then criminal contempt. Prior to his appointment to the bench, Kaplan was a lawyer. He worked at Paul Weiss, Exxon Mobil's law firm of choice, defending tobacco companies in the 70s and 80s as a judge. He has a reputation for ruling in favor of corporations. Kaplan ruled on behalf of R.J. Reynolds in a cigaret smuggling case in 2002, and he ruled in defense the accounting firm KPMG when the government went after them for creating tax shelters for the wealthy. According to Steven Danziger's attorney, Lauren Regan, Kaplan has been a friend to Chevron throughout the company's decade long pursuit of her client.

[00:01:23] Ecuador's Supreme Court validated the judgment and said, yeah, they'll use nine billion dollars. And Chevron basically gave them the finger and said, you know, pulled all their assets out of Ecuador. I was like, oh, nothing here for you to take. And so then, you know, the way the legal system works is you can go to other countries where assets exist and ask that country to assist in collecting the debt. And so Donziger and the legal team started going to European countries and Canada and other places to begin collecting on the judgment. And at that time, Chevron started going around to various states in the U.S. asking the US court to put a stop basically to those proceedings.

[00:02:15] And most states in the US showed them away and said that's that's not real. But when they got to Judge Kaplan's court in the Southern District of New York, you know, he's a former tobacco lobbyist. And so Chevron realized they had a friend in that courtroom on this, like, minor proceeding. And then while they were in that minor proceeding, it was Kaplin that said, you know, it sounds like a Rico.

[00:02:44] Kaplan has denied this. He says Chevron already made its intention to file a RICO claim known before he made these comments. Donziger and the Lago Agrio plaintiffs have accused Kaplin of bias against them on other fronts, too. Here's Donald Moncayo. You might remember him from earlier episodes. He's the guy who used to lead people on tours of the toxic pits in the Amazon. Moncayo came to New York to testify in the RICO case is.

[00:03:14] But I mean, who is could have bought at the last in the last season to give whatever he says?

[00:03:22] For me, Capone was a corporate judge, the most racist judge I've ever seen. We've heard stuff like this from quite a few Ecuadorians and their lawyers. They've told us that Kaplin didn't really understand Spanish, that he didn't grasp Ecuadorian law or the differences between Ecuadorian law and US law, and that he was just generally dismissive of the Ecuadorians. We're going to dig into whether and how that played out in the RICO trial right after this quick break. Zoe Littlepage, who represented Donziger in the Ricoh trial, said the court's preferential treatment of Chevron was obvious from the jump.

[00:04:22] Judge Kaplan likes to run a very tight ship, as many federal judges do, and he was not amused by activism. And he certainly was not amused by Stevens attempt to be both an activist and a lawyer. In fact, he appeared to be sort of insulted by lawyers who went beyond just being an advocate and actually being an activist. So remember, a lot of the underlying facts of the case was Steven and many activist groups attempts to get the word out about what was happening in the Amazon. And so for a lawyer to sort of cross those lines and attend protests and be a part of an activism movement appeared to upset and anger Judge Kaplan.

[00:05:15] Littlepage says even the logistics of the courtroom favored Chevron.

[00:05:19] [00:05:19]Judge Kaplan gave Chevron half of the room, so they had five or six rows of benches. [7.6s]

[00:05:28] [00:05:28]Then he gave the media every other seat except for one row, which seats about six or seven people. So that was all we were allowed to bring it on. Our trial team was six or seven people because they couldn't sit. He also gave Chevron a jury room for all their extra lawyers who couldn't fit in their five or six rows and all their legal assistance and all their boxes and. [26.3s]

[00:05:56] [00:05:56]In that courtroom, we had several. [3.2s]

[00:06:01] [00:06:01]Human rights nonprofit law firms had provided us with lawyers to help with briefing and getting the case ready at night, so we had four or five volunteer lawyers who were working for us. So in the mornings, we would be lined up in this very long line. We had to get there very early and it was in October, November, it was cold. So we would be all bundled up. We would be in this long line to get through security, to get into the courthouse, and we'd have our blow ups and our boxes with our briefcases. And then you would see a row of five black Lincoln Suburbans arrive with tinted windows. And out of it would come the. Senior management of Chevron There, head of litigation, their entire legal team, and they were they were ushered in through a separate entrance as VIP, so they didn't have to stand in the line with all the rest of us when they would get out and go straight into the courtroom. So we would have been in line for forty five minutes when they would arrive and go straight. [72.8s]

[00:07:27] Julio Gomez is the attorney for the Ecuadorians named as defendants in the RICO case. He says he also saw examples of this, particularly with respect to how stacked the case was in favor of Chevron, simply by virtue of Chevron having the budget to put what Gomez, Littlepage and Donziger all described as a quote unquote, army of lawyers on this case.

[00:07:50] For example, one of the things we wanted to do in our case is to have live testimony. In any usual case. You have a witness get on the stand and they give what's called a direct examination, their attorney questions. And what happened to you? What did you see? What did you observe, et cetera. And then the other side cross-examined you live. That's the way most trials are conducted in the United States, in New York, in this particular trial, New York has this practice where, well, you know, that can take too long. So what we'll do is we'll have the witness submit a written testimony and then the other side just gets up and cross-examined them based on that written testimony that they submitted. Think about what happens in a case where you are small team up against Chevron. Chevron has 30 witnesses. And a day before trial or two days before trial, you are handed 30 written testimonies with, you know, 10 to 50 exhibits each.

[00:08:48] Now, you, as the cross examining attorney, has to read all 20 or 30 of these written testimonies in a short period of time, process all of those exhibits, prepare all of your cross-examination questions and come into court and start doing one after the other after the other. That's crazy.

[00:09:09] Yeah, that's just impossible. I would have much preferred having them testify live because not only do they have to tell their story properly and some witnesses, no matter how well you prepare them, are going to screw up when they give their testimony in court. That would have benefited us. But more importantly, we would have heard the testimony in real time and had time to react to it slowly as opposed to being bombarded with all of the testimony at once and then being required to prepare to go in and cross-examine and everybody in the next week.

[00:09:45] Gomez says he actually asked Caplan to space out the testimony, have live testimony and live cross examinations, but to no avail.

[00:09:56] We made repeated appeals to Kaplin to take into account our lack of resources to develop procedures for the trial that could counteract the prejudice that these procedures would cause on the plaintiffs, on Steven Donziger and on the Ecuadorian plaintiffs. And I don't remember any instance when the court made those kinds of accommodations to us. Judge says, no, we do this all the time in New York. There's nothing unusual about doing this way. And we're going to do it this way.

[00:10:25] In this case, the mismatch of resources is something that came up a lot when we started digging into the RICO case a couple of episodes back, filmmaker Joe Berlinger said something about how we have a justice system where deep pockets prevail. Gomez said something very similar about the RICO trial.

[00:10:42] [00:10:42]What would it take to to to mount a challenge to that? Another oil company. The people don't understand the incredible, incredible inequity in our legal system to to finances, you know, if you have the money, you can write the most incredibly prepared, beautifully articulated briefs. You can hire the best investigators. You can look under every stone. You can hire the best experts with the best credentials. I mean, you can whether whether you're on the right or on the side of wrong, you can create an incredible presentation with resources. If you don't, everything is less than satisfactory. That's why. That's why, you know, when. What are the proper matchups? It's Microsoft  can only go up against Google. Apple can only go up against Samsung. Chevron can only go up against Exxon Mobil and vice versa, because that's the only way to do it right. To to meet every expert, to meet every motion. You need exactly the same resources. And unfortunately, our judicial system does not take that into account. [80.7s]

[00:12:03] That mismatch started to come into play more and more as the case wore on. It showed up in a lot of different ways, like the number and length of motions that Chevron filed.

[00:12:14] You know, you could work on this case twenty four hours a day, not sleep, not eat, not spend time with your family, not spend time working on other cases to earn a living. And you wouldn't have enough time to do everything that a thousand attorneys on the other side were doing or piling on you to do, because Chevron would file every type of motion they could at every single instance they did it. [00:12:37]And it wasn't a one or two page motion. Their motions were 30 pages long with 50 exhibits attached to them. And these would come in on a regular basis and you barely have time to read these things, much less write a persuasive, well thought out, researched opposition or response to the motion. So it was that was just it was insane. [22.3s]

[00:13:00] On top of what was happening in court, Chevron had attorneys working the case out of the courts too.

[00:13:05] Chevron plays dirty by putting pressure on pieces of the strategy that would benefit them. So, for example, they went after the Ecuadorians had hired an environmental engineering firm to do the analysis in Ecuador. And Chevron was making arguments that those analyzes were not only unreliable, they were beaten, ghostwritten by this firm. For the other experts in Ecuador, one of the things that Chevron did was to put you know, that's an environmental engineering firm. It's a business like any other business there,. The Ecuadorian plaintiffs are not their only client. They have other clients that they do work for and that's how they earn their living and that's how they pay their rent and that's how they pay their employees. Well, Chevron would contact those other clients and try to persuade them to stop using the environmental engineering firm.

[00:13:58] They would defame the firm to those other clients so that if you continued to work on the case or if you did not do Chevron's bidding and by doing Chevron's bidding, I mean switch sides.

[00:14:11] Gomez is talking about Stratis, the environmental engineering firm that worked on the Cabrera report. Now, remember, the Cabrera report is something we've heard about quite a bit. It's this report that the damages assessment was initially based on in Ecuador. Mastro says Donziger and the Ecuadorians were far too involved in what was supposed to be an independent report, and that strategy should not have been writing any part of it. Donziger says it was all perfectly legal within Ecuadorian law.

[00:14:43] In either case, Chevron went after Stratis Hard, they told the company's clients and anyone else who would listen that Stratis was part of an international conspiracy to defraud Chevron. In one case, Chevron even sent a letter to the Portland Harbor in Oregon, which had hired Stratis for a project. They wrote, quote, because of the extensive evidence of corrupt activity on the part of Stratis in furtherance of the claims in Ecuador. Chevron believes that it would be in the best interest of all the parties involved at the Portland Harbor site for the trustees to sever ties with stress. Multiple letters were sent to the Portland council, too, and Chevron posted an article and video on its website accusing Stratis of fraud. Two At one point, Stratis even countersuits Chevron for libel and slander. That complaint reads, quote, Filing suit against Stratis was not enough for Chevron. Now it has embarked on an extrajudicial campaign of malicious defamation and deliberate interference with Stratis business to tortuously destroy Stratis and the livelihood of its employees and to prevent Stratis from being able to successfully defend itself at trial against Chevron's allegations. We asked Randy Mastro, the attorney heading up the RICO case for Chevron, about this when you are the victim of a fraud.

[00:16:05] And as as an extortion scheme, as Chevron believed it was, it took.

[00:16:15] Tenacity and conviction and.

[00:16:24] Perseverance and principle to stand up to the front so that Chevron asserted every form that would listen, that this is what we believe happened here and it was wrong, and then for Chevron to prove it, I mean, I, I think that Chevron not only had every right to do that, I think it speaks volumes about. Chevron, on behalf of its shareholders and stakeholders, are doing the right thing and not being. Pressured or holding back in the face of what is believed to be a fraud and extortion scheme and not paying tribute to anyone involved in that fraud or extortion scheme.

[00:17:27] Two years after his original deposition, Stratis VP Douglas Bultmann recanted his testimony.

[00:17:39] In that recantation, Bultmann notes that he and colleague and Messitte wrote the Cobra report with no interaction with Cabrera. He also notes repeatedly that they were never directed to try to separate Petroecuador, his responsibilities from Texaco's which became chevrons, and that they were instructed by Donziger to use a contamination standard that would increase the cost of remediation. The focus is specifically on damages claims and whether there was evidence to back them up. And Beltman [00:18:09]sounds like a scientist who was asked to assess costs, but he [3.4s] never does say anything like there was no contamination. It's more about who's responsible financially for the contamination, not whether or not it exists or even whether or not Texaco had a hand in it. In one part, for example, Bultmann says, quote, I cannot say who may have responsibility for any environmental contamination in the audience. They what the extent of such contamination may be or what the appropriate damages amounts may be to remediate any such contamination.

[00:18:49] They convinced that firm or force that firm, in my opinion, to switch sides and turn against the Ecuadorian plaintiffs who were their clients, Gomez and Littlepage made this argument in court as well.

[00:19:01] But Kaplan wasn't having it. We asked Donziger about boatman's recantation, too, because he looms large as the person directing bellman's work.

[00:19:10] Douglas Feldman.

[00:19:13] That just makes me weep and hurt. Was one of our scientific experts, a wonderful man of high integrity and intelligence and skill, and Chevon just I think they just destroyed his life. I mean, they they named his company as a defendant in the RICO case.

[00:19:37] They got a law firm and they countersued Chevron for defamation and tortious interference with their business.

[00:19:45] And in the end of the day, to settle the case as between the consultancy, which was called Stratis Veltman and another scientist, their name, and Messitte and Chevron Stratis came to an agreement that required Bellmon in May to put in affidavits that contained a ton of false information, [00:20:09]affidavits clearly written by Chevron's lawyers and tried to claim that I had gotten them to endorse scientific findings that were not true. [8.9s]

[00:20:18] [00:20:18]Again, false and rejected by Ecuador's courts. But this is part of Chevron's, you know, witness extortion. [5.8s]

[00:20:25] [00:20:25]I mean, they basically threatened to destroy people unless they gave them the testimony that they wanted. [5.6s] Tellingly, Feltman never came to testify. [00:20:35]And I think the reason Chevron didn't ever bring them into court is because they knew he would have no credibility. I would cross-examine him and he would probably admit, you know, to everything I'm telling you now. [9.8s]

[00:20:45] And the sad part is, I think when Doug wrote that affidavit, you know, with all this distorted or false information, I think he thought that would be the end of his problem. But what ended up happening is right after he submitted it, his partners fired him anyway. And he hasn't been heard from since. I think he's been so I don't know what happened.

[00:21:07] And I'm scared, honestly. He's another one of Chevron's victims.

[00:21:12] And, you know, I worry about him. I think about him a lot, actually. I have no idea where he is.

[00:21:18] My co reporter on this season, Karen Savage, found Doug Baumann. He's retired now and can't talk publicly about the case because he signed various agreements with Chevron that prohibit it. He said he wished he could talk to us, but he couldn't. And he sounded pretty scared to attract any attention from Chevron. Julio Gomez, the lawyer for the Ecuadorian plaintiffs, said he also heard from lawyers at some of the firms working on the case that Chevron was calling their other clients, applying pressure to Joe Cohn, a prominent lawyer who had helped to fund the Lago Agrio litigation, was another partner who testified against Donziger.

[00:21:59] OK, so one of the things that I saw is a guy named Joseph. Yeah, yeah. I testified against you, said you obtained millions of dollars in litigation funding and didn't keep him in the loop, basically, and misrepresented what was going on. Tell us more about that.

[00:22:17] Joe Cohn is a prominent lawyer in Philly. His law firm funded most of the case state. They funded my work on the case for the most part.

[00:22:28] We worked well together. He's a good, solid lawyer. When Chevron started to make these allegations that that the Cabrera report was done wrongly or fraudulently and then they filed a RICO case, Joe got extremely nervous. I think he was petrified that the RICO litigation would name him as a defendant.

[00:22:54] And he would be that time they were suing us for 60 billion dollars, largest potential liability in U.S. history. And I think he thought his life was going to be destroyed and he was going to be bankrupted and his firm was going to be closed down by a liability that might come out of this fake RICO case.

[00:23:12] So I think out of that fear, Joe started to cooperate with Chevron. I mean, it's really no different in my mind than what a lot of people did to get out from under the pressure that Chevron and Judge Cappo are putting on that other law firms who are working with us did this as well, but many others stayed in there.

[00:23:31] I mean, I don't want people to think that people just abandon the case.

[00:23:35] But there were certain individuals, Joe Cohn among them, who basically abandoned their duties to the case and to the people of Ecuador into their own integrity, in my view, to, you know, get Chevron off their back.

[00:23:52] The people who could have easily abandoned Donziger and didn't were the Ecuadorians. The U.S. courts really had no jurisdiction over them. That's true in general. But in this case in particular, keep in mind that Chevron had argued itself about a decade ago that the New York courts had no jurisdiction over what had happened in Ecuador. Here's There, attorney, Julio Gomez, again, looking back to take the position.

[00:24:19] That this case cannot return to New York at all and that the defendant, the Ecuadorian plaintiffs, should simply default entirely and not do absolutely anything and completely protest the return of this case to New York. If I had it to do over again, that's probably the card that I would play. It would have been better for the Ecuadorian plaintiffs to be able to say in other countries, as a matter of principle, we should not have been required to present any evidence in New York after New York had already told us to go home and to bring us back to do anything is completely illegitimate and completely wrong, and we will not participate in it. I think if I had it to do over, I would advise my client to do that, to completely protest the trial and and that's it. And unfortunately, Steven didn't have that option because Steven lives in New York and he's subject to the jurisdiction of the court and he has to defend the case. But my client did have that option and that was not a card we chose to play.

[00:25:36] According to Danziger's lawyer in the RICO case, the Littlepage judge, Kaplan focused on two key issues in the case, the Cabrero report, and the allegation that the judgment itself had been ghostwritten.

[00:25:50] It was very clear that Judge Kaplan was really focused on bribery. And so a lot of a lot of the stuff that had happened in the underlying case and a lot of the disquiet that the tribesmen had about the way Chevron had handled the case and some of the sort of dirty tricks Chevron had played in Ecuador with the underlying case was not allowed to enter into evidence. We were not allowed to explore any of those prior issues. And Judge Kaplan's ruling was it was just wasn't relevant. He was really focused on some very specific incidents, and that's all he wanted to talk about. And he would not allow any evidence or anything else. The other thing that Judge Kaplan was really sort of focused on was had the plaintiff's team crossed the line with that court expert and then sort of to interfering, helped him actually create his report, helped him put together exhibits to his report, none of which is prohibited under Ecuador.

[00:26:50] We've covered the Kabera report at length, but the bribery little pages referring to There, brings us back to the guera story. We heard last time from Chevron's attorney, Randy Mastro, that Gerra had been part of the conspiracy with Donziger and the Ecuadorians and then flipped on the Lago Agrio plaintiffs testifying against them. Here's Mastro again.

[00:27:14] And there were actually multiple witnesses in Ecuador and in the United States who have been working with the plaintiffs team who flipped during the case.

[00:27:25] I'm a former federal prosecutor and I don't use that term lightly. They were part of the conspiracy or they refused to be a part of the conspiracy.

[00:27:36] And they later gave testimony against Donziger and his allies about the conspiracy that they were perpetrating. Alberto Carrera wasn't the only one. And he gave very powerful testimony at the trial. And he ended his testimony by saying, I know I did bad things in words or substance. He said, I know I did bad things. I regret that I did bad things, but I'm telling the truth today.

[00:28:12] But Gary's testimony changed in a couple of instances and the story took some wild turns. We asked Littlepage to walk us through it.

[00:28:20] Well, it was shocking. We knew coming in that Chevron had gone and recruited and paid cash in a duffle bag to a judge who had been essentially disbarred in Ecuador for corruption and fraud. And as an American lawyer, I just assumed that that sort of what sounded like a story, like a movie plot would be completely laughed out of an American courtroom, that we would have a key witness in a trial be someone that Chevron had paid close to a million dollars to in either money or compensation, or they bought him a Harrell's. They gave him a job. They bought him cars. They paid his life for him and his family to move out of Ecuador. They paid for the immigration lawyer to bring him here. They. And it all started with Chevron showing up to a sketchy meeting with this former disbarred judge with a duffel bag full of cash, and the idea that what this judge would say would hold any weight in an American courtroom was laughable. When I first got involved, I mean, I thought this is this is a joke, right? I mean, we are not allowed to play to pay for witnesses. That's the rules. You cannot be a fact witness just for this reason, because we're not supposed to influence the facts of a case. And yet Chevron had paid a fact witness and not just paid them fifteen thousand dollars in a duffle bag the first time they met, but then paid them another ten thousand and then would give him bonuses of cash if he came forward with more and more. Suppose at Fox that he had just remembered he would get a bonus for everything he had just remembered. So that was an incredible concept.

[00:30:20] Gomez was also blown away by this, given what Garrel was allowed to testify about and given the fact that the court chose to believe some aspects of his testimony and disregard other aspects of his testimony. I don't know that another witness would have made the difference if the court's willing to cherry pick testimony like that and the court had reasons to do it and the court has every prerogative to do it. Judges do that all the time. What Judge Kaplan did by deciding to believe some of Garo, some of what was said and what some of what Garrett did not happens all the time in court. I particularly don't think it should have happened here, given that he was getting paid twelve thousand dollars a month. But that's my opinion.

[00:31:09] Littlepage says it was clear from investigations of Garah and his later testimony that he was regularly adding more supposed evidence to his story to get more money out of Chevron, transcripts of his testimony back this up the first time he met with Chevron.

[00:31:30] Judge Guera had, first of all, with every conversation with Chevron, it was always about how much money Gerra could get, always. So every conversation and they were recording these conversations, we were actually able to see them. You could see in his conversations that he was every single time it was how much how much am I going to get? But just listen to the evolution of the story. I mean, the first time he met, the first time he sort of concocted the story of bribery. He he said very specific facts. He said he met Judge Sambrano at the Quito airport because Judge Kara lived in Quito, not in the frontier, not where the actual case was happening. So he said Sambrano had been at the Quito airport. He went to the Heathrow Airport. Judge Sombrotto handed him the draft verdict on a flash drive and his understanding was this flash drive was coming from the plaintiffs lawyers, from Steven Donziger and the other Ecuadorian lawyers. He took that flash drive home to his house in Quito, where he put it into his home computer. He never spoke to Judge Sambrano at all that whole weekend, and he retyped the verdict. So it would sound like an Ecuadorian judge had written it. He put it back on the jump drive. He went back to the airport and he handed it to Judge Sombrotto. OK, so a very specific recollection. Well, several events said, great, we'll pay you to come and buy your 10 year old computer from your house and we will find the draft verdict on There, because you worked on it and you saved it back to this jump drive. And it's going to be there and that's going to be our proof. And of course, he sold off his multi year old computer to them and they put a forensic team on it. And there was absolutely no evidence of the verdict being on judge home computer none. So then they bought from him every jump drive he could find. Every jump drive in his house, and they found no evidence of the verdict. So when they came back to him and said, you know, look, this is kind of disappointing, we don't have any support for what you've been telling us, he said, oh, no. Now I remember I went by bus all the way to LaGuardia. I actually now remember I got on a bus and I drove hour after hour after hour all the way to like Aughrim. When I got there, I went to judge some Prado's apartment and I stayed with him over the weekend. Now, the first story said he never saw Brown over the weekend here. Now he's staying at Jackson Brownnose House. He worked on it on a laptop the judge Sambrano gave him that he believed belonged to one of the Ecuadorian plaintiffs lawyers. And that's why he couldn't produce it, because it wasn't his belonged to someone else. He didn't put it on jump drive. He worked on it on the computer. He left it on the computer. He had dinner together with Judge Sambrano in the evenings. And that's how the verdict came about.

[00:34:34] Well, I mean, those stories are so completely different that that witness, under any rule of law would have zero credibility. I mean, just zero credibility. And even more amazing, there had been an article in the Ketel newspaper about a judge being busted for having a plaintiff's lawyer give him a proposed verdict on a jump drive that he then put into his computer, changed a couple of the words and printed it and issued it as his own. And the jump drive had been found.

[00:35:12] So here we have a man that we know about in the newspaper about verdicts on jump drives, came to Chevron with a story about working on this verdict on a jump drive that Judge Sambrano gave him at the airport in Quito. And when he could support none of that, he made up a whole new story about traveling by bus across the country into the frontier, to La Guardia to live adjudge some brownnose house while he typed up this verdict on a different computer completely. So it was so comical. I mean, when I first got into the case, Retreatment had asked me if I would handle Judge Guera the cross-examination of Judge Garah and that sort of whole timeline. And when I started reading it and I saw Chevron was recording their conversations with Judge Guiora, and he would say things like, how much gold do you have?

[00:36:07] For me, the best story brings the best gold, just incredible things on these tapes.

[00:36:13] And I thought, OK, this is a joke, right? I mean, no American court would allow this person to even come testify. I mean, they are the epitome of perjuring witness. And then the amount of money that had been paid to this fact witness was so absurd. And yet none of that counted.

[00:36:41] It's true, ultimately, none of it counted. Judge Kaplan ruled against Donziger and the Ecuadoreans throughout the case and eventually did find them guilty of fraud. His ruling barred them from collecting the Ecuadorian judgment in the U.S.. That verdict came down in 2014, but that wasn't the end of this story either.

[00:37:05] Next time on Drilled and Carmen gave kind of like a warning about what they had gone through, you know, that it's likely to come to pass once again now that this RICO precedent has been set. And indeed, that's what happened. Energy transfer partners put that case against Greenpeace, against Stand Earth, against several water protectors. And we can see so many, many cases in which the law has morphed from its original intention of targeting the mafia and white collar criminals to silencing protest, trying to quell particular forms of political organizing.

[00:37:49] Drilled is an original production of the Critical Frequency podcast network.

[00:37:54] The show was created, reported and written by me. Amy Westervelt, my co reporter. This season is Karen Savage. Our editor is Julia Richi. The show's editorial consultant is Rekha Murthy Mixing and Mastering by Mark Bush. Original Score by B. Beamon. Fact Checking by Wootten Yahn. Our artwork for this season was done by these super talented Matt Flemyng.

[00:38:21] Special thanks to Trevor Gowan and Emily Gert's If you are a Patreon subscriber. Thank you. Your money is helping to make this season. And as a special thank you to Patreon members, we're providing a variety of benefits, including bonus content and early access to episodes in this season. If that sounds appealing to you or you just want to support our work, go over to on dotcom, slash Drilled and sign up. We also have some merch associated with that. You can find stories, documents and photos related to this season on our website at Drilled. News dot com. That's it for this time. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.