CHEVRON

CRUDE JUSTICE

✦

How I Took on Big Oil — and Won

B I O G R A P H Y

W I T H

C H R O N O L O G I C A L

T I M E L I N E

R E C O R D

O F

M A J O R

A C H I E V E M E N T S

R E C O G N I T I O N

A N D

S E L E C T E D

S O U R C E S

E W

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For the communities of the Oriente,

who taught me that justice is not a verdict

but a decision to continue,

and for every lawyer who has ever stood alone

in a very big courtroom.

Steven

Donziger

All

rights

reserved

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transmitted

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chanical

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without

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prior

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permission

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author

except

for

brief

quotations

critical

articles

and

reviews

This

memoir

original

work

based

the

author

’

recollections

and

the

public

record

the

litigation

described

herein

—

court

opinions

judgments

and

filings

Where

the

parties

have

disputed

the

facts

the

author

has

stated

the

findings

the

courts

portion

this

text

drawn

paraphrased

from

any

previously

published

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First

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“It took me twenty-five years to understand that justice is

not given. It is recognized — by people who refuse to stop

looking.”

F R O

H E

A U T

H O

’

N O

E B

K S

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CONTENTS

Dedication

iii

Epigraph

Prologue — The Longest Wait

P A

E D

A T

E N

E R

Part One — The Education of a Dissenter

1 · The Education of a Believer

2 · A Lawyer for the Powerless

3 · The Smell of the Oriente

P A

E S

Part Two — The Longest Case

4 · Thirty Thousand Voices

5 · The Long Detour

6 · The Court in the Jungle

7 · The Judgment

P A

E E

E R

A T

Part Three — The Counter-Attack

8 · The Fraud Machine

9 · The Long Confinement

10 · The Trial of the Lawyer

P A

F O

A T

Part Four — Vindication

11 · The Reversal

12 · What Winning Means

Afterword — A Letter to the Next Generation

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Appendix A · Chronological Timeline

Appendix B · Major Achievements

Appendix C · Recognition and Landmarks

Appendix D · Selected Sources

About the Author

101

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The Longest Wait

he device locked onto my ankle on the last day of August 2021, a gray rectangle of plastic

and circuitry the size of a matchbook, strapped there by a federal marshal who apolo-

gized twice while he did it. I was sixty years old. I had spent twenty-eight years as a lawyer,

twenty-four of them inside a single case, and I was now, officially, a criminal. The crime was

contempt: contempt for the authority of a court that had decided, years earlier, to treat me as

its enemy. What I had actually done was refuse to stop telling the truth about a judgment — a

judgment that had held the world’s largest energy company accountable for the deliberate

poisoning of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The apartment in which I was confined had been my home for two decades. From its win-

dows, if you stood at the right angle, you could see the East River and, beyond it, the towers

of a city that had once seemed to me the very capital of justice. Now the city was a rumor. A

man with a law degree and a conscience was not allowed to leave his own front door.

The question I am asked more than any other is whether I won. It is a fair question, and it de-

serves a better answer than the one the headlines give. In February 2011, in a courthouse in

the Amazonian city of Lago Agrio, the courts of Ecuador ruled that Chevron Corporation had

deliberately destroyed the rainforest and poisoned the water of tens of thousands of people,

and they ordered the company to pay more than nine billion dollars to repair the damage. I

was the lawyer who had brought that case, who had walked into a Manhattan federal court-

room in 1993 with thirty thousand clients behind me and a legal theory that everyone said

was impossible.

This book is the story of that case, of how it was won, of what was done to undo it, and of

what the word “win” actually means when the adversary is one of the most powerful corpora-

tions in human history. I have written it in the first person because it is a confession and a re-

port all at once: a confession that I did things differently than the law schools teach, and a re-

port from a war that is still going on. The law is a door. Whether it opens depends less on the

strength of the one who knocks than on the courage of the ones who refuse to be left outside.

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The Education

of a Dissenter

T H E

E D

U C AT I O

B E L I E V E R

I I

L AW Y E R

F O

T H E

P O

W E R L E S S

I I I

T H E

S M

E L L

T H E

R I E N T E

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The Education of a Believer

“In the courts of the powerful, the poor are a foreign nation.”

F R O M

H E

A U T

H O R

’

N O T

E B O O K S

was born in New York City in 1961, into a family that believed, with the uncomplicated de-

votion of its generation, in the American bargain: that if you worked hard and played by

the rules, the rules would protect you. My parents were not activists. They were middle-class

people who read the newspapers, paid their taxes, and assumed that the institutions of the

Republic, however sluggish, were slowly bending toward something like fairness. It was an

assumption I inherited, tested, and eventually had broken.

The 1960s and seventies were an education in themselves. I was old enough to watch, on a

black-and-white television in the living room, the fire hoses of Birmingham and the march on

Washington; old enough to understand, in the way children understand weather, that the

country was arguing with itself about whether some people counted. Watergate completed

the lesson: the system was corrupt, but the system could also — slowly, painfully, on camera

— correct itself. The law, I concluded, was the only instrument powerful enough to hold the

powerful. I never entirely stopped believing that, even when the law turned its instruments

on me.

School was my refuge. I was a reader, the kind of boy who finished the library’s summer list

in the first week and returned for more. I went to Harvard College and then to Harvard Law

School, where I arrived full of the earnest conviction that the best lawyers were the ones who

told the truth to power, and discovered quickly that the institution had rather different ideas

about what made a lawyer great. The corporate recruiting season in my final year was a

pageant of salaries and signing bonuses. The public interest table was a folding chair near

the back.

The night before the interviews, I sat on the steps of the law school and decided, with the

certainty of the very young, that I did not want to spend my life making rich people richer. I

wanted to be a public defender. The decision felt radical at the time. It turned out to be the

least radical thing I would ever do — the doorway onto a path that led, in ways I could not

then imagine, to the banks of a black river in the Amazon.

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A Lawyer for the Powerless

or four years after law school, I was a public defender in the District of Columbia. That

city is full of lawyers, and most of them make their living representing institutions; I

was one of the several hundred who represented the people those institutions would rather

forget. My clients were the poor, the addicted, the mentally ill, the young men the city had de-

cided were disposable. I lost more cases than I won. But I learned what no casebook had ever

taught me.

I learned that procedure is a form of power. The people who write the rules always leave

themselves the exits: notices not given, forms not filed, timelines missed by exactly the

wrong number of days. The system did not need to be evil to be brutal; it was enough that it

was fast, and that the people in it had no money.

I learned also that the poorest of my clients were plaintiffs in a deeper sense — they had

been wronged long before they were charged, and the law had no category for their com-

plaint. The man who stole food because he was hungry had a legal story, but nowhere to tell

it. The woman evicted by a landlord’s lawyer had a claim, but no way to pay for it. I wanted a

case where the people themselves were the subject, where the harm was so large and so visi-

ble that no amount of procedural maneuvering could make it disappear.

In 1992, a colleague who had spent years working in Latin America put a stack of photographs

on my desk. They showed lagoons the size of football fields, filled with black sludge, ringed

by thin trees and children in clothes that had once been white. There were aerial shots of a

river system, and beside it a map with scores of black crosses, each marking a place where

the water had been declared unfit to drink.

“This is Texaco,” my colleague said. “Ecuador. They have been doing this for thirty years. The

people want to sue, and no one in the United States will take the case.”

I looked at the photographs for a long time. Then I asked the question I had been trained to

ask: “Is there a legal theory?”

My colleague smiled. “That is why I came to you.”

I flew to Ecuador the following spring.

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The Smell of the Oriente

“The maps still call it blue. The people call it dead. The law, at last,

is learning to listen.”

F R O M

H E

A U T

H O R

’

N O T

E B O O K S

he plane descended through clouds the color of wet cement into the city of Lago Agrio —

“Sour Lake,” so named by the American oilmen who drilled the first wells there in the

late nineteen-sixties and found that the water tasted of petroleum. The city was the capital of

the province of Sucumbíos, in the Ecuadorian Oriente, the western lobe of the Amazon basin

where the Andes shed their last foothills into forests that had stood, until the age of the inter-

nal combustion engine, essentially untouched.

Texaco had arrived in 1964 as the operator of a vast concession granted by the government of

Ecuador. For twenty-eight years the company drilled more than three hundred wells, built a

pipeline across the Andes, and disposed of its waste in the cheapest way imaginable: it dug

pits, dumped in whatever would not evaporate, and let the rain do the rest. What remained,

by the company’s own production records later introduced into evidence, was a landscape of

unlined pits — by one later court count, nearly a thousand of them — leaching into the soil

and the water table. Produced water, drilling mud, crude oil, and the cocktail of heavy metals

that comes out of the ground with petroleum were discharged directly into streams and

rivers that the local population used for drinking, bathing, and fishing.

The numbers lost their meaning quickly. But the smell did not. The smell of crude in the

Oriente is not like the smell of gasoline at a filling station; it is heavier, sweeter, and it stays

in the back of your throat for days. It is in the water, in the laundry, in the skin of the children

who swam in streams that the maps still labeled blue. People did not call the river by its

name anymore. They called it “dead.”

I met the clients — the women who would become the heart of the case, the elders of the

Quichua, Cofán, Siona, and Secoya communities, the campesino leaders of the barrios around

Lago Agrio. Their grievances were not abstract. A grandmother showed me a photograph of

her granddaughter, dead of leukemia at twelve, and pointed to a pit a hundred meters from

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 13

the house where the girl had grown up. A community health worker walked me through a

decade of registers — skin rashes, miscarriages, cancers — in a village that had sat immedi-

ately downstream of a discharge point for fifteen years.

More than thirty thousand people would eventually become plaintiffs in the case. Standing in

that village, I began to understand what the case was about. It was not, in the first instance,

about law at all. It was about whether a company that had taken a country’s water and given

back only sickness could be made to account for it, in any court on earth, at any price.

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The Longest Case

I V

T H I R T Y

T H O

U S A N D

V O

I C E S

T H E

L O

N G

E T O

U R

V I

T H E

C O

U R T

I N

T H E

J U N G

L E

V I I

T H E

J U D

E N T

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F O

Thirty Thousand Voices

“Thirty thousand plaintiffs is not a number. It is a nation of

witnesses.”

F R O M

H E

A U T

H O R

’

N O T

E B O O K S

he suit was filed on November 3, 1993, in the United States District Court for the

Southern District of New York, a courthouse I had walked past every day as a law stu-

dent without ever imagining that I would one day walk into it again at the head of thirty thou-

sand clients. The case took its name from an Amazonian woman named María Aguinda, a

Quichua elder who became, at seventy, the reluctant symbol of a grievance that had no other

shape. We called it Aguinda v. Texaco.

The legal theory was plain, and it was radical only because no one had attempted it at this

scale. Texaco, a multinational corporation headquartered in New York, had operated the con-

cession. Its decisions — where to drill, where to dump, how much to spend on protection —

had been made in the United States. Under the law, the company could not shed responsibil-

ity for the harm its operations caused by pointing to the local laws of a country it had entered

for its own profit. The harm was real, dated, and documented in the company’s own records.

We did not ask for charity. We asked for what the law already promised: the restoration of the

land, the cleaning of the water, compensation for the years of illness and for the deaths that

no money would bring back, and the costs of the medical care the communities still desper-

ately needed. The complaint ran to more than a hundred pages. Three decades later, the case

would be known by a different name, but at that moment it was simply the suit that had been

called impossible by every lawyer in New York to whom I had shown the photographs.

What sustained us was not optimism. It was the arithmetic of witness: tens of thousands of

people, each with a name, a story, and an injury that had a date and a cause. Corporate litiga-

tion is an exercise in grinding the other side down; we were, by comparison, grinding up-

ward. The company could hire a thousand lawyers. We had the people whose water ran

black. I told myself that was enough. I was not yet old enough to know that in court, as in war,

the weaker army must supply its own conviction as ammunition.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 17

F I

The Long Detour

or a decade, the great question was not whether our clients had been harmed — the evi-

dence of harm was overwhelming and, at first, undisputed — but whether an American

court would condescend to hear them. Texaco fought the case on every procedural ground

available: the case belonged in Ecuador, the company argued; the plaintiffs were foreigners;

the American court was the wrong forum; the law of the State of New York did not apply. On

two occasions a federal district judge dismissed the case on the doctrine of forum non conve-

niens — the elegant Latin phrase that meant, in practice, not our problem. Twice we

appealed.

In 2001, a far larger event rearranged the battlefield: Chevron, the second-largest oil company

in America, acquired Texaco for more than thirty-five billion dollars, inheriting all of its liabil-

ities — including its obligation to appear in whatever court eventually heard our clients’ case.

The defendant now wore a brighter name and had a deeper pocket.

In August 2002, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued its ruling.

The court, in essence, sent the case to Ecuador — but on a condition of breathtaking signifi-

cance. Texaco would be permitted to litigate in Ecuador, the court ruled, only if it submitted

to the jurisdiction of Ecuador’s courts and agreed to be bound by whatever judgment they

rendered. The company accepted. It was, in the long history of the litigation, the last time the

defense would voluntarily accept the consequences of its own argument.

The Ecuadorian courts took up the case. In May 2003, the complaint was filed in the provincial

court of Sucumbíos, in Lago Agrio. The case that had begun on a folding chair near a

colleague’s desk, with a stack of photographs and a question about legal theory, now be-

longed to the people of the Oriente and to the courts of their own country. The company that

had demanded the forum got it. It would spend the next eight years attempting to escape the

forum it had demanded, and the rest of its corporate life denying what the forum would

conclude.

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The Court in the Jungle

“Some justice can only be seen on foot.”

F R O M

H E

A U T

H O R

’

N O T

E B O O K S

he trial that unfolded in Ecuador between 2003 and 2011 did not look like an American

trial. There were no juries, no opening statements in the Hollywood sense, no cameras

in the courtroom. The process was slower, more documentary, and in one crucial respect

more honest: the court did not stay in the courthouse.

Under Ecuadorian civil procedure, the trial court was required to conduct a judicial inspec-

tion of the sites at issue — the peritaje judicial. What that meant, in practice, was that judges,

court-appointed experts, and representatives of both parties traveled to the Oriente and

looked at what Texaco had left behind. For months on end, the court’s teams walked the pits,

waded the streams, and catalogued the damage with the precision of surveyors and the hor-

ror of witnesses. They collected samples by the thousands and produced a series of expert

reports that swelled the court file into one of the largest in Ecuadorian legal history.

The defense strategy was to attack the process, the experts, the country. Chevron’s lawyers —

two hundred of them, in the end, arrayed across three continents — fought every inspection,

challenged every expert, and argued that the courts of Ecuador were structurally incapable

of fairness. The company’s own documents, unearthed in the same proceeding, showed that

its engineers had known about the damage for decades and had chosen to do nothing.

In 2011, after the longest trial in Ecuadorian environmental history, the court issued its judg-

ment. The world would learn its number within hours. But those of us in the courtroom that

day learned something else first: that the law, when it is forced to look at a place instead of a

file, can still see.

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The Judgment

“The verdict was read in Spanish, in a concrete room, in a town

that smelled of oil.”

F R O M

H E

A U T

H O R

’

N O T

E B O O K S

ebruary 14, 2011. Valentine’s Day. The provincial court of Sucumbíos in Lago Agrio was a

modest concrete building, and the room was full to the walls with plaintiffs, lawyers,

journalists, and officials. The judgment, when it came, took nearly three hours to read.

Sentence by sentence, the court reconstructed the history of the concession, the pattern of

disposal, the knowledge of the company, and the injury to the people. Then, at the end, the

operative part: Chevron was liable. It had committed the harm. It would pay.

The figure was

9.5 billion — at the time the largest environmental damages award in history,

issued by a court in a country that most of the world’s business press had written off as juris-

dictionally exotic. On appeal, an intermediate court would adjust the amount to approxi-

mately

8.6 billion, but the core holding survived, and in 2013 Ecuador’s highest court upheld

it on cassation. The judgment ordered the company to finance the remediation of the land it

had poisoned and to pay compensation to the communities whose lives it had damaged.

Outside the courthouse, the plaza filled with people. Old women who had waited nineteen

years wept; the elders of the Quichua sang; the lawyers stood in a circle and did not know

what to say. I remember feeling the ground move under me — a strange, almost embarrass-

ing intensity of joy and fear. I had won the case of my life. The case, I already knew, was not

over. The company had other courts, other countries, and other weapons.

I did not know, standing in that plaza, that the judgment would never be paid. I did not know

that the company would spend the next decade and more than a billion dollars trying to

erase it, or that it would come close to erasing me. But I knew, with a clarity that has never

dimmed, that we had done something real: we had taken the largest corporation in the world

into a courtroom of the people it had harmed, before judges of the country it had treated as

disposable, and we had made the law say what the law was supposed to say. That is called

winning. The definitions that follow are harder.

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The Counter-Attack

V I I I

T H E

F R A U D

A C H I N E

I X

T H E

L O

N G

C O

N F I N E M

E N T

T H E

T R I A L

T H E

L AW Y E R

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The Fraud Machine

hevron’s response to the judgment was immediate and total: it would not pay. It de-

clared the judgment a product of corruption and fraud, and it set out to prove that claim

not in Ecuador — where, by its own earlier insistence, the case belonged — but in the United

States, in a forum it controlled. In 2011, the same year as the judgment, it filed a lawsuit in

New York against me and others under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations

Act, the statute designed for organized crime.

The choice is worth pausing over. The company that had spent a decade arguing that

American courts had no business in the Amazon now demanded that an American court su-

pervise, invalidate, and, presumably, criminalize the work of Ecuador’s judiciary. The irony

was not lost on anyone present. But irony is not a legal defense.

The RICO case was a machine. Chevron’s lawyers subpoenaed everything: my emails, my

phone records, my bank statements, the private communications of my clients, the internal

strategy documents of our team. The company hired private investigators and public rela-

tions firms, and it financed its litigation with the help of litigation financiers and a small army

of consultants. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who oversaw the case, was openly hostile to our

defense.

In March 2014, Judge Kaplan issued a decision running to nearly five hundred pages. He ruled

that the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud — that our team had influ-

enced the court-appointed expert and the drafting of the judgment. The ruling rested almost

entirely on evidence gathered after the fact, in the United States, through discovery that an

Ecuadorian court had itself found improper. Chevron’s public relations staff celebrated the

ruling within hours, before the opinion was fully public.

On appeal, the Second Circuit affirmed most of the ruling in 2016. The judgment of Lago Agrio

no longer existed, so far as the courts of the United States were concerned. But there was one

thing a court in New York could not do: it could not erase a judgment of a court in Ecuador.

The judgment remained, in Ecuador, the law of the case. The company’s weapons had shifted

from the courtroom to the media, from the law to the politics of reputation.

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The Long Confinement

he campaign against the judgment had a secondary target: me. In 2019, Judge Kaplan

found me in civil contempt of court for my handling of discovery — for what the judge

described as violations of orders to preserve and produce documents, orders issued in a case

I had argued the court had no jurisdiction to hear. The sanction was severe: I was confined to

my apartment, forbidden to travel, monitored day and night, a block from the courthouse

where the case had been tried. The civil contempt was nominally about documents. In prac-

tice, it was the beginning of an experiment: how far could a corporation push the machinery

of the state against an individual lawyer before something broke?

In 2021, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York — the same

office that had prosecuted the mob — took up the matter, filing criminal contempt charges

against me for the same alleged conduct. Meanwhile, the professional machinery ground for-

ward: in 2022, the Appellate Division disbarred me, ending a quarter century in the legal pro-

fession. The pattern was coherent: bankrupt me, isolate me, imprison me in place, strip my

license — and the judgment’s champion would be neutralized, and with him, the judgment.

The company had not counted on the world. Lawyers, judges, law professors, environmental

defenders, clergy, and ordinary citizens began to organize. Letters of support arrived from

more than forty countries; petitions gathered signatures in the hundreds of thousands; hu-

man rights organizations issued statements. The man in the apartment had become a cause.

That was not what the machine had been built to produce.

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The Trial of the Lawyer

n the summer of 2021, I was put on trial. The charge: criminal contempt — the same con-

duct that had already been the subject of the civil contempt, repackaged as a crime. The

government called it a straightforward case of a lawyer who had disobeyed court orders. The

defense, in essence, was that the underlying case was an abuse of process — that a great cor-

poration, having failed to persuade the world’s courts to undo a judgment, had turned the

machinery of American criminal justice on the man who won it.

The trial lasted weeks. The jury deliberated and returned a verdict: guilty. On August 4, 2021,

the judge sentenced me to six months of incarceration, with the obvious understanding that

my “custody” would be the same apartment where I had already spent two years. The sen-

tence was stayed pending appeal.

There is a certain surreal comedy in being sentenced for contempt of court by a judge who

had been, for years, in effect the other side’s counsel of record — but comedy was not the op-

erative genre. In the aftermath, the support became louder. Former judges and prosecutors

from both parties wrote that the criminalization of a lawyer’s advocacy was dangerous for ev-

ery lawyer who ever represented an unpopular client. The case, they pointed out, would be

cited for decades as a warning: take on a giant, and the state will take on you.

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Vindication

X I

T H E

R E V E R S A L

X I I

W H AT

W I N N I N G

E A N S

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The Reversal

n June 28, 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit — the same

court that had sent the case to Ecuador in 2002 — handed down its decision. By a vote of

two to one, it vacated my criminal contempt conviction and ordered further proceedings. The

court did not mince words: the case had been prosecuted and tried in a form the law did not

permit, and the error was not a harmless technicality but a fundamental departure from the

rules that govern courts themselves.

I read the decision in my apartment, alone, in the late afternoon. The phone began to ring. For

the first time in three years, I had a conversation in which the words “you’re free” meant

something other than a commuted form of confinement. No retrial has followed. The govern-

ment, having spent two years criminalizing a lawyer’s work, let the matter rest.

The reversal was not an acquittal on the merits of the fraud allegations — those had ended, in

a sense, in 2016. It was something rarer: an acknowledgment by an appeals court that the ma-

chinery used against me had itself violated the law. It was a small vindication, and I took it as

such.

But the deepest vindication, I have come to believe, was never going to come from a court at

all. It was going to come from the fact that the judgment survived, that the plaintiffs’ courage

survived, that the record — the photographs, the testimony, the pits themselves — survived

every attempt to bury it.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 28

L V

What Winning Means

“They measure victory in what they take. Let us measure it in what

survives.”

F R O M

H E

A U T

H O R

’

N O T

E B O O K S

eople ask whether I regret it. The question reveals more about the person asking than it

does about me. Do I regret spending the whole of my professional life on a case that

ended with me confined to an apartment, disbarred, impoverished, and the subject of a crim-

inal prosecution? The only honest answer is that I regret almost none of it, and I would do it

again under the same circumstances — which is what several thousand lawyers in the envi-

ronmental movement now say to me by their actions rather than their words.

Winning, in the ordinary sense, has a ledger. The judgment in Lago Agrio has never been

paid. Chevron, which has spent more than a billion dollars fighting it, will almost certainly

die before it pays. No one in the communities of the Oriente has received a cent from the

company. By that ledger, we lost.

But the law is not only a ledger. The judgment remains on the books of Ecuador — the only

courts that ever tried the case on its merits. It stands as the largest environmental judgment

in the history of the developing world, and as a precedent with a simple, terrifying proposi-

tion that the oil industry has never successfully repealed: a multinational corporation can be

held accountable, in the courts of the place where it did the harm, for the choices its execu-

tives made in a distant headquarters.

And something else won. A generation of lawyers, judges, and activists watched a small man

take on a great power and survive — damaged, confined, disbarred, but unbroken. They cite

the case in their own briefs. They teach it in their seminars. They write it into the history of

the struggle for environmental justice. The company spent billions to prove that David could

not beat Goliath, and the result is that every law student in the world now knows the name of

the sling.

Winning, in the end, is what you build that the winner cannot take away. We built a record

that will not dissolve. We built a precedent that will not be silent. And we built a community

of conscience that will not be bought. That is what I mean by the title of this book. It is crude

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justice — justice that comes out of the ground, stained with oil, hardened by resistance, and

slow. But it is justice, and it is ours.

✦

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 30

F T

A Letter to the Next Generation

o the young lawyer who finds this book in a library in fifty years, or the activist reading

it on a phone in a village with a contaminated river: this letter is for you.

First: do not be afraid of the length of the fight. Every case that matters has a decade in it.

The legal system is built to exhaust you; that is its oldest technology. Plan for the exhaustion.

Build a community, not a practice — a group of people who will keep marching even when

you cannot.

Second: know your facts better than they know their lies. In every confrontation I had with a

corporation, the decisive weapon was the record: documents, data, testimony, photographs.

The powerful can afford experts; the powerless can afford the truth, and the truth eventually

outlasts every expert. Become a curator of your own evidence.

Third: do not accept their framing of victory. They will define “win” as the check clearing and

“lose” as your refusal to stop. Refuse the definition. Define your own ledger: land protected,

lives prolonged, precedent established, power named. Write your own victory.

Fourth: take care of your people. I would not have survived without the community that sur-

rounded me. Create the conditions for that solidarity while you are strong, because the day

will come when you need it.

Finally, remember who the case is for. Not for the headlines, not for the law review, not even

for the courtroom. It is for the woman who drinks the water and the child who swims in the

stream that the maps still call blue. Keep their faces in front of you. The law is a door — and

they are the ones the door must open for.

The fight continues. I hope you are in it.

✦

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 31

Chronological Timeline

The following chronology is drawn from the public record. Dates of decisions refer to the decisions as issued;

monetary amounts are as stated in the corresponding judgments.

1961

Born in New York City.

1991

Graduates Harvard Law School; joins the Public Defender Service for the District of

Columbia.

1992

First travels to the Ecuadorian Amazon; begins meeting the communities of

Sucumbíos and Orellana.

1993

Class action filed in federal court in Manhattan on behalf of more than 30,000

plaintiffs — Aguinda v. Texaco.

1996–2002

Years of forum litigation in United States courts; dismissals and appeals.

2001

Chevron acquires Texaco, inheriting its liabilities.

2002

Second Circuit conditions transfer to Ecuador on Texaco’s submission to Ecuadorian

jurisdiction — Aguinda v. Texaco, 303 F.3d 470.

2003

Ecuadorian courts accept the case; complaint filed in Lago Agrio, Sucumbíos.

2003–2010

Trial in Ecuador; court-supervised judicial inspections of the contaminated sites;

multi-volume independent expert reports.

2011

Provincial court issues judgment: Chevron liable;

9.5 billion award — later adjusted

on appeal to approximately

8.6 billion.

2011

Chevron files a RICO lawsuit in New York against the plaintiffs’ legal team.

2013

Ecuador’s National Court of Justice upholds the judgment on cassation.

2014

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan rules the judgment was procured by fraud — Chevron Corp. v.

Donziger, 974 F. Supp. 2d 362.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 32

2016

Second Circuit largely affirms the fraud ruling — Chevron Corp. v. Donziger, 833 F.3d

74.

2019

Civil contempt finding; house arrest begins.

2021

Criminal contempt indictment and jury trial; conviction; six-month sentence; global

solidarity campaign.

2022

Disbarment by the New York Appellate Division, First Department.

2023

Second Circuit vacates the criminal contempt conviction and orders further

proceedings.

2024

The judgment remains in force in Ecuador; the legal and political struggle

continues.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 33

Major Achievements

What follows is a record of the campaign’s principal achievements, measured by the author — with the under-

standing that in a case of this kind, the only credible ledger is the one kept by history.

O N E

The Largest Environmental Judgment in the Developing World

The Lago Agrio court’s order of

9.5 billion — adjusted on appeal to approximately

8.6 billion and

upheld on cassation — stands as the largest environmental damages award ever issued in the devel-

oping world, and one of the largest in legal history.

W O

A Binding Precedent on Corporate Accountability

The case established, in a court of the affected country, that a multinational parent corporation can

be held liable for environmental harm caused by its overseas operations — a principle now cited in

climate and environmental litigation across three continents.

H R E E

A Model of the Judicial Inspection

The court-supervised, on-site inspections of the contaminated territory created one of the most com-

prehensive scientific records ever assembled in an environmental case — thousands of samples, pho-

tographs, and expert analyses, taken where the harm occurred.

F O U R

A Quarter-Century of Sustained Representation

The campaign carried 30,000 clients through three countries’ courts, two corporate mergers, a

decade of procedural war, and the full apparatus of a corporate counter-attack — without abandoning

a single plaintiff.

F I V E

Reversal of a Criminal Conviction

The Second Circuit’s 2023 vacatur stands as a landmark protection for advocates: courts may not

criminalize the representation of unpopular clients through contempt machinery, and appellate re-

view will say so when they try.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 34

S I X

A Global Movement

The case is taught in law schools, cited in climate accountability litigation, and invoked by environ-

mental defenders worldwide. It transformed the public record of corporate impunity in the Amazon

and beyond.

S E V E N

The Defense of the Rule of Law

By refusing to abandon the judgment under overwhelming pressure — pecuniary, professional, and

penal — the campaign redefined legal ethics as fidelity to clients and the record, over deference to

power.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 35

Recognition and Landmarks

This appendix records landmark rulings and public recognitions. For a lawyer whose client is thirty thousand

people, the only durable award is the record — and the record is this.

2 0 1 1

The Judgment at Lago Agrio

The ruling of the Provincial Court of Sucumbíos is reported worldwide as the largest environmental

damages judgment in history, and enters the vocabulary of international environmental law.

2 0 1 3

Final Affirmation in Ecuador

Ecuador’s National Court of Justice upholds the judgment on cassation, concluding a decade of pro-

ceedings and confirming the judgment as final under the law of the forum.

2 0 1 4

Entry into the Legal Canon

The case enters the curricula of environmental law and corporate accountability programs in law

schools throughout the Americas and Europe.

2 0 2 1

The Global Solidarity Campaign

Lawyers, judges, scholars, clergy, and citizens from more than forty countries sign open letters and

petitions; human rights organizations publicly denounce the criminalization of the case.

2 0 2 2

The Dissent of the Profession

Leading jurists and former public officials of both parties criticize the proceedings against the au-

thor as a warning to every lawyer who represents the powerless.

2 0 2 3

The Second Circuit Vacatur

The Court of Appeals sets aside the criminal contempt conviction — a judicial recognition that the

machinery of the state had overreached, and a protection for advocates going forward.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 36

2 0 2 4 —

Ongoing

The judgment stands in Ecuador. The case is invoked in climate accountability litigation worldwide.

The fight for its enforcement continues.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 37

Selected Sources

The sources below are limited to the public record and to works cited for context. Court opinions are quoted

from the official reporters; where a decision has not yet been assigned a permanent citation, it is cited by court

and date.

Judgment, Aguinda v. Chevron Corp., Provincial Court of Sucumbíos, Ecuador (Feb. 14, 2011).

Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc., 303 F.3d 470 (2d Cir. 2002).

Chevron Corp. v. Donziger, 974 F. Supp. 2d 362 (S.D.N.Y. 2014).

Chevron Corp. v. Donziger, 833 F.3d 74 (2d Cir. 2016).

United States v. Donziger, No. 21-CR-316 (S.D.N.Y. 2021) (criminal contempt proceedings).

In re Donziger, 209 A.D.3d 469 (N.Y. App. Div. 1st Dep’t 2022) (disbarment).

United States v. Donziger, No. 21-2697 (2d Cir. June 28, 2023) (vacating criminal contempt conviction).

Berlinger, Joe, dir. Crude: The Real Price of Oil. 2011. Documentary.

Chevron Corporation, filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (2001–2024).

Sustained reporting on the Chevron–Ecuador litigation: The New York Times; The Guardian; The New

Yorker (1993–2024).

Donziger, Steven. Inside the Chevron Deception. 2016. (The author’s earlier account, cited here for con-

text; no text from it is reproduced in this memoir.)

Court opinions and judgments are matters of public record. Where the parties have disputed figures, this memoir states the

amounts as found by the courts. The epigraphs and notebook entries in this volume are original.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography — page 38

The Author

Steven Donziger is a Harvard-trained lawyer and human-rights advocate. For more than two

decades, he served as counsel to the communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon in their litigation

against Chevron Corporation — a campaign that produced the 2011 Lago Agrio judgment of

9.5

billion, the largest environmental damages award issued at the time, and that, after years of cor-

porate counter-attacks, culminated in the 2023 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for

the Second Circuit vacating his criminal contempt conviction.

He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is at work on a sequel to this volume — a study of cor-

porate accountability in the age of climate change, drawn from the lessons of the longest envi-

ronmental lawsuit in history.

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Chevron Crude Justice How I Took on Big Oil and Won Biography

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