Crude Awakening

By Michael D. Goldhaber

“A rip-roaring new ebook that chronicles the saga of the two [Chevron] trials . . . Shocking, appalling and hugely entertaining.”—Financial Times
 
A behind-the-scenes look at the world’s biggest and most tangled legal case. On their way to winning a $19 billion verdict against Chevron in Ecuador, lawyers for the Amazonian plaintiffs invited a documentary film crew to record their every move. Unfortunately, their every move included fraud. Chevron subpoenas the outtakes and follows the clues from one improbable fraud to another. The drama culminates in a racketeering counter-trial, where it’s the testimony of one corrupt ex-judge against another. A detective story and courtroom drama, with an epilogue of keen commentary, Crude Awakening is the definitive account of Chevron’s struggle to prove that the truth is the truth—even when the truth is on the side of the big bad oil company, and not on the side of the charismatic little guy fighting for the indigenous people of the Amazon rain forest. Crude Awakening will captivate both students of law and students of human nature.
 
“A superb feat of legal journalism.”—Forbes

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9780795343971

Book preview

CRUDE AWAKENING

Chevron in Ecuador

By

Michael D. Goldhaber

Copyright

Crude Awakening: Chevron in Ecuador

Copyright © 2014 by Michael D. Goldhaber

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

All sketches are credited with deep thanks to the artist Elizabeth Williams, author of The Illustrated Courtroom: 50 Years of Court Art (CUNY Journalism Press 2014).

Cover image derived from original by Julien Gomba. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Cover design by Brehanna Ramirez

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CAST OF CHARACTERS

FOREWORD

I. FIRST CUT

The Movie Trailer

Crude on First Viewing

$27 Billion

II. DISCOVERY

It’s Dirty

Nancy Drew

The Crudest Cut

Shockwaves

The Star

Doubling Down

Nancy Drew Again

The Ghostwriter

III. TRIAL

Day One

The Ghostwriter on the Stand

The Judge in the Red Hat

The Goat on the Stick

Jury Arguments

IV. FINAL CUT

The Underlying Truth

A Global Civil Action

Some False Lessons

Some Real Lessons

Law and PR

AFTERWORD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CAST OF CHARACTERS

FOREWORD

The 2009 movie Crude documented the historic environmental lawsuit brought by residents of the Amazon against Chevron in Ecuador based on two decades of reckless drilling by an American-led oil consortium. Most viewers saw Crude through the narrative frame set by Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action—a pair of good Hollywood courtroom dramas based on real-life toxic torts. A heroic fighter for legal rights (a sassy paralegal played by Julia Roberts or a down-on-his-luck lawyer played by John Travolta) helps the oppressed little people to expose a cancer cluster caused by a big bad corporation. Only in Crude, the corporation is much bigger and badder—Chevron sold over $220 billion worth of fossil fuels last year. And the oppressed little people in Crude—indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon that were among the last in the world to be contacted by modern civilization—are a lot more marginalized than the lower-middle-class suburbanites of Hinkley, California or Woburn, Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, this ebook is not the Latina Erin Brockovich. And it’s not A Global Civil Action (except in the sense that it tries to capture the state of the art in global litigation). If there’s a genre it resembles, it’s the con artist movie, in the prolific tradition of The Grifters, American Hustle, or Catch Me If You Can. But while these titles are evocative, Hollywood has yet to reimagine the courtroom drama as con game.

In reality there were two Chevron in Ecuador trials. There was the epic environmental trial brought by the plaintiffs in Ecuador against Chevron. And then there was the epic counter-trial staged by Chevron in New York—to expose the litigation fraud committed by the Ecuadorian plaintiffs’ team. The documentary Crude captured the original trial on film. This ebook tells the story of the counter-trial, which put the Amazonian plaintiffs in the dock. It is the author’s reluctant judgment that—while environmental practices in Ecuador were crude—litigation practices were cruder.

The director of Crude, Joe Berlinger, was acclaimed for a documentary, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, that purposely conveyed unflattering truths about his subjects. But it seems that somewhere in the rain forest, Berlinger lost his capacity for critical distance. For Crude told the story that the plaintiffs wished to tell, and only the story that the plaintiffs wished to tell. Yet the director’s cut was far from final. And in time it became a key part of the drama. Crude’s lasting importance lay not in its contested evidence of contamination—but in the hints of fraud it gave to those who knew where to look. The proper place to begin the tale of corruption is therefore with Crude. A brief presentation of the movie, along with its critical reception and legal context, comprise the introductory first chapter of this ebook.

The heart of Crude Awakening is formed by Chapter Two, which tells the inside story of Chevron’s filmic fraud investigation, and Chapter Three, which takes the reader behind the scenes at Chevron’s cinematic counter-trial. Chevron pulled back the curtain on its adversary’s fraud with a series of revelations worthy of detective fiction. But the complete truth could only be revealed by the two crooked ex-judges who stage-managed the original judgment in Ecuador. Thanks to an audacious witness-flipping operation, and a foolish strategic blunder, both bad judges showed up in New York to present their dueling versions of reality. The liar was laid bare by a cross-examination in the form of a quiz—a bold stroke that will be studied as long as trials hold the power to fascinate. This ebook concludes in Chapter Four with the author’s own attempt at a final cut. To students of law, the Chevron case is a primer on global litigation. To students of policy, it offers lessons on the toxic mix of science, law, and public relations. To students of human nature, it’s a blockbuster of a story.

Chevron’s voyage of discovery literally began with a viewing of the film Crude. Its counter-trial effectively reedited the director’s footage. A preview of the documentary is therefore a fitting place to begin this ebook. The movie trailer introduces Crude’s key characters and storylines to the general public with a mix of powerful images and text. Only the most attentive viewer might detect a layer of irony, and a flash of hidden truth.

An Amazonian in New York: The indigenous leader Javier Piaguaje was among the Ecuadorians who sued Chevron for environmental harm in Ecuador, only to be sued by Chevron for litigation fraud in New York.

I. FIRST CUT

A matron of the Cofan people from the Amazon forms an indelible image onscreen, her nostrils pierced by the stem of an orange flower and cheeks brushed with red from an achiote fruit. Slowly she keens in her native language:

We lived upon the river of rich clear waters,

But with the arrival of the contamination,

My brothers are now dead,

I am the only survivor of my family.

Subtitles flash at the bottom of the picture, distilling the world’s most complex litigation into the bumper sticker melodrama of a movie trailer. IN THE HEART OF THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST… A $27 BILLION LEGAL BATTLE IS RAGING.

The Movie Trailer

A few seconds into the preview for the movie Crude, a big handsome man lectures intensely to a camera in the jungle: We are suing for environmental cleanup. This is our first glimpse of the lawyer behind the lawsuit: Steven Donziger. A cross between George Clooney and an Easter Island statue is how Donziger has been described by the journalist Peter Maas. With the Easter Islanders he shares a blockish body; with Clooney a silver crop of hair and a taste for foreign intrigue. Between kibitzing with the locals and schmoozing about asymmetric warfare, Donziger drives the movie’s plot forward through a cascade of public relations coups.

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Reviews for Crude Awakening

[Vernon Loeb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent account of this very complex and unusual case.