Fortune Focuses On Brad Pitt While Ignoring Key Developments In Ecuador Pollution Case

Reposted from The Chevron Pit

Roger Parloff's reporting for Fortune about Chevron's growing pollution liability in Ecuador – where he ignores devastating new evidence that the oil giant's defenses are unraveling – is on display yet again with a blog claiming that Brad Pitt has interest in making a movie about the litigation.

This is a great example of how a legal reporter misses the point. A good part of Chevron's Ecuador house is burning down, and Parloff focuses on the tricycle in the front yard.

Parloff's obvious sympathy for Chevron and his refusal to publish our letters calling him out for his errors has been well-documented on these pages and elsewhere, including in this post by activist-journalist Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch. By consistently engaging in reportorial hijinks when covering the historic case, Parloff deprives Fortune's readers of critical information and undermines his credibility and that of his employer.

Parloff's latest post was about Pitt's supposed interest in a movie focused on Steven Donziger, the U.S. lawyer who helped hold Chevron accountable for dumping billions of gallons of oil waste into the rainforest. According to Parloff, Pitt beat out George Clooney for the rights to the story. Yet neither Pitt nor Clooney nor Donziger confirm any involvement.

While trying to write cute stories about movies, Parloff continues to ignore critical substantive developments in the case that contradict Chevron's narrative that the company has been victimized by the very rainforest communities it poisoned. In 2013, after 11 years of legal proceedings in Chevron's chosen forum, Ecuador's Supreme Court in a 220-page decision affirmed a trial court judgment finding that the company had deliberately dumped billions of gallons of toxic oil waste into rainforest waterways when it operated in Ecuador (under the Texaco brand) from 1964 to 1992.

Since Parloff last reported on the Ecuador pollution matter in depth, three critical facts have emerged that have seriously undermined – if not completely blown up – the contrary civil findings of U.S. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Chevron's retaliatory racketeering case. Neither Fortune nor Parloff have reported these developments even though they suggest nefarious efforts by Chevron's lawyers to frame Donziger as revenge for winning a historic $9.5 billion judgment against the company.

(Judge Kaplan's determination that a fraud occurred, which is under appeal, contradicts the findings of eight separate appellate judges in Ecuador that actually had access to the record evidence. Kaplan refused to admit any evidence of Chevron's pollution in Ecuador nor look at the Ecuador trial record. For background on how Chevron made a mockery of justice in Kaplan's courtroom, see here.)

The first critical fact ignored by Parloff is a new forensic examination of the computer of the Ecuador trial judge that emerged recently in a related investor arbitration between Chevron and Ecuador's government. That report – by one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, J. Christopher Racich – found that the trial court judgment against Chevron was written painstakingly by the judge over a period of months on his office computer.

Chevron had claimed Donziger had orchestrated the writing of the judgment and that it had been given to the judge on a flash drive just before it was issued. Donziger has categorically and repeatedly denied the allegation under oath and there is zero forensic evidence to support it. Let's just say the Racich report confirms Donziger is telling the truth, Chevron is lying, and Kaplan (who has undisclosed investments in Chevron) got it wrong.

Also ignored by Parloff is the related issue of how Chevron paid its star witness who testified falsely about the ghostwriting story, a crooked former Ecuadorian judge named Alberto Guerra, tens of thousands of dollars in cash out of suitcase and upwards of $2 million in benefits. You get the picture: Chevron purchased false witness testimony in violation of the ethical rules (read this affidavit by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky) and used it to frame adversary counsel. That might explain why Chevron lawyers coached Guerra for 53 consecutive days before putting him on the stand.

The Racich report and payments to Guerra not only eradicate the last remnants of Chevron's credibility in the company's New York case, they utterly destroy the key factual predicate of Judge Kaplan's deeply flawed decision against Donziger and his clients. Kaplan, who for years disparaged Donziger and the Ecuadorians from the bench, did not have access to the Racich report.

(For a summary of the Racich report, see this filing by Donziger attorney Deepak Gupta. While Fortune ignored the filing, Adam Klasfeld of Courthouse News did report extensively on the Racich conclusions.)

The second key development ignored by Parloff was the release in early April of explosive internal Chevron videotapes that expose an elaborate ruse by company scientists to defraud Ecuador's courts by only "finding" clean soil samples at clearly polluted sites during the eight-year trial. The videos, turned over to Amazon Watch by a Chevron whistleblower, were first published by Vice News and have been rampaging across the internet for the last several weeks. They also show Chevron scientists laughing at the pollution at well sites the company had previously certified as remediated.

Again, nothing from Parloff and institutional silence from Fortune.

Finally, in a devastating setback for Chevron, a panel of investor arbitrators sympathetic to the company recently nullified the oil giant's primary defense to the pollution allegations. Chevron had tried to claim that it was absolved of all liability for the pollution based on what turned out to be a sham remediation conducted in the 1990s; both the arbitrators and three layers of courts in Ecuador have now rejected the defense. For background on how Chevron General Counsel R. Hewitt Pate has misled shareholders on the issue, don't read Fortune because it's not there.

See our own blog posting of the panel's decision here or read the Courthouse News version here.

Instead of focusing on the emergence of new evidence, Parloff wrote a largely unsourced post about a possible movie in a clear attempt to pump up his friend Paul Barrett's pro-Chevron book on the litigation. Barrett's one-sided take has earned him a possible defamation lawsuit for distorting facts and fabricating scenes. It also has received poor reviews from the likes of prominent writer Peter Maas. (Donziger's "notice of defamation" letter to Barrett and his publisher can be read here.)

Barrett and Parloff have a mutual interest in stroking each other. In his own reporting for Businessweek, Barrett also has ignored the Racich report, the arbitration decision, and Chevron's videos. So did Michael Goldhaber of American Lawyer. Along with Parloff, Barrett and Goldhaber have a history of being wedded to Chevron's narrative and they often quote each other's articles. (Goldhaber had the audacity to write a short book about the case without even visiting Ecuador or interviewing any of Chevron's victims.)

Also ignored by Fortune is any serious examination of how Chevron's management team is in trouble after having invested an estimated $2 billion of company funds to hire 60 law firms and 2,000 legal personnel to try to beat back the communities and Donziger (described as a "warhorse lawyer" according to Rolling Stone). Many of Chevron's largest shareholders are seeking the scalp of Chevron CEO John Watson after he was reprimanded over his mishandling of the Ecuador matter during a recent annual meeting.

In his Hollywood blog, Parloff also writes that Donziger's attorneys "for the most part" have not disputed Judge Kaplan's findings that a bribe occurred in Ecuador. That's not true and proves how intellectually dishonest Parloff can be.

Donziger and his attorneys have disputed the bribe and just about every one of Kaplan's "findings" as is made clear by the first 70 pages of the lawyer's appellate brief. Parloff also ignores Donziger's comprehensive 5,000-word takedown of Chevron's environmental crimes and fraud in Ecuador in an article published recently by the legal media outlet Law360.com. Donziger has made it clear at every turn that there was no bribe and that it was Chevron that repeatedly tried to corrupt and sabotage the Ecuador trial, as this sworn affidavit (also ignored by Fortune and Parloff) explains in detail.

While Parloff ignores these new developments, they clearly have planted seeds of doubt about Kaplan's decision in a federal appellate panel that seems highly skeptical of Chevron's forum shopping and bad faith. For more on that, see this article by – you guessed it – a Fortune competitor.

There are many who pay the price for Fortune's apparent inability to report the Ecuador litigation in a balanced way – starting with the magazine's own readers. It shouldn't be hard for a magazine to present two points of view in a contested litigation. Fortune and Parloff need to step it up.


(Editor's Note: For a copy of our letter to Fortune submitted in 2013 criticizing Parloff for errors in a prior story about the Ecuador litigation, see here. Fortune still has refused to print the letter.)

Donny Rico Schools Chevron on How To "Be the Victim" in Ecuador

Reposted from Eye on the Amazon

First we're told that money = speech, now we're told speaking out is against the law. If you're not worried about what Donny Rico is talking about, you "damn well should be!"

Do you care about reining in corporate power and calling out injustice? Your very rights as a citizen? Watch and share the latest in the Adventures of Donny Rico series by Pulitzer winner Mark Fiore, unraveling the tale of Chevron's grotesque abuse of the legal system to fabricate a fraud case against Ecuadorian victims and their lawyers. While this case is under appeal and likely to be overturned, it's been destructive to our work to protect the environment and to challenge corporate misdeeds.

Corporate power in America is at an all-time high. The Citizens United decision equating money with speech is a threat to the very foundation of our democracy. And now, thanks to Chevron's actions and a dangerous decision by a federal judge, corporations can also criminalize YOUR speech.

Global challenges like the climate change crisis are already being felt around this planet that we share, and our most powerful tool as a caring community is our collective voice. Yet speaking out about making real and lasting change means, among other things, confronting bad actors in the energy industry. U.S. citizens rely on the constitutional right to call out corporate crimes and to pressure them with legal and grassroots actions. But how will shareholders know about activities harming the community and environment if actions to tell them are criminalized and activists intimidated?

When Chevron launched its vicious retaliation against Ecuadorian communities, their lawyers and allies, they also included the environmental community. Having 60 law firms and millions to spend, they came up with a nefarious method to strike at us. And rather than suing us head on – which would have opened THEIR files to discovery – they tagged us as "co-conspirators" in their RICO action and tried to get the court to force us to turn over ALL of our internal information about their environmental disaster in Ecuador and the campaign to force them to clean it up. Had we not received the excellent pro-bono services of Earthrights International, we would not have been able to fight for over a year to prevent this from happening and to ultimately prevail.

Yet Chevron still got a lot of what it wanted. They tied us up, affected our image and may well have scared away much needed support for our work. You and your organization could easily be next. Pro-corporate advocates like the Americans for Tort Reform have called this the "new playbook to go after corporate gadflies."

The Donny Rico series from Pulitzer winner Mark Fiore tells the tale in five short animations of how Chevron abused the legal system to fabricate a fraud case against the Ecuadorians and their lawyers. This case is under appeal and likely to be overturned. Regardless, this has done enormous damage to our work to protect the environment and to challenge corporate misdeeds. As the brief filed for the appeal by Amazon Watch, Amnesty International, and 15 other human rights and environmental NGOs states:

"In essence, this case is an effort by Chevron to retaliate against Ecuadorian villagers, their lawyers, and their supporters for suing, bringing public pressure, and petitioning government agencies to hold Chevron accountable for violations of human rights. The district court's decision below, if allowed to stand, poses a severe threat to the rights to expression, association, political participation, and access to courts guaranteed by the First Amendment. If the vaguely defined scope and heavy penalties of RICO – enacted to support law enforcement efforts against organized crime syndicates – may be wielded by private parties against public interest groups and activists who engage in First Amendment-protected activities to seek to hold those private parties accountable, democracy itself is threatened."

When Amazon Watch issues a press release, holds a demonstration, or even puts out a "Donny Rico" animation to educate the public about Chevron's environmental crimes in Ecuador, Chevron charges that we're acting illegally. All this despite our independent knowledge of their acts in Ecuador and over a decade of experience on the ground with the affected communities. Not to mention the recent and damning secret videos we released thanks to a Chevron whistleblower (did you see and share that?!).

Donny Rico is a voice for us, something everyone who cares about reining in corporate power and calling out injustice must watch and share. Public awareness of this must grow if we are to defend our right to free speech and implement reforms. Hundreds of thousands of messages have already been sent to members of the U.S. Senate asking for their help in stopping this. Please watch and share the Adventures of Donny Rico series and take action today!

On Eve of Ecuador Pollution Trial, Chevron (Predictably) Stalls

Reposted from AmericaBlog

Yesterday, in what they'd like to have come off as a higher-road detour, Chevron made a big deal about dropping the fraud claims against one of the major funders of the plaintiffs in the Chevron/ Ecuador pollution case, the London-based Woodsford group. This will certainly be nice PR, but it might also be useful in that Chevron no longer has to squirm in court as overwhelmingly condemning evidence against them continues to flow, unchecked.

As Chevron continues to flail and cry like a child who refuses to pick up his toys, the fraud allegations against the fundraising group that has been supporting not even the Ecuadorian villagers, but their foreign lawyers, amounted to nothing more than yet another tantrum designed to stall the legal process. But Chevron didn't even believe its own bluster, and so we see their last-minute swerve, dropping the ridiculous claims in this game of chicken.

The oil giant is continuing to claim, as they will in today's appeal, that the legal team representing the poisoned and polluted Ecuadorian villagers acted like a crime syndicate in falsifying their evidence in court and paying off key players. If you can't remember why that sounds familiar, it's from the time that Chevron actually did act like a crime syndicate in falsifying their evidence in court and paying off key players. We've also had a lot of time between last year's trial and today's appeal to consider how Chevron's star witness had trouble remembering which version of their story to tell, and how Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in favor of Chevron without the aid of a jury or the plaintiff's main body of evidence.

In case today's trial doesn't go well, though, Chevron can point media to the dubious consolation prize of these dropped charges. If that, too, sounds familiar, it might be from last year, when Chevron decided to “pardon” the Ecuadorian legal team at the last minute for, as Chevron claimed, filing "bogus" charges against them. The gall it takes to mount an “I know you are, but what am I?” defense amid such obvious evidence of wrongdoing is, really, quite astonishing.

That dropped charge, by the way, was the very one that would have necessitated a jury to be present for last year's trial. Throw out the charges and the jury, and you get the judge who was able to rule unilaterally in favor of Chevron, in order to protect them from suffering even more "high legal fees" and "harm to its reputation." Because while justice may be blind, it has a nose for brand loyalty.

Putting aside the ludicrous nature of Chevron appealing to every court it can, including the Hague, to protest the lack of fairness the corporate multinational has suffered at the hands of leukemia- and cancer-plagued indigenous farmers, the question remains as to why New York is where the trial is taking place at all. Why is a court based in New York able to stand in judgement of a foreign legal process? How disgraceful is it that the Ecuadorian villagers have had to go through foreign legal teams and financial backers to get justice for ongoing crime in their own land? If Chevron is so guilty that the fact that Ecuador is polluted because of them isn't even in question anymore, what could possibly be left to argue?

If today's decision lets Chevron off the hook again, corporate giants will look to Chevron's playbook of denial for inspiration. Next up: How BP has the balls, literally, to deny ongoing Deepwater Horizon damage.

It's all just too familiar.

The Chevron Tapes: 30 Years and Still Waiting for Justice

Reposted from Eye on the Amazon

Last week, Amazon Watch released The Chevron Tapes, internal Chevron videos leaked to us by a company whistleblower which show the company finding and mocking contamination in areas of the Amazon rainforest it claims to have cleaned up years ago.

The videos also included revealing interviews with area residents in which they denounce Chevron's pollution and recount how it never cleaned up waste pits and instead covered them with dirt. We don't know how the Chevron interviewers presented themselves to the residents, but it seems unlikely that they were honest about who they were or what they were doing.

Well over a million people have already viewed last week's video, and many told us that they were deeply affected by a resident named José describing how he lost three daughters due to the toxic contamination of his home. In the interview that Chevron filmed of him in 2006, he painfully related that when his daughters were dying, company representatives told him that they would send help, that they would "come quickly" and "take responsibility" for their condition. He said that he had been waiting for over twenty years and they still hadn't arrived. That video was shot almost ten years ago, so José has now been waiting for about thirty years.

This week we're highlighting José's story and providing more of his leaked interview.

Chevron's response to these damning videos is to claim that they "may have been taken out of context." The full videos are available online, but we decided to provide still more "context" for Chevron's benefit.

In the leaked video, José says that he's lived in the same place since before there was any oil exploration in the area. He lives near Dureno Uno, the very first first oil well that Chevron drilled in the area. Dureno Uno was the original sin that brought ruin to José's rainforest paradise, and Chevron alone was responsible for operating it until it left the country in 1990. José's daughters died in the mid-1980's, so the company has no one else it can blame for their deaths.

You don't need to take our word for it. To corroborate José's testimony, we've re-released a 2010 interview that Amazon Watch filmed of Jhinsop Martinez Erraez, a former oil worker at the Dureno Uno well. In the video, Jhinsop recalls the helplessness he felt at being ordered by Chevron to dump toxic waste directly into the rainforest, day after day:

The wastewater was dumped into a ravine, a stream, without any treatment at all.
...and at that time these were mountainous lands, pure rainforest existed, rich in flora and fauna; and this destroyed everything. And since we were just simple workers we couldn't say anything.

Of course, Dureno Uno wasn't the only site where Chevron operated with criminal disregard for people and the environment. Over the course of its time as the sole operator of the oil concession in the northeastern rainforest region in Ecuador, on top of spilling millions gallons of crude and abandoning hundreds of waste pits filled with poisonous sludge, Chevron dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater directly into rivers and streams depended upon by thousands of men, women, and children for drinking and bathing.

It's estimated that 10,000 people in the region will get cancer. Over 1,400 have already died.

Besides the testimony of men like José and Jhinsop, how do we know? How do we know that other wells and facilities throughout the sprawling Ecuadorian oilfields were operated in the same deliberately reckless fashion? In fact, we know this from the company's own audits, commissioned as it was preparing to depart Ecuador. Test results from judicial inspections proved that Chevron left toxins at levels many times higher than the legal limits, and recent expert reports demonstrate that many sites remain alarmingly toxic to this day.

Despite being exposed by these whistleblower videos, Chevron continues to claim that this systematic daily poisoning of the region's soil and waters over decades posed (and poses) no threat to the people living there.

Fulfilling its pledge of a "lifetime of litigation" for the Ecuadorians, Chevron has since sued them alleging their case was a fraud and claims to be the true victim. We'd like to see them explain this to José and his remaining family. After thirty years of waiting they deserve some measure of justice.

In Ecuador, Chevron Found Contamination – and Comedy – in Soil They Testified Was Clean

Reposted from AmericaBlog

In my last post, I wrote on the side of large corporations, encouraging forgiveness for well-intentioned but tone-deaf actions on the part of social good. That's because Starbucks is a bastion of justice and equality when compared to deeply polluting, institutionalized evil as embodied in Chevron's dealings in Ecuador.

This is not new news, but rather a recently resurfaced hydra head of the ages-long lawsuit of Chevron versus the Ecuadorian plaintiffs as represented by the Amazon Defense Coalition. This story, beginning in 1993, features Texaco-turned-Chevron drilling in Ecuador, systematically ignoring pollution and waste hazards, subsequently contaminating the land and water so badly that Ecuadorian residents are still suffering from it. Ecuador’s 1993 class-action lawsuit against Chevron has since bounced around in a really complicated fashion from court to court, as both sides have appealed any decision that did not come out in their favor.

But last week, proving that nothing embarrassing on the Internet ever goes away, some leaked footage began circulating online — evidence from supposedly “cleaned up” Texaco drilling sites that proved just how much the oil company knew about the reach of its pollution:

In the videos, consultants hired by Chevron to do inspections of the area “keep finding petroleum where it’s not supposed to be,” as one of them joked. He and another inspector lightheartedly bicker back and forth about the inconvenience of finding contaminated soil cores even in the areas that they had specifically selected for off-site, supposedly clean sampling. After pulling up a few more samples so polluted that a simple sniff can detect petroleum, they call off the hunt and discuss plan B, which is “not beating it to death” with a rigorous lab test. The audio and transcript hint at unsurprised impatience for the discovery of oil in places that Chevron would later testify were clean — concern for the complications that might ensue for the legal process, but no concern for the effects on humans or land beyond Chevron’s own.

“The Chevron Tapes,” as people are calling them, were last aired in 2011, during a trial in Ecuador in which Chevron was ordered to pay 9.5 billion dollars in damages to the affected communities and the Amazon Defense Coalition, the group formed to represent them, as well as to help clean up their mess. The judge also ruled that this amount would double if Chevron did not issue a public apology to the affected groups in Ecuador. Not only did Chevron flip Ecuador the bird and refuse to pay, it also filed a civil suit against the group, claiming that their evidence was bunk. Chevron won that round last year and, the next appeal is set to be heard next Monday in New York.

The tapes will not be used as evidence in the proceedings, but Amazon Watch wants you to watch them now. They would like to remind the public that despite the legal quibbling — 22 years of it — over cost, accountability and enforcement, one of these sides in the trial is audibly, visibly, morally wrong:

What’s really frustrating, apart from the ongoing contamination in Ecuador that is lowering the living standards of residents in the affected areas, is how long the struggle has been allowed to play out. Following the bouncing court case from local to regional — from Ecuador to the United States to Canada — the tangled web of non-resolution shows that no one knows who can or should be the law enforcer for large international corporations, who wield their limited liability with a sneer and a joke.

If we have no cohesive mechanism to hold large corporations accountable for their actions, we're going to get even more of this: perpetrators laughing in the face of pollution.