Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Steven Donzinger won a judgment against Chevron for fouling the environment in Ecuador.
Steven R. Donziger — environmental hero or charlatan, depending on whom you talk to — is one of the toughest lawyers around, or slightly crazy.
Possibly both.
For the last two decades Mr. Donziger has been battling the Chevron Corporation over an environmental disaster that happened in the jungles of Ecuador. Two years ago, he won an $18 billion case against the oil giant, the kind of victory that most lawyers can only dream of.
But Chevron has yet to pay a penny of the award, and has turned the tables on him. Now, he is defending himself against a Chevron lawsuit charging that he masterminded a conspiracy to extort and defraud the corporation. The trial is scheduled for October.
Across a table in his two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Donziger for the first time in recent years spoke publicly about the personal travails that he says have engulfed him. He says shadowy men have trailed him. Watched his family. Sat in cars outside his home. He had his apartment swept for bugs, but found nothing.
All of that might sound like the ravings of a Grade A conspiracy theorist. But Mr. Donziger, who played basketball with Barack Obama at Harvard Law School, has a serious following among environmentalists. He and his supporters say he is being vilified — potentially ruined — for unmasking Chevron's questionable environmental record. Chevron, which is suing him and his associates for damages that could reach billions of dollars, says he is simply a con artist.
It is a remarkable turn of events for Mr. Donziger, who has chased after Chevron with the single-mindedness of Ahab. Reports of questionable ethical conduct have cast doubt over his motives. He is accused of engineering the ghostwriting of a crucial report submitted to the Ecuadorean court that decided the case, a claim he says is exaggerated and misconstrues local legal customs. Some of his former allies have abandoned him and signed statements taking Chevron's side.
Even his lawyer in the fraud case has withdrawn himself because, he said, Mr. Donziger could no longer pay his bills. And this month U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied Mr. Donziger's plea for a delay in the trial, expressing skepticism that he and his backers did not have the money to hire another lawyer. (Judge Kaplan noted in his ruling that Mr. Donziger stood to gain a fee of over $1 billion should the Ecuadorean judgment, which Chevron is challenging, be enforced.)
The particulars of the case have been litigated and relitigated. Mr. Donziger insists that Chevron's predecessor, Texaco, cut through the Amazon, spilled oil into pristine rain forests and left behind what remains to this day a toxic mess. Chevron says he is an ambulance-chaser who has fabricated facts for his own financial ends, blaming the company for pollution mostly caused by Petroecuador, the national oil company that was once a partner of Texaco and continues to produce oil in the region.
But Mr. Donziger, a bear of a man with a quick laugh and a robust ego, says he is unbowed.
"It is creepy and scary," Mr. Donziger, 51, said of his experiences during a six-hour interview at his home. Chevron, a company worth $240 billion, is trying to scare him away, he says. "When I walk into a deposition and see 15 Chevron lawyers there ready to eat me for lunch, I realize I've been bestowed an honor," he said, smiling.
To which Chevron says: Nonsense. "He thinks he can one-up P. T. Barnum and fool all the people all the time," said Randy Mastro, a lawyer working for Chevron. "But it's his own confidants who have now turned on him."
Many environmentalists, perhaps predictably, are still behind him.
"I have admiration for anyone who is willing to take on a rich, powerful oil company," said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club and a longtime supporter of Mr. Donziger's efforts. "And to do it for more than two decades is either crazy or impressive and probably both."
These days, Mr. Donziger spends much of his time working at his dining room table below an expansive portrait of Mao walking among his people — more of a joke than an expression of his political beliefs, he says. He still finds time to take his 6-year-old son to school, take yoga classes and walk the dog. His apartment is virtually a gallery of the case. Photographs of Ecuadorean Indians, jungle pipelines and the first day of the Ecuadorean trial hang on its walls.
The origins of the case go back to the 1970s, when Texaco, which was later acquired by Chevron, operated as a partner with the Ecuadorean state oil company Petroecuador in the Amazon.
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