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"Two good, new books are now shedding light on the controversial environmental lawsuit filed in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, in 2003, which culminated in a $18.2 billion judgment against Chevron \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\tCVX\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t in February 2011, later reduced to $9.5 billion. But Steven Donziger, the plaintiffs lead U.S. lawyer, is alleging that one of the books defames him, and appears to be leading a smear campaign against its author.\nThe suit stems from contamination allegedly left behind by Texaco (acquired by Chevron in 2001) when it drilled for oil in the Amazon rainforest of eastern Ecuador from 1964 to 1992. Many environmentalists and human-rights advocates regard the case as a historic victory for third-world peoples.\nIt\u2019s also the case, however, in which a Manhattan federal judge concluded last March, in a 485&amp;#8211;page, 1842-footnote ruling, that Donziger achieved the historic judgment through bribery, fraud, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and other crimes. The jurist, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, barred any American court from enforcing the Ecuadorian judgment, and barred Donziger from personally benefiting from it, even if some non-U.S. court ever does enforce it. Donziger denies wrongdoing and has appealed. (Chevron has virtually no assets in Ecuador, so the judgment is worthless unless the plaintiffs can persuade a court to honor it in a country where Chevron does have assets.)\nPaul M. Barrett\u2019s book, The Law of the Jungle: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who\u2019d Stop at Nothing to Win It (Crown Publishers, 304 pages, $26), is due for release on September 23, while Michael Goldhaber\u2019s Kindle Single ebook, Crude Awakening: Chevron in Ecuador (RosettaBooks, 27,000 words, $2.99), came out last month.\nBoth authors are highly experienced, well-credentialed journalists. Barrett, an assistant managing editor and senior writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, while Goldhaber, the \u201CThe Global Lawyer\u201D columnist for The American Lawyer, has degrees from Harvard College, Columbia Journalism School, and Yale Law School. The Law of the Jungle is Barrett\u2019s fourth book (his last one, Glock: The Rise of America\u2019s Gun, became a New York Times bestseller), while Crude Awakening is Goldhaber\u2019s second, after A People\u2019s History of the European Court of Human Rights.\nThe books are complementary, rather than redundant, because the authors have different aspirations. Barrett has written an accessible, fast-paced read for the generalist, providing both an overview of the whole environmental dispute and vivid portrait of Donziger, the larger-than-life enigma at the center of the litigation. Goldhaber\u2019s more specialized work is aimed at lawyers and others in the field, focusing on the detective work that enabled Chevron to unearth Donziger\u2019s alleged crimes, on the baroque intricacy of the alleged wrongdoing, and on broad legal questions presented by global human rights litigation generally. Goldhaber is a less mellifluous writer than Barrett, so his book will be a tougher read, even for lawyers. Still, in litigation, the devil is in the details, and Goldhaber presents more of those appalling details.\nBoth authors attended much of Chevron\u2019s civil racketeering trial against Donziger in Manhattan last fall, and both appear to conclude that Donziger was guilty of almost all of the wrongdoing Chevron alleged. (For a summary of the key accusations, see my companion piece, \u201CWhere&amp;#8217;s Preet?\u201D also being published today.) At the same time, both authors\u2014like Judge Kaplan himself, as he acknowledged in his ruling\u2014remain troubled about the unresolved merits of the underlying dispute, i.e., the question of whether Texaco behaved improperly in Ecuador and whether Chevron, as a consequence, still owes recompense, notwithstanding Texaco\u2019s prior environmental settlement with the Ecuadorian government in 1998. Goldhaber even pledges to donate his book royalties to \u201Cthe indigenous peoples of Ecuador,\u201D and closes his book by calling upon Chevron, \u201Cwithout honoring its corrupt adversaries or their false narratives, to make a similar gesture of good will for all residents of the region.\u201D\nBarrett wrote a very sympathetic cover story about Donziger for BusinessWeek in March 2011\u2014one that Donziger\u2019s public relations person, Karen Hinton, was so pleased with at the time that she distributed it to all the reporters covering the case. Barrett\u2019s views have evolved since then, however, and the portrait of Donziger here is less forgiving. The book culminates in an exceedingly telling incident that plays out between Barrett and Donziger in a bistro near Donziger\u2019s Upper West Side apartment late last year. To preserve suspense, I won\u2019t give that one away.\nDespite the focus on Donziger, Barrett also provides a valuable and, for the most part, scrupulously even-handed account of the context of the underlying case. He begins, for instance, with the memories of a Cof\u00E1n Indian leader, whose life was turned upside down shortly after Texaco\u2019s helicopters first began hovering over his homeland in 1964. \u201CBefore long, a multicolored sheen appeared on the surface of the streams where the Cof\u00E1n fished and bathed and gathered drinking water,\u201D Barrett writes. \u201CCof\u00E1n children began to suffer from unfamiliar stomach ailments that neither the shaman\u2019s roots, nor the missionaries\u2019 medicine, could cure.\u201D Later, two of the leader\u2019s children died from diseases that the man believes were caused by oil contamination.\nAt the same time, Barrett suggests that the Republic of Ecuador shares plenty of responsibility for everything that happened, having invited Texaco into the country; having ignored the environmental problems as they were occurring; having been the majority partner in the drilling venture from 1977 onwards; and having, when taxes are taken into account, extracted 93 percent of the profits from the joint venture during its years of operation. Ecuador&amp;#8217;s state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, also continued drilling in the region after Texaco pulled out 22 years ago, compiling an even worse environmental record than its former joint-venture partner, Barrett suggests, and complicating efforts to separate out Texaco\u2019s responsibility today.\nWhile Barrett does provide a basically fair overview, my subjective opinion is that he is sometimes too uncritical in permiting Donziger, when attacking Chevron, to gin up mountains out of molehills and to level unsubstantiated accusations. This enables Barrett to conclude that \u201Cboth sides were doing business of one sort or another with the devil.\u201D\nBut if Barrett does sometimes give Donziger\u2019s bare accusations too much credence, it\u2019s unlikely he will make the same mistake again in the future, because Donziger is now dishing out unsubstantiated smears at Barrett himself in an effort to dissuade people from reading or crediting his book.\nIn fact, both Goldhaber and Barrett deserve commendation for ever having enlisted for the project of writing about this case. It had to have been clear from the outset that anyone who did so conscientiously\u2014a task that would necessarily include discussing the overwhelming evidence of Donziger\u2019s use of mendacity and intimidation to achieve his goals\u2014would end up being tarred with baseless attacks on their integrity emanating from Donziger\u2019s camp. (A Google search of my own name\u2014for I, too, have been writing about this case for the past four years\u2014usually turns up at least two of these retaliatory, search-optimized, diatribes.)\nThough Donziger\u2019s team is also taking Goldhaber to task, it is Barrett who is getting pelted with most of the mud at the moment, doubtless because Donziger\u2019s people recognize that his book, aimed at the general reader, stands the greater chance of scoring wide impact.\nThe attacks on Barrett began on July 31 with an 1650-word, unsigned broadside on The Chevron Pit, a web site that has, in the past at least, been controlled by Donziger and his public relations person, Karen Hinton, according to testimony and emails that emerged during the civil racketeering litigation. Hinton says she no longer works on that site, and it\u2019s difficult to say authoritatively who controls it now since most of its posts are signed only \u201CAdmin.\u201D and it identifies its staff only as \u201Cthe team working to hold oil giant Chevron accountable for its human rights and environmental abuses in Ecuador.\u201D (I\u2019m not linking here to the Chevron Pit post attacking Barrett\u2014or those attacking me, for that matter\u2014in part because I think they\u2019re defamatory, but also because Google takes such links into account in determining the prominence to give such blogposts in search results. Why Google still allows its results to be so easily manipulated by malevolent, anonymous smear campaigns is a topic for another day.)\nIn any case, the initial Chevron Pit assault was followed by an unsigned, 1200-word \u201Ccritique\u201D that Hinton emailed to reporters on September 3.\nThe broadsides claim that Barrett\u2019s book is \u201Criddled\u201D or \u201Creplete\u201D with \u201Cerrors,\u201D but neither gives specific, verifiable examples. Each accuses Barrett of suffering from \u201Cconflicts of interest,\u201D but the specifics are vapid to the point of unintelligibility. The first alleged &amp;#8220;blatant conflict&amp;#8221; is that Barrett wrote the book while also continuing to write for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, an arrangement that his employer and publisher both knew about and approved of, and one that is obviously both benign and routine.\nThe second alleged conflict is that Barrett accepted the invitation of a U.S. House Foreign Affairs subcommittee to testify about the case last July. The calumniators speculate that Chevron arranged for the hearing to take place (which a spokesperson for Chevron denies), and then further speculate that Chevron arranged for Barrett to be called as a witness (which Chevron and Barrett both deny). A Chevron spokesman told me he was surprised\u2014and chagrined\u2014to discover that Barrett was testifying, since Barrett&amp;#8217;s book suggests that Texaco behaved improperly in Ecuador, a proposition that is obviously inimical to Chevron\u2019s core legal position. In an email Barrett tells me that he knows how the invitation came about: \u201CA Latin American journalist I know has friends who work on the subcommittee staff. He told them about my book. When their hearing came up, they called me to ask if I would testify. That&amp;#8217;s it.\u201D\nNext, and more seriously, the attacks accuse Barrett of bias\u2014specifically, of having told unidentified people that he \u201Cplanned to use his book to \u2018take down\u2019 Donziger.\u201D In an email to me, Barrett says, \u201CThis is a lie. I never said this.\u201D\nAsked when, where, and to whom Barrett made these \u201Cexplicit threats,\u201D as the Pit post calls them, Hinton said that she was \u201Cnot involved in writing\u201D either the Chevron Pit post or the \u201Ccritique\u201D that she blast-emailed to reporters. She said she would forward my inquiries to Donziger.\nIn an emailed statement, Donziger said, first of all, that I should not be writing a review of the Barrett or Goldhaber books at all, because I, too, have a \u201Cconflict of interest,\u201D in that he does not deem my coverage of the case to have been \u201Cbalanced.\u201D As for Barrett\u2019s alleged \u201Cthreat,\u201D he says it was made to \u201Ca person on our legal team,\u201D but \u201CI am not going to provide more details at this point for various litigation-related reasons.\u201D Donziger added that he had written a detailed letter to Barrett, his agent, and his publisher \u201Coutlining some of the defamatory statements in the book\u201D which, he claims, \u201Ccreate exposure for Barrett and the publisher,\u201D though he did not indicate which statements those were. (Matthew Martin, senior vice president and associate general counsel for Penguin Random House\u2014Crown\u2019s parent\u2014said, \u201CWhile we generally refrain from commenting on pending legal claims or litigation, I can tell you that Law of the Jungle was carefully and diligently researched over many years and we stand fully behind Paul Barrett\u2019s reporting.\u201D )\nThe Chevron Pit post also asserts that Barrett \u201Cnever interviewed a single member of the legal team for the villagers,\u201D and both broadsides fault Barrett for giving too little attention to the team\u2019s key Ecuadorian leaders, Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza. The assertions are both inaccurate and highly misleading. As Barrett explains in the book itself, \u201CSteve Donziger spoke to me at length for the initial [BusinessWeek] magazine profile [in March 2011] and in the months thereafter. When my attention turned to this book, however, he cut off communication and discouraged certain other people from cooperating.\u201D In an interview with me, Barrett specifies that he had actually already booked interviews with Fajardo and Yanza, among others, and was at the Miami airport waiting for his flight to depart, when Donziger intervened and saw to it that those were cancelled.\nDonziger admitted to me that he stopped speaking to Barrett\u2014citing both qualms with Barrett\u2019s reporting and legal advice from his attorney. He also admitted having \u201Cshared [his] thoughts\u201D about speaking to Barrett with \u201Cmembers of his local team, including Fajardo and Yanza,\u201D but said that they \u201Cdecided independently to not cooperate with Barrett. . . . These sentient beings make their own decisions about their lives, including whether to conduct interviews with reporters like Barrett.\u201D\nBut whatever their reasons for not talking to Barrett, there is no dispute that it was their decision\u2014not Barrett\u2019s. The calumniators are implying that Barrett failed to reach out to these people for their perspectives when in fact, as they well know, Barrett reached out, but the people in question refused to speak to him. That&amp;#8217;s absurdly misleading.\nFinally, the Chevron Pit blog poster asserts that he or she knows of \u201Cmultiple reports\u201D that \u201CChevron is quietly helping to promote\u201D Barrett\u2019s book. The post doesn\u2019t link to any of those \u201Creports,\u201D though, and, for the reasons mentioned above, the allegation seems preposterous on its face. Barrett\u2019s book is very sympathetic to the plight of the people Donziger represents, critical of Texaco and Chevron, and quite harsh\u2014sometimes unduly so, in my view\u2014toward Chevron\u2019s counsel at Gibson, Dunn &amp;amp; Crutcher. It likens Gibson Dunn at one point, for instance, to \u201Ca \u2018cleaner,\u2019\u201D that is, \u201Can underworld specialist in the art of tidying up bloody crime scenes.\u201D\nWhen I asked for more specifics about the alleged \u201Creports\u201D that Chevron was promoting Barrett\u2019s book, Donziger provided none, except to claim that they emanated from somewhere in Ecuador. He then repeated the calumniators\u2019 rank speculation that Chevron engineered Barrett\u2019s testimony before the House committee.\nThe mendacity and intimidation evinced in these reckless attacks on Barrett are of a piece with the conduct that Judge Kaplan found to have marred so many key aspects of Donziger\u2019s case against Chevron in Ecuador. Again and again, Donziger has undermined a plausible legal case with needless, transparent, and despicable lies."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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