Chevron Request for ‘CRUDE’ Footage Approved

by Bob McCarty

The Courthouse News Service reported Monday that Chevron Corp. asked a federal judge Friday to order the release of outtakes from Joseph Berlinger’s 2009 documentary, “CRUDE” (trailer below). Today, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan granted the San Ramon, Calif.-based oil giant’s request, leaving one question unanswered: Will the footage exonerate the company and bring an end to its maddening 17-year-old court battle in the South American country?

In the conclusion of a 31-page decision issued in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York, Judge Kaplan wrote:

The Court expresses no view as to whether the concerns of either side are supported by proof of improper political influence, corruption, or other misconduct affecting the Ecuadorian As Justice Brandeis once wrote, however, “sunshine is said to the best of disinfectants.” Review of Berlinger’s outtakes will contribute to the goal of seeing not only that justice is done, but that it appears to be done.

Three portions of the documentary* highlighted by Chevron in their request to the judge involve Steven Donziger, the New York-based attorney leading the lawsuit against Chevron, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa and Dr. Carlos Beristain, a one-time expert witness in the case:

A. Plaintiffs’ Counsel Meets with Expert Witness — Crude contains footage of a number of meetings that took place in the Dureno community of the indigenous Cofan people. A version of Crude “streamed” over Netflix depicts one such meeting, at which Dr. Beristain, an expert who contributed to Cabrera’s neutral damages assessment, is shown working directly with both the Cofan people and plaintiffs’ counsel. Berlinger, however, altered the scene at the direction of plaintiffs’ counsel to conceal all images of Dr. Beristain before Crude was released on DVD. The interaction between plaintiffs’ counsel and Dr. Beristain therefore does not appear in the final version of Crude sold on DVD in the United States.

B. Plaintiff’s Counsel Interferes with Judicial Inspection — In another scene of Crude, Donziger, one of plaintiffs’ lead counsel, persuades an Ecuadorian judge, apparently in the presence of Chevron’s lawyers and news media, to block the judicial inspection of a laboratory allegedly being used by the Lago Agrio plaintiffs to test for environmental contamination. Donziger describes his use of “pressure tactics” to influence the judge and concedes that “[t]his is something you would never do in the United States, but Ecuador, you know, this is how the game is played, it’s dirty.”

C. Plaintiffs’ Representatives Meet with the Ecuadorian Government — In another scene, a representative of the plaintiffs informs Donziger that he had left the office of President Correa “after coordinating everything.” Donziger declares, “Congratulations. We’ve achieved something very important in this case . . . . Now we are friends with the President.” The film then offers a glimpse of a meeting between President Correa and plaintiffs’ counsel that takes place on a helicopter. Later on, President Correa embraces Donziger and says, “Wonderful, keep it up!” Donziger explains also that President Correa had called for criminal prosecutions to proceed against those who engineered the Settlement and Final Release. “Correa just said that anyone in the Ecuador government who approved the so-called remediation is now going to be subject to litigation in Ecuador. Those guys are shittin’ in their pants right now.”

This news — and the potentially huge implications that accompanies it — comes one day after I published Chevron Accuses Plaintiff of Lying in $27B Lawsuit, the most recent in a series of more than three-dozen posts I’ve published during the past year about the lawsuit which has the potential to cost Chevron $27 billion.

*Note: I removed the citation numbers from the three points above as they appeared in the official request. To see them, click here.


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Posted May 8th 2010 at 4:55 pm in Environment, Justice/Legal | 40 Comments