Lawyer Steven Donziger has been on a house arrest for more than eight hundred days and is now facing six months of incarceration on charges of “criminal contempt.”

The crime? Donziger won a landmark $9.5-billion pollution case against Chevron in Ecuador in 2011, and they have been taking him to court ever since. So much about Donziger’s case is unprecedented, and many consider it a gross miscarriage of justice.

Today, Friday host Esty Dinur spends the hour untangling this story with journalist James North, who has followed the Donziger case for a long time.

They dive into the details of this history, including Chevron’s operations in Ecuador and their consequences, the case brought against the oil giant, and the strange twists that ended up with Donziger’s incarceration.

James North has reported from Africa, Latin America, and Asia for four decades. He is the editor-at-large of Mondoweiss and author of Freedom Rising (Plume, 1986), and he regularly writes for The Nation.

Cover photo: Screenshot from Steven Donziger’s interview with KolectiVOZ Digital in July 2021, licensed under CC BY 3.0 / filter added

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