Who is Steven Donziger, the Jewish environmental lawyer who politicians want Biden to pardon next?

Donziger was imprisoned and later put under house arrest after suing Chevron for $9.5-billion

Environmental lawyer Steven Donziger speaks outside the White House in July 2024 calling for President Joe Biden to pardon him. Photo by Brendan Smialowski via Getty Images

By Samuel Eli Shepherd December 4, 2024

After President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, earlier this week, members of Congress began pressuring him to pardon others during his final weeks in office.

Their pardon suggestions include Indigenous rights activist Leonard Peltier and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as a posthumous pardon for the accused Soviet spy Ethel Rosenberg. Also on the list: Jewish environmental lawyer Steven R. Donziger.

Here’s a look at Donziger’s activism, punishment, and the people trying to get Biden to pardon him, led by Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat.

Who is Steven Donziger?

Donziger is an American human rights lawyer who spent his career campaigning for the rights of Indigenous and farming communities in the Amazonian region of Ecuador and found himself in one of the largest environmental lawsuits in history.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, Texaco, an oil brand corporation owned by Chevron, allegedly dumped millions of gallons of poisonous oil and billions of gallons of wastewater into the Amazonian rainforest. The chemicals from the contaminated water led to increased birth defects, cancer and disease among Indigenous and other local communities living in the region, according to the plaintiff’s report and the nonprofit Amazon Watch.

In 1993, Donziger – then a recent graduate of Harvard Law School – traveled to Ecuador with a legal team and witnessed the devastation in the Amazon firsthand. Ten years later, he led a legal team in Ecuador representing 30,000 locals arguing for legal remediation for decades of toxic waste. In 2011, Ecuador’s Supreme Court ruled in Donziger’s favor, and Chevron was ordered to pay $9.5 billion in damages to the plaintiffs.

Why was Donziger disbarred and put under house arrest?

Chevron counter-sued, arguing that the evidence Donziger cited in his case against the oil company was fraudulent, and it accused Donziger of ghost-writing an environmental report.

Donziger was disbarred in the District of Columbia in 2018 for professional misconduct. He then faced a court order to hand over case files containing decades of confidential information, as well as his phone and computer. He refused to give these documents to Chevron, saying that it was an invasion of attorney-client confidentiality.

As a result, Donziger was also charged with contempt of court in 2021 and imprisoned for six months. He was later placed under house arrest until April 2022. Chevron, meanwhile, has argued in U.S. federal court that the original 2011 ruling relied on fraud and possibly even conspiracy, and has yet to pay the judgment to the plaintiffs .

OK, but he’s been released. Why pardon him now?

In an October 2024 draft of a pardon letter addressed to Biden issued by McGovern’s office, first reported by Axios, signatories recount how several judges have found “legal irregularities” in Chevron’s case against Donziger. Specifically, the letter describes the court order for Donziger to surrender his confidential case files as a violation of attorney-client privilege, and something never done before in U.S. court history.

The letter also points to Donziger’s extended house arrest before his trial – he was confined to his apartment for 26 months because of COVID-19 jail policies – as an excessively harsh punishment.

BREAKING: @Chevron appears to have attacked my account to delete this post about its vicious targeting of me and Amazon communities after we won a historic $10 billion pollution case. Many posts are missing.

The story below is in my words. Please share.⤵️https://t.co/iaCvs0GZwa pic.twitter.com/kRnBk7caeW
— Steven Donziger (@SDonziger) November 3, 2023

“We believe that the legal case against Mr. Donziger, as well as the excessively harsh nature of the punishment against him, are directly tied to his prior work against Chevron,” the letter reads.

In addition, the group “Free Donziger” has raised more than $600,000 on Chuffed to lobby the White House for a pardon. In the donation blurb, Donziger accuses the judge in his trial of having had financial ties to Chevron, suggesting that may have influenced the verdict.

Donziger’s Jewish background

Donziger has a Jewish family with a long history of activism and social justice.

He grew up in the Jacksonville, Florida, according to a profile in Haaretz, where his mother, Hester Donziger, known as “Honey,” was a prominent activist in the community. His maternal grandfather, Aaron E. Koota, was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who later became a New York State Supreme Court Judge.

After his release from house arrest, Donziger posted a tribute on Instagram to his mother.

“Honey instilled in me so much for which I am deeply grateful,” Donziger wrote. “She passed away in 2009 way too early. Got thru 993 days of detention in great part because of the lessons she taught me and my sister.”

From Steven:

“I want to remember my mother Hester ‘Honey’ Donziger who passed way too young this week 11 years ago. Chevron first sued me 2 days after her death.

Honey inspired me and my sister to chart our own course and she gave us the confidence to do so. Miss her deeply.” pic.twitter.com/1pAHHdRIe2
— Steven Donziger (@SDonziger) December 8, 2021

Donziger has long been an outspoken critic of the Israeli government — and a defender of its critics.

In 2019, Donziger expressed his frustration on Twitter with the backlash against Rep. Ilhan Omar’s criticism of AIPAC.

Since Oct. 7, Donziger has often re-posted articles and posts lambasting Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza on his Instagram and on X, formerly Twitter. Donziger often invokes his Jewish identity when discussing his outrage at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“As a Jew and human rights attorney, I find this photo repulsive,” Donziger said of a picture showing of Israeli soldiers unfurling an Israeli flag at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital last year.

This October, he uploaded an image of a police officer arresting a Jewish Voices For Peace activist after a demonstration on Wall Street, and wrote: “As a person of conscience and a Jew, I stand with these protesters.”

Samuel Eli Shepherd is a culture journalist and a digital reporting and editing intern at the Forward. He can be reached at [email protected].

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