On Thursday 15 April from 6-7 PM (ET), Divest Princeton and Natives at Princeton will host a conversation with Steven Donziger followed by a Q&A. Register now: bit.ly/DonzigerPrinceton.

Donziger is a lawyer, writer, former journalist, and environmental advocate currently known for leading a 24 years and counting legal battle against Chevron related to its contamination of the Ecuadorian rainforest. Steven has led a variety of international human rights fact-finding and advocacy projects, served as a public defender, and edited a leading text on criminal justice reform. In the Chevron/Ecuador case, his “Herculean tenacity” (Business Week) is often credited with keeping the case on track for 18 years until his clients prevailed in a complex environmental trial and won a $9.5 billion damages judgment. That judgment has since been affirmed on appeal and by Ecuador’s Supreme Court, and Donziger is now part of efforts to enforce that judgment against Chevron’s assets in jurisdictions around the world, including Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.

After winning the judgment, Steven was the main target of a campaign of retaliatory litigation by Chevron that the company admitted was designed to “demonize” him. To combat the efforts of Steven and his colleagues, Chevron has deployed a team of 60 law firms and more than 2,000 lawyers and consultants, at a cost conservatively estimated at $2 billion. Chevron’s defense is considered the largest and most expensive such effort in the history of the fossil fuel industry.