A petition with over 2000 signatures is pleading with Brad Pitt to sit on the rights of a book “Law of the Jungle” he purchased with his production company Plan B. The petition followed a week after Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa invited Pitt to personally witness the environmental destruction caused by Texaco, a Chevron owned company since 2001. At the same time, the president also called for a global Twitter campaign to show the actor “how he is being used.”
Law of the Jungle claims to chronicle the legal fight by Ecuador’s Lago Agrio region against the dumping of oilfield waste between the 1970s and 1990s. As a result, in 2011, Chevron was ordered to pay $9.5 billion in damages, one of the biggest environmental verdicts we’ve seen in our history.
However, in 2014, a US court discovered that Harvard trained Steven Donziger, the lawyer who led the plaintiff’s team, conspired to win by “egregious fraud.” Reportedly, Donziger bribed the judge, and going so far as to write the court’s verdict. According to author Paul Barrett, Donziger would stop at nothing to win his case.
The worry by petitioners, and the president ,is producing this movie may create the wrong impression and spread misinformation about the destruction caused by Chevron. In turn, “undermining the efforts of the Ecuadorian people for justice.”
