Robert Sheehan is a renowned Irish actor & activist, best known for his dynamic performances in hit TV series such as Misfits & Umbrella Academy. He also stars in Fogtown creator’s indie film “The Song of Sway Lake”.

Steven Donziger is a human rights lawyer who made headlines for winning a landmark judgement against Chevron, on behalf of 30,000 indigenous people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Not only did Chevron refuse to pay, but they spent over $2 billion attacking the ruling, and then Steven was personally prosecuted by Chevron’s private attorneys in the US - and, incredibly, jailed, in what 29 Nobel Prize winners called “One of the most egregious cases of judicial harassment and defamation” in US history.

In this conversation mc’ed by Ari gold, Sheehan & Donziger discuss legal battles, the intersection of law and activism, perspectives on the ongoing environmental crisis, and Steven’s experience in the Amazon.

STEVEN: I'm the only person in U.S. history to be prosecuted by a private corporation. In a nutshell, I’d been an attorney for decades, representing indigenous people in the rainforest of Ecuador, in a huge litigation against Chevron, over the deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing toxic waste onto indigenous lands. This happened in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and it’s literally killing people with cancer. We won the case, a historic result, back in 2013, for around $10 billion. Chevron refused to pay and I then was prosecuted by Chevron directly. A private Chevron lawyer was appointed by a judge to act in the name of the U.S. government and to be my prosecutor after the regular federal prosecutor refused to prosecute me. I became the only lawyer ever to be locked up for - charged with criminal contempt - for almost three years, and who also spent six weeks in federal prison.

ROBERT: This judge that convicted you, you said he has investments in Chevron. Tell us more…

STEVEN: Yeah, so the judge who orchestrated this, had significant investments in Chevron, and never disclosed that prior to this case. But he also appointed another judge to preside over the case. And she is a major official in the Federalist Society where Chevron is a major donor. And then on top of that, when I appealed to the Supreme Court, I found out that the U.S. Supreme Court has a private charity, in which litigants before the court can actually make donations. Chevron itself, while my case has been pending, donated $200,000 to the Supreme Court foundation while they're litigating. Seriously, the level of corporate money flowing into all branches of our government, including the judiciary, it is off the charts. It's like the corporate class has bought out our government.

ROBERT: If we were making this into a movie, and I was playing you, Steven, the question for me would become, “Do we allow the rule of law, the court, to be overwhelmed by corporate power? Do these business people who exist ultimately for profit, get to live in a different, completely different class to everybody else?

STEVEN: Chevron is spending billions on 60 law firms work against us. They are trying to figure out if by spending all of this money to attack me, whether it is going to pay off as an investment.  It's a lab experiment for the oil industry. But if we're able to get the recovery on behalf of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, so that they can clean up their ancestral lands, so that they can restore their culture, and restore their forests, it will set a precedent that will terrify the whole industry. There are millions of people who support this work. We just need to organize it and mobilize it.

ROBERT: True, and I think you've got to do things through love, not through rage. Signing petitions to love the planet, not through hatred for Chevron. Doing things from a place which doesn't doesn't carry any knock on effect - any kind of bad karma.

ARI: Indigenous culture point us in a better direction, as you must have experienced in Ecuador. The kinds of stories they tell are inherently different than the way that it happens in American-made global blockbusters. We have to change the way we dream, even when fighting. Maybe the new David and Goliath story is about each of us confronting what is false within, and that will naturally push us into the right kind of leadership.

STEVEN: Agreed, this is for the Indigenous peoples who have never gotten this far in an environmental case - it’s a paradigm shifting case. The outcome is intimately connected to the survival of the planet. We cannot let these polluters get away with continuing to destroy the Earth. That’s a new story.

Stay up-to-date on Mr. Donziger’s quest for justice by visiting FreeDonziger.com and following him on Instagram @stevendonziger.