Kaplan is a very pro-corporate judge and the appeals court has ruled against his overreach already. I'd take his analysis with a large grain of salt, but there is certainly a lot of fog of war in this case.
I think Chevron paying their witness (Guerra) $12k/mo is quite suspicious and Kaplan did not object to that witness' testimony. Certainly encourage more people to follow this case - it's pretty interesting (and a bit scary IMO) to see how it is playing out.
It's not like there's never been an individual activist who's prevailed over a large corporation. It happens often enough that the "fog of war" is not the normal. He also was jailed for refusing to provide the other side access to evidence through the process of discovery. In this case, the unedited footage from the film he produced which already had evidence of questionable behavior edited out after it's debut.
The "fog of war" you're citing seems a lot to me like a guy who may be right but has used dishonest means to "prove" his case.
I'd never heard of him so I did.
>In 2014, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in Ecuador was invalid because Donziger had achieved it through offenses against legal ethics, including racketeering, extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, judicial bribery, coercion, witness tampering, and arranging for expert's reports to be ghostwritten.
Your statement is correct but you left out that he tried to hold the accountable by many, many illegal means.
To compare him to a dissident in China who simply dissapears ome day with no explanation is beyond disengeneuos.
If the BLM protests happened in China, those protesters would all be in jail.