The Greenpeace verdict is a warning sign for protest rights • Zero-Sum

Dakota Access Pipeline protest on November 14, 2016. Photo by Leslie Peterson via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

by Emily Sanders | Mar 21, 2025

Corporations hoping to stifle their critics could feel emboldened after a jury ruled that one of the world’s largest environmental organizations has to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for assisting protests against a major oil pipeline company.

The verdict in a case brought by Energy Transfer slaps Greenpeace with nearly $667 million in damages for its involvement in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests nearly a decade ago. Energy Transfer accused Greenpeace of inciting the protests in 2016 and 2017, arguing that the nonprofit’s public statements about the pipeline and the training it offered to protestors violated defamation, trespass, and other North Dakota state laws in a “violent scheme” against the company.

Greenpeace said it would appeal the ruling, but human rights and First Amendment lawyers warn the verdict could have a chilling effect on free speech, protest, and advocacy.

“This case sends the message that any nonprofit or local community members or activists who criticize a corporation could be sued into bankruptcy,” said Kirk Herbertson, a New York attorney and the U.S. director for advocacy and campaigns for EarthRights International. While the North Dakota verdict won’t set a legal precedent in other states, Herbertson said it “could influence the behavior of other corporations, other courts, and other legislatures.”

Greenpeace has said the damages could gut its U.S. operations, and the ruling could have “the maximum chilling effect on other organizations that may not have the same resources to defend themselves as Greenpeace did,” said Lauren Regan, director of litigation and advocacy at the Civil Liberties Defense Center. “They don’t have to sue us all — they can just sue one and hope that the rest of us bend a knee as a result of it.”

The lawsuit has been broadly criticized as a SLAPP — or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — a tactic fossil fuel companies are increasingly turning to in order to silence and bankrupt their opposition, legal experts say. The jury’s verdict “puts steroids” into that trend and is “a massive boon for the extractive industries,” said Scott Wilson Badenoch, a visiting attorney at the Environmental Law Institute and part of an independent group of international human rights lawyers who monitored the trial in North Dakota.

The ruling comes at a time when the oil industry is gaining power under a federal administration that is dismantling environmental and public health regulations and throwing civic freedoms into turmoil.

“We’re seeing the rise of a corporatocracy, with the additional rights of corporations to run roughshod over the environment, over human rights, and over Indigenous rights,” said Natali Segovia, a Quechua international human rights attorney and executive director of the Indigenous-led Water Protector Legal Collective. Energy Transfer’s case was “part and parcel of the effort to dismantle legitimate advocacy, limit civic space, and ultimately silence anything in the form of dissent.”

A “false narrative” about protest

Energy Transfer worked to shut down the dissent against Dakota Access well before its lawsuit was filed. During the protests, which thousands participated in, the pipeline company hired police and private mercenaries to surveil and attack water protectors and help build a RICO suit against Greenpeace and other environmental groups accusing them of terrorism.

In 2017, Energy Transfer filed its lawsuit against a slew of groups and individuals under federal racketeering charges in North Dakota, which has no anti-SLAPP law. After the RICO charges were dismissed two years later, the case was revived against Greenpeace under defamation and other state law claims.

Energy Transfer’s legal attack on Greenpeace was eventually taken over by Gibson Dunn, a global law firm with a track record of both helping fossil fuel companies muzzle their critics and using a First Amendment defense to shield those same companies from accountability. The firm won the historic Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, which used a First Amendment argument to unleash dark money spending in politics by corporations.

“This is what [Gibson Dunn] sells to their corporate clients, which is the ability to create a false narrative that portrays those who hold them accountable as criminals and themselves as the victim,” said Steven Donziger, a human rights attorney whom Gibson Dunn lawyers, on behalf of another client, Chevron, targeted under RICO laws after he won a major pollution judgment against the oil giant. Donziger attended the proceedings as part of the trial monitoring committee, which afterward said the trial was tainted by jury bias and a lack of public transparency.

In court documents and at trial, Greenpeace said that it played a nonviolent, supportive role in the Indigenous-led movement to protect water and sacred sites on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation only after it was asked to. It said the trainings and resources it offered to activists were focused on de-escalation, safety, and nonviolence.

But Energy Transfer said Greenpeace should be held liable for the behavior of individual protestors who broke laws, including trespass and destruction of property, despite having no proven ties to the group.

The verdict conveyed that anyone who attends a protest could be made to pay for the illegal behavior of “any random infiltrator or provocateur” — a blatant violation of the First Amendment, Regan said.

“The clear intent is to try and make nonprofit organizations afraid to show up in solidarity at mass protests, and to try to prevent those larger groups that have money and educational capacity and communications bandwidth from being in solidarity with a mass movement,” she said.

Brian Hauss, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that “if companies can sue critics, advocates, and protesters into oblivion for their speech and the unlawful acts of third parties, then no one will feel safe protesting corporate malfeasance.”

It’s not just companies trying to criminalize advocates and individuals by association: the Trump administration has sought to justify the arrest and deportation of people with no criminal records by claiming they were connected to terrorist groups.

Importantly, Regan said, people and organizations should not cease their advocacy as a result of these efforts. “People should be smart and strategic, but if people self-censor, and organizations and facets of the movement are chilled as a result of these tactics, you will see them used more widely and more severely.” she said. “People really need to stand on constitutional foundations.”

Increasing punishment

At the trial’s close, a spokesperson for the company said the lawsuit was “about recovering damages for the harm Greenpeace caused our company. It is not about free speech.”

But since the mass movement at Standing Rock, oil companies have invested heavily in lawsuits and legislative efforts to increase punishments for those who might engage in protest. The fossil fuel industry has spent millions of dollars lobbying state legislators to push laws that make it a felony to trespass on the industry’s so-called “critical infrastructure.” Last year, oil companies and trade groups urged lawmakers to vastly expand federal criminal penalties against pipeline protestors, pushing for vague language that could criminalize a number of peaceful protest actions.

Other fossil fuel giants, like the operators of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, are pursuing felony charges against activists for civil disobedience, too.

Throughout American history, powerful protest movements have often used civil disobedience tactics — which may involve breaking laws like trespassing or blocking traffic. But the fossil fuel industry is “promoting this message that civil disobedience, and any protest actions against them that are unlawful, can be slammed with the harshest penalties available in the U.S. legal system,” Herbertson said.

Segovia, of Water Protector Legal Collective, noted that it’s important for people to remember that the law has been weaponized against protestors for decades, from the women’s suffrage and Civil Rights movements to the war in Vietnam.

“There’s a need to be attentive to the law, but it is also up to us collectively as people to be courageous and not to cower in the face of manifest injustices,” she said.

The fight for Indigenous rights underway

Indigenous rights remain at the heart of the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline. In a statement at the start of trial, Standing Rock Sioux tribal chairperson Janet Alkire called the case “an attempt to silence our Tribe about the truth of what happened at Standing Rock, and the threat posed by DAPL to our land, our water and our people. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe will not be silenced,” she wrote.

The tribe has filed its own lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, arguing the pipeline is operating illegally and should be shut down. The case was spurred partially by a 2024 engineering report finding that a section of the pipeline the Army Corps has jurisdiction over, which crosses under Lake Oahe about a half-mile from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, may have leaked 1.4 million gallons of drilling fluid into the surrounding soil.

The tribe also says Energy Transfer — which has the worst fuel spill record in the United States — has refused to provide information about pipeline safety and an emergency response plan, while the Army Corps of Engineers provided “highly-redacted, illegible information.”

Greenpeace will continue to fight the case, in and out of the United States. The group’s international arm has filed a lawsuit under Europe’s anti-SLAPP directive in an attempt to recover all damages and costs it has faced as a result of the lawsuit.

Despite the company’s efforts to shift attention from what’s happening at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, “this struggle over the water, over natural resources, is a battle that is still underway,” said Segovia. “It’s far from over.”