The jury has officially reached a verdict in our trial against Big Oil company Energy Transfer’s meritless lawsuit.
This verdict is not the end of this case. Although a jury of nine people in North Dakota has decided that Greenpeace entities are liable for over $660 million in damages, this isn’t over.
We’re going to appeal. And we’re prepared to fight this all the way to victory.
We absolutely believe in our legal defense. We believe the law is fully on our side. We believe in what we did at Standing Rock, and that ultimately we will prevail against this meritless lawsuit.
Before we discuss next steps, let’s acknowledge that this is a dark moment in United States history. And let’s talk about what “victory” actually means.
We’ve fought Energy Transfer’s lawsuits for more than seven years. Every step of the way, we’ve emphasized that these types of lawsuits — intended to silence and shut down critics — are part of a growing national attack on our First Amendment rights.
The truth is, “victory” doesn’t just mean defeating this specific lawsuit. It means that no other organization or individual has to defend themselves against this type of attack.
This lawsuit was designed to scare and divide our movement. Instead, the opposite has happened — in the last year alone, more than 350,000 individuals around the world and more than 430 organizations representing millions of people have spoken out against it.
Thankfully, we’ve never been lonely in this fight. It’s entirely thanks to Greenpeace supporters that we’ve had the resources to fight back for more than seven years without ever slowing down our work campaigning for a green and peaceful future.
Greenpeace USA was founded on nonviolent direct action and peaceful protest over 50 years ago, and we’ve exercised our right to peacefully expose environmental harm ever since. Energy Transfer chose to target three Greenpeace entities because of what our history represents.
We are simply a community of people who share a set of values, and our community is part of a larger global movement. No courtroom or judgement can stop that movement.
As we’ve long said: we will not be silenced, and our movement will endure.
On Thursday, March 20th, you can join us on Zoom where we’ll be discussing this verdict and sharing more about the next steps — RSVP here.
For now, we’ll leave you with this quote from Standing Rock Grassroots member Waniya Locke, published last month in The New York Times:
“When you look back at history, they always try to wipe us out.”
Beyond just attempting to diminish every American’s free speech rights, this lawsuit attempts to erase Indigenous leadership. It’s an attack on Indigenous sovereignty, and a racist attempt to rewrite the actual history of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.
More than seven years later, we remain deeply proud of what we did to support that Indigenous-led resistance. We own everything we did, because what we did was simply living our values.
With your support, we will continue living those values for many years to come.
