Public Comment

Alex Sharenko, who is challenging incumbent Cheryl Davila for the District 2 seat on Berkeley City Council, has announced on his campaign website an endorsement from Eric Mason, founder of the Mason Investigative Group (MIG), and resident of District 2. 

Given the alarming accusations made by the Ecuadorian government against serial polluter Chevron and specifically its “investigative” contractor, Eric Mason, this seemed a curious endorsement for a self-proclaimed environmentalist candidate such as Sharenko to have accepted and publicized. 

And this unusual endorsement comes at a time when Chevron’s extreme harassment of environmental attorney Steven Donziger (harassment allegedly conducted via a quartet of investigative groups, including Eric Mason’s MIG) is garnering increasing protest and media attention. 

Steven Donziger is the attorney who successfully sued Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorians whose land had been poisoned by the oil giant, in what was considered the worst oil-related environmental disaster in history, often referred to as “Amazon’s Chernobyl.” Although Chevron has admitted that it was responsible for the willful poisoning of ancestral, indigenous lands that resulted in mass deaths and cancers among Ecuadorian farmers and indigenous peoples, it has spent literally billions in legal fees to evade the judgment. It has good reason to try - Donziger’s historic, decades-long legal battle, set a precedent for other indigenous groups to sue multinational corporations that poison their land and water. 

But Chevron didn’t stop there. Chevron’s lawyers began a bizarre harassment of Donziger and, under the highly suspicious oversight of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, Mr. Donziger has been placed under house arrest, an unprecedented step against an environmental attorney. In April, twenty-nine Nobel laureates signed a letter condemning what they described as “judicial harassment” of Donziger, but Kaplan has refused to release Donziger from house arrest.  

Beyond Chevron’s armies of lawyers, the energy behemoth commenced a series of dirty tricks worthy of the blundering right-wing hucksters at Project Veritas. And that appears to be where Mason Investigative Group entered the scene. 

In 2009, Ecuador’s government accused Eric Mason’s MIG of assisting “American Businessman” Wayne Hansen to escape prosecution by Ecuador. Contrary to Chevron’s assertion of stolid business credentials, Hansen was in reality a convicted felon hired by Chevron to manufacture evidence that the judge involved in the case was corrupt. (How Chevron came to employ Mr. Hansen is a question Eric Mason might answer, as the available email correspondence from Mr. Hansen to Eric implies a cozy familiarity.) 

Helping a client’s ex-con employee flee the country isn’t your usual “investigative” service. When Eric Mason advertised MIG’s “discreet services”, what he might have meant is occasionally illegal services for the right price and the right client. 

Despite the ensuing court battle between Chevron and the Ecuadorian government over Eric Mason’s emails and other communications, Chevron allegedly continued to pay “investigators”, including Eric Mason’s group, to harass Steven Donziger and other legal counsel for the Ecuadorian victims of Chevron’s record-shattering environmental disaster. 

If that is true, what specific role did Eric Mason play in the targeted harassment of Steven Donziger? Is Eric Mason’s MIG still under contract with Chevron? 

Eric Mason wasn’t always accused of such unusual activities. He got his first big break as an investigator in the early 1990’s, digging up compromising information about the families of Michael Jackson’s sexual abuse victims. This “dirty work” won Eric valuable mentions in the Los Angeles Times and helped him build his own business. 

The investigative work of discrediting the victims of rape and sexual abuse is entirely legal, and highly profitable. But when the cash and power differential is so vast between the defense team, which can hire costly investigators like Eric Mason, and the accuser, who often has no resources, it is clearly unethical. This reality is all the more clear in the wake of the recent documentaries about the Michael Jackson abuse victims. 

Much of the secretive activity of Eric’s “investigative” group has been fiercely protected by powerful law firms which contract him, and by Chevron, the multi-billion dollar corporation which hired MIG to “investigate” and allegedly to act as a fixer. It would be grossly unfair to Eric Mason to assume that anyone would behave more ethically when they have the “protection” of a corporation like Chevron, which has paid Mason’s legal fees. On September 25, 2012, the Amazon Defense Coalition reported on Chevron’s protection of MIG’s correspondence: 

“A US federal judge in San Francisco is inexplicably delaying the release of documents that would shed light on Chevron’s extensive misconduct in judicial proceedings in Ecuador where it recently was hit with a $19 billion judgment for dumping toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest. More than a year has passed since Federal Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins was asked by rainforest villagers in Ecuador’s rainforest to force Chevron and the Mason Investigative Group to releases hundreds of pages of material related to a scheme to bribe an Ecuadorian judge and undermine the court process there, said Karen Hinton, the US spokesperson for the Ecuadorians.” 

I reached out to Eric Mason, with whom I had a long if not particularly close friendship, prior to writing this, but have not heard back. I am aware that Eric is likely bound by an NDA with Chevron and other parties, so I have tried to be as generous as possible - both to Eric Mason and to the seriousness of the accusations and the damage to innocent Ecuadorian farmers and indigenous groups - in what I relate. 

But the available record about Chevron and MIG should raise questions about Sharenko’s willingness to accept an endorsement from Eric Mason. 

Why does Sharenko covet the endorsement of an investigator with a history as Chevron’s fixer in the Ecuadorian suit? And what does Eric Mason, an individual who doesn’t shirk at “dirty deeds” for powerful people and even more powerful corporations, hope to gain from his endorsement of Sharenko? 

An April 2019 bid by MIG to the Oakland Police Commission for investigative work suggests Eric may be hoping to be rewarded with a future contract with a similar agency within the City of Berkeley. (Unsurprisingly, in the Oakland bid, he does not list Chevron or Michael Jackson among his past clients.) 

Beyond that, we need to examine the nature of “investigative” groups such as MIG, and why they are permitted to function as apparatchiks for behemoth corporations at the expense of innocent people. What role have “investigative groups” played in thwarting justice - whether environmental justice (as in MIG’s work for Chevron) or justice for the victims of sexual abuse (e.g., MIG’s work for Michael Jackson)? 

Why are City Council members like Rashi Kesarwani, Lori Droste and Susan Wengraf - three individuals who stake a claim to progressivism and environmentalism - willing to remain endorsers alongside “investigators” like Eric Mason? If they don’t ask Eric Mason to rescind his endorsement, or if they don’t decline their own, what does that say about their own lack of judgment or ethics? 

I understand that there’s been friction between Cheryl Davila and some other Council members. It’s sometimes felt almost as uncomfortable as it has been necessary, a fact made more clear in this season of protest and pandemic. But if we had honest representatives at all levels of government, people who were as unafraid as Cheryl Davila has been to do and say the right thing, maybe “investigative” groups like MIG wouldn’t be allowed to bully environmental attorneys and the victims of sexual assault. Maybe MIG would never have been in the position to help Wayne Hansen evade justice in Ecuador. Maybe MIG wouldn’t be given room to do in Berkeley what it did in Ecuador. 

But until then, if you have a controversial past as a rape “investigator” for celebrity legal defense teams, and as alleged fixer on Chevron’s Ecuadorian pollution case, and as alleged harasser of the Ecuadorian victims’ attorney, as Eric Mason does, your endorsement reflects the ethics of the campaign that accepts it. It is difficult to imagine that Alex Sharenko doesn’t understand that.