The SLAPP Heard 'Round the World: Standing Rock Verdict
Drilled
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 August 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The verdict in Energy Transfer's lawsuit against Standing Rock activists and Greenpeace is announced, more than doubling the damages. At a time when repression of protest is accelerating in the United States, Energy Transfer's lawyers claim it's a victory for free speech. As the trial wraps up, we look at what this verdict means for Indigenous rights, climate activists, and the decline of individual free speech rights in the United States as corporate free speech rights expand.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | By the final day of testimony in the Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace trial, it's March 13th, |
| 0:05.4 | and an early spring has melted the snow. Kelsey Warren is called as a witness. He's Energy |
| 0:11.2 | Transfer's board chair and largest shareholder, and he was CEO when the Dakota Access Pipeline |
| 0:16.6 | was being built. Energy Transfer has spent a whole lot of time trying to keep Kelsey Warren's |
| 0:22.4 | testimony out of the courtroom. Their lawyers tried to claim that Kelsey didn't have any |
| 0:26.9 | useful information about his own company's famously controversial pipeline. In interviews, Kelsey's |
| 0:33.7 | made it clear that he has strong feelings about the Standing Rock movement. |
| 0:42.4 | Here he is on CNBC, right after the original Greenpeace lawsuit was filed in 2017. |
| 0:48.1 | What happened to us was tragic. |
| 0:55.3 | I mean, that lies were being told, tens of millions of dollars were being raised by Greenpeace and others based on these lives. |
| 1:02.3 | Kelsey's a pretty sensitive guy. In addition to his island in Honduras and his collection of exotic animals, |
| 1:08.8 | he also owns a record label and writes his own tender songs on the guitar. Jackson Brown is his idol. |
| 1:16.6 | Kelsey has a reputation for using the legal system to lash out when he feels his company is unfairly being attacked, which is exactly what he thought was happening with the Standing Rock movement. |
| 1:20.6 | It couldn't have helped that his hero Jackson Brown publicly denounced Kelsey's company's pipeline. |
| 1:26.6 | Jackson even gave a benefit concert in honor of the water protectors. |
| 1:30.7 | We've got to do something. |
| 1:33.2 | Everybody's afraid of these environmental groups and the fear that it may look wrong if you fight back with these people. |
| 1:39.0 | But what they did to us is wrong and they're going to pay for it. |
| 1:43.8 | At the Morton County Courthouse, Kelsey's face appears on the flat screen TVs around the courtroom. |
| 1:50.2 | It's a pre-recorded video deposition. He has a shock of white hair and his eyebrows are furrowed, |
| 1:55.8 | like he's concerned. The lawyer goes over how Donald Trump's executive order in 2017 told the Army Corps to approve the |
| 2:04.4 | Dakota Access Pipeline's easement. And about midway through his testimony, Kelsey drops his |
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