SLAPP’d Season Finale: A Pipeline Boss’s Bad Deal, the Testicle Festival, and a Verdict

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This week we published the final episode of SLAPP’d, and I'm so thrilled to share it with you all. I'll circulate some big picture reflections on what it was like making this podcast next week, but for now here's a synopsis of our grand finale:

On the last day of testimony, Greenpeace’s lawyers present pipeline boss Kelcy Warren’s pre-recorded deposition. He takes a sharp left turn off the rails and starts going on about how he offered the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s chairman a ranch and a school for the reservation, if only he would call off the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Chairman Dave Archambault refused, and Warren blames an environmental nonprofit for his denial. Spoiler alert: the environmental nonprofit he blames isn’t the one this lawsuit is aimed at – it isn’t Greenpeace. In other words, at the end of the trial, Energy Transfer’s board chair presents a story of Standing Rock that conflicts with his company’s arguments in court.

Other highlights from the episode: I visit Mandan’s Testicle Festival, to find out what local folks think of Greenpeace and the trial in their town. I also talk to a local who actually IS Mandan, a member of the Mandan Hidatsa and Arikara nation, about what SHE thinks of all this. Then in comes the verdict and the aftermath, and a few reflections on how this fits in with the era of authoritarianism that we’ve ended up in by the close of trial.

You can check out the entire season here or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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