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Who Is Envelope Man? Plus a SLAPP'd Reading List


Fall has begun and the entire season of SLAPP’d, the podcast I worked on for the past year, is out. Before I start sorting through what’s next, I wanted to share a few last thoughts about my experience reporting the story. Plus scroll down for a long list of recommendations for further reading, watching, and listening.

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Cody Hall and the Unsolved Mystery of Envelope Man

I had been trying to reach Cody Hall for weeks. My boss at Drilled had greenlit a podcast series about the Energy Transfer vs. Greenpeace lawsuit, and I couldn’t tell the story without him. That suit was famous for targeting, well, Greenpeace. The pipeline company was demanding Greenpeace pay $300 million in damages (though it actually ended up being way more than that) for conspiring to create the Standing Rock movement. To people familiar with the Indigenous-led movement, including me, the allegations seemed disconnected from reality.

I was determined to figure out what was really going on, and Cody, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, was at the center of it all. He was named alongside Greenpeace as a defendant in the lawsuit. Yet, as far as I could tell, no journalist had spoken to him about the suit.

But when I finally got him on the phone, Cody told me a story I didn’t expect. He said that the only contact he’d had with his alleged co-conspirator, Greenpeace, involved a strange man who me and my editor, Audrey Quinn, dubbed “Envelope Man.” At a protest back in 2016, this weird guy had offered Cody a ride back to the anti-pipeline camps. This dude claimed he worked for Greenpeace, and attempted to offer Cody $200,000 in an envelope, as a donation.

I have to admit: what Cody told me stressed me out. I knew very well that even $200,000 was a fraction of the money raised by innumerable individuals, Go Fund Me pages, and nonprofits to support Standing Rock. If Greenpeace did that, it wouldn’t prove that they were the hidden force behind the movement. But it’s not normal for a nonprofit to offer someone an envelope full of money.

There was no way for me to corroborate Cody’s story. He didn’t tell anyone about it at the time, and eight years had gone by. I know from my years of fact-checking that memories are weird and sometimes wrong. And the stakes here felt high. I had spent the last several weeks reading about lawyers using journalists’ work as weapons to go after their corporate clients’ critics. Was it irresponsible for me to report this knowing how aggressive Energy Transfer’s lawyers are? Would this bit of unconfirmed information be twisted into some kind of weapon to take down the entire environmental movement? Maybe that sounds extreme and even narcissistic, but last fall and winter, everything was feeling very precarious.

Journalistically, though, I didn’t see how I could avoid this story. Cody Hall was accused of conspiring with Greenpeace to fuel the Standing Rock movement. The obvious first question for him was, “What relationship DID you have with Greenpeace?” And his answer was Envelope Man. It was what it was.

My hesitation was coming from a place of fear – and this is exactly what SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) are meant to do, to instill fear to speak up. Strangely, it means not just that people are afraid to criticize companies; it can also mean that people are nervous to criticize the targeted groups or movements. And I don’t mean just me. It becomes difficult for people who are actually involved in a targeted group to discuss their movement's pitfalls, when everyone is afraid that any critique could be used by a company or government entity to destroy people’s lives. (For a twisted example of this, check out this story me and John Knefel wrote for the Intercept about the FBI attempting to use an alleged sexual assault to go after the animal rights movement.)

Anyway, besides my concern that this information Cody shared could be unduly weaponized, I was grappling with something else. I spent a lot of the year I was reporting out this story worrying that I could be the subject of a meritless lawsuit by the pipeline company. I’d seen it before — lawyers claiming that journalists are biased and thus not journalists, and using that allegation to force them to hand over their reporting materials. Even before I talked to Cody I had been twisting myself into a pretzel making sure I was looking at all angles of this story, doing everything I could to I remain independent from all sources and agendas, and worrying about how my work could be weaponized against vulnerable people or, frankly, against me.

I could not leave out the story of Envelope Man. So I didn’t.

Envelope Man forced me to make a choice to tell the truth, as complicated as it was. And it gave me an opportunity to illustrate how reality becomes obscured when law enforcement, private security, lawyers and oil companies flood into a space and lean on deception or fear or a combination of both to get what they want.

Because there was another twist: when I looked up Cody’s name in my giant cache of Standing Rock public records, I discovered a memo. It said that a private security company had sent an infiltrator, pretending to be a protester, to the very same protest where Cody met Envelope Man. A security contractor had written in his daily report that the private security infiltrator had been invited by Cody back to the anti-pipeline camps.

Greenpeace says Envelope Man wasn’t working them. TigerSwan didn’t answer my emails about the infiltrator, and neither did Energy Transfer.

Who is Envelope Man? Maybe I’ll never know, and maybe that’s why he’s important.

SLAPP'd Read / Watch / Listen List:

The full season of SLAPP'd is here (or wherever you listen to podcasts – search Drilled, then navigate to season 12)

The print version, for Grist, is here

And a lot of the key public records that informed the piece are here or also in the "documents" section here.

(featuring Envelope Man):

-->Private security report describing the infiltrator that met Cody (public record)

-->Oil and Water, by me, Will Parrish, and Alice Speri (19-part investigative article series for The Intercept that launched my reporting on Standing Rock)

-->The Infiltrator, by me (article)

-->Unicorn Riot DAPL archive (videos and articles by media collective that was on the ground at Standing Rock from the first day camps were set up)

-->NoDAPL Archive (archive of videos and other material related to the NoDAPL movement)

-->American Psy Op, hosted by Emily Bicks and Wes Clark Jr. (wild podcast about how Wes Clark Jr. called thousands of military veterans to show up at Standing Rock while he was tangled up with cult members and in the middle of a mental health break)

-->Black Snake Killaz, produced by Unicorn Riot (film)

-->AWAKE, A Dream From Standing Rock, written by Floris Ptesáŋ Huŋká, Josh Fox, Myron Dewey (film)

-->Our History is the Future, by Nick Estes (book)

-->Standoff: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story of Sacred Lands, by Jaqueline Keeler (book)

-->Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon (book)

-->TigerSwan's RICO product (public record)

-->Dakota Access Pipeline Company Paid Mercenaries to Build Conspiracy Lawsuit Against Environmentalists, by me, Will Parrish, and Alice Speri (article first describing TigerSwan's involvement in Energy Transfer's RICO strategy)

-->Song of the Canary, directed by Josh Hanig (incredible 1970s documentary film that blew the lid off of DCBP contamination that was poisoning workers. It's like a half hour. Just watch it.)

-->Bananas!, directed by Fredrik Gertten (documentary film about Nicaraguans' fight against Dole for DCBP contamination on banana plantations. This film landed filmmaker Fredrik Gertten in legal crosshairs.)

-->Big Boys Gone Bananas, directed by Fredrik Gertten (documentary film about Dole's legal attack on filmmaker Fredrik Gertten)

-->The Kill Step, by David Hechler (article first documenting Dole's "kill step" strategy – you can find a link to it down the page)

-->Drilled Season 5: La Lucha en La Jungla, written and reported by Amy Westervelt and Karen Savage (podcast documenting Chevron's legal attacks on lawyer Steven Donziger and broader effort to quash Indigenous Ecuadorians' fight for justice for oil contamination in the Amazon)

-->Crude, directed by Joe Berlinger (documentary film about Indigenous Ecuadorians' fight against Chevron. This film landed filmmaker Joe Berlinger in legal crosshairs)

-->The Scorched-Earth Legal Strategy Corporations Are Using to Silence Critics, by Sasha Chavkin (article)

-->Deposition of Energy Transfer's Vice President in charge of public relations (public record where she confirms that in 2023 Energy Transfer was paying the PR firm DCI around $100,000 per month to run Grow American Infrastructure Now)

-->As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place, by Davey Alba and Jack Nicas (wild article, truly, that ties directly into what was happening in North Dakota as the trial got underway)

-->‘Weird’ newspaper shows up in North Dakota mailboxes attacking Dakota Access protests as Greenpeace trial looms, by Miranda Green and Michael Standaert (article)

-->Paid By the Pipeline, by me and Will Parrish (the section of this article that talks about propagandists gets into some surprising tactics by a guy hired by TigerSwan)

-->The Fake News Pipeline: How A Small-Time Clickbait Farmer Is Spreading the Gospel of Big Oil, by Shane Ryan (another juicy article about the propaganda efforts that played out during the Standing Rock fight)

-->Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace Trial Monitoring Committee, web site with statements from group of lawyers and advocates monitoring the trial

-->Drilling Mud report, by Exponent (report commissioned by Greenpeace, stating that 1.4 million gallons of drilling mud apparently disappeared into a hole that went under the Missouri River, as Energy Transfer contractors installed the pipeline)

-->List of 13 Dakota Access Pipeline spills, by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (spreadsheet of DAPL spills, collected by federal monitor)

-->Standing Rock v. Army Corps (legal complaint from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's 2023 latest pipeline-related lawsuit)

-->Dammed Indians Revisited: The Continuing History of the Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux (important book about the impact of the dams on Indigenous nations along the Missouri River)

-->Documents Undermine Pipeline Company's Claims About Sacred Sites, by me (past newsletter post diving deep into the public records that informed episode 5)

**Shout-out to Will Parrish, journalist, academic, and public records icon who years ago obtained a document that included a lot of the security guard testimony from the day of the dog attack, which was also included in this record that I obtained more recently

Not too many readings to recommend here but I hope you'll just listen to it

By the excellent team who worked on SLAPP'd

Amy Westervelt is my Drilled boss, the executive producer of SLAPP'd, and an incredible investigative journalist. I actually love the newsletter Amy puts out, and subscribing is a great way to follow and support Drilled.

Audrey Quinn was the story editor on SLAPP’d. She offered me up a bootcamp in audio storytelling. If you’re looking for other podcasts to listen to check out her other badass work including Suave, hosted by Maria Hinojosa, which won a goddamn Pulitzer, and Stolen, an excellent podcast hosted by Connie Walker.

Tristan Ahtone edited the print version of this project, for Grist. He's great as an editor, but his own investigative work is killer. His Land Grab Universities investigation is a classic and if you don't know it, get with it, and read it.

Ray Pang was our producer and sound designer. Ray made this super cool short "that imagined the life of a single tree over the span of 200+ years, as its surrounding world transformed into a dense cityscape dominated and shaped by humans." (Also him and Audrey happen to work on the Leakey Foundation's Origin Stories podcast together, and their most recent episode asks the eternal question, "Can a Human Outrun a Horse?")

Martin Zaltz Austwick did a lot of the sound mixing for the podcast, and he's also a musician, writer and performer. Check out this story he did with Helen Zaltzman about "two rival Edwardian font makers and the rocky waters of their friendship," as he puts it. This started out as a live performance and then was adapted for the BBC.

Sara Sneath, one of our fact checkers on this project, has done excellenet reporting on fossil fuel companies funding university research.

And Shilpa Jindia, our other fact-checker, is a lawyer AND a reporter. She’s published some good pieces lately on the crackdown on Palestine-related speech.

Deerlady's album Greatest Hits was the source of our theme music. I love it and them and you're dumb if you don't listen.

Victor Pascual from Digital Navajo did our cool ass artwork and he does other cool stuff too, some of which is here.

Hat-tip to Peter Duff, who also did sound-mixing, Lindsay Crowder, the show's impact producer, James Wheaton, Drilled's First Amendment attorney, and Maggie Taylor, who killed it on marketing.

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