When I first met human rights lawyer Steven Donziger in March, during the last month of his nearly 1,000 days of house arrest, I was taken aback by his cheery disposition, his 6'3" stature, and his linebacker shoulders. The only evidence that he had been forced to stay home for years was the bulky ankle bracelet peeking out between his leather boots and his blue jeans. He was a human rebuttal to the way people talked about abandoning hard pants and gaining the “COVID-15” while isolating during the pandemic. Further proof of Donziger’s self-discipline? He sent me home with the pastries I had brought him.

Donziger told me that physical exercise—he had a special dispensation from the Bureau of Prisons to visit the gym—has been his key to staying sane, happy, and fit since he became the target of an extraordinary legal campaign waged by the oil giant Chevron.  

In 2011, he led the legal team that won a case on behalf of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador against Chevron, which (operating as Texaco) had dumped 16 billion gallons of oil into their ancestral land in the Amazon rainforest. (That’s 80 times more than was dumped in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon BP spill off the coast of Florida.) Chevron was ordered by the Supreme Court of Ecuador to pay $9.5 billion to the Indigenous communities. Rather than pay the settlement, Chevron left the country and successfully fought the ruling in American court, after a controversial ruling held that Donziger and his team committed fraud in Ecuadorian court. Then, the multinational turned to attacking Donziger through the U.S. legal system. After U.S. federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against Donziger, in a virtually unheard of move, a judge appointed a private law firm that had represented Chevron, Seward & Kissel, to prosecute him in the name of the government. Donziger was detained in his home with an ankle bracelet for two years and two months while he awaited trial, and after a trial with no jury, the judge found him guilty of contempt of court and sentenced Donziger to six months in prison, the maximum sentence for a misdemeanor offense, with no credit for time served. (Amnesty International and the U.N. have called his detention "arbitrary.")

On Monday, Donziger was freed from his final stint of house arrest, and celebrated with a block party outside his apartment—longtime supporter Susan Sarandon dropped by. Ahead of his release, Donziger caught up with GQ about the fitness routine that kept him healthy, sane, and in shape through it all.

For Real-Life Diet, GQ talks to athletes, celebrities, and other high performers about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.

GQ: Have you always worked out?

Steven Donziger: I’ve always been someone that exercised on a daily basis—since I was a teenager. I’ve always enjoyed the feeling I get from exercising. It’s part of my daily existence. For obvious reasons, over the past several years I’ve had a hard time starting my day feeling good physically and mentally without exercising in the morning. It’s not the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning. The first thing I do in the morning is make a list of everything I have to do that day. Then I exercise.

So you have a morning routine?

Absolutely. I wake up in the morning and I eat a small piece of fruit. I work out, which is usually weight training with heavy weights, but in a way that incorporates some cardio. I drink a lot of water. After I work out I really start to engage in my main vice in my life, which is iced tea. I drink an insane amount of iced tea. I don’t drink coffee, but before my lunch I get this insane caffeine boost from iced English breakfast or green tea. I find that it makes me alert and keeps me in a heightened state of focus.

I need to have a lot of focus because I have a very complex professional and personal life because of my situation. In any given day I deal with probably 5 major things and 20 minor things, literally. I also have a fresh vegetable juice every morning with different vegetables in it. Just stuff. Ginger, garlic, kale, beets. Just whatever vegetables.

Were you always this dedicated to a routine?

Especially now. I knew this was a moment where I needed to be incredibly dedicated to my mental health, so I tried to have as much routine as possible—which is hard when the for-profit company that is monitoring me calls me at all hours, randomly, and I need to take a selfie at like, 4 a.m.  

That also meant putting on clothes every day. Jeans. Shoes. Obviously the ankle bracelet stays on. Almost every day after I finish work I take a shower and then get dressed again even though I’ve never left home. Then I get myself ready for dinner with my wife and son at the table as if I had come home from work at an office.

What was your workout when you first were put under home confinement in 2019?

When I was originally arrested the very first time, I couldn’t leave the house at all. So I had to reconfigure how to meet my basic needs in every way, including staying in shape. I was able to get some serious weights and kettlebells into the house, and an exercise bike, and this man who trains me named Antonio came over and designed five workouts. This was pre-COVID, so no one was doing Zoom workouts yet, but I was working out in my own home by myself every morning. 

I was later able to get permission to take me and my son to Antonio’s little gym a block away where he would work us out with his equipment. It’s a private gym with group workout sessions, so it’s relatively inexpensive for training, so that’s where I really have done most of my work trying to stay in shape. That and the home workouts designed by him.

How did you get cardio exercise?

Because I can’t get the cardio that comes from being able to walk around, when I lift weights I try to make it a cardio exercise by lifting intensively and fast, with time limits.

How has being an athlete shaped your professional life?

I think it’s shaped it in a number of ways. Sports teach you about competition based on merit. Sports are one of the last areas of our society, in my opinion, where you can actually have a competition that’s entirely merit based, without corruption or corporate control or bias in refereeing—all the things that take away the integrity of any endeavor. So you know, watching live sports in person or on TV is very exciting because you don’t know what’s going to go down because you could be watching something historic. Watching a game at the high level where athletes really go after each other but with integrity really is something I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed.

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People were talking about how hard it was to stay active during the pandemic. You’ve been in a sort of lockdown for almost three years now. Did you ever find it hard to stay active?

I had the opposite view of COVID. In a way it was a relief that it happened, because I was detained anyway, so it put everyone somewhat on the same footing as me. I know that’s probably rude to say, but in a way it gave me some psychological relief to know that I wasn’t alone at home during this time. Because I can promise you: To be detained when you’re an active person, especially for no good reason—which is my view of my own detention—is torture. To know that other people are out enjoying the weather and you have to sit inside all day and night. 

Then the lockdowns ended and people starting going out again and I felt like I had to suffer all over again. Because you have to understand that I’ve been detained at home now through ten seasons. Fall of 2019 through spring 2022. So it takes dedication and discipline to maintain a workout regime under a situation where you can’t get out of the house but also because you’re mentally under stress. To be detained is to be mentally under stress. Psychological stress, emotional stress. So the workout helps but it also requires that much more commitment than you would have otherwise.

Why do you think you are so dedicated to working out?

I think any aesthetic benefits are secondary to just wanting to feel good. Which I guess factors into vanity. You just want to physically feel good. I think there’s a dopamine release that makes me feel good after I work out which is why I like to do it in the morning so it can lift me and I can ride it for the rest of the day. I was put on trial for racketeering in a civil case in 2013, with literally over 100 lawyers trying to destroy my life. I would have to go to trial and sit there and listen to a whole bunch of stuff that wasn’t true about myself, and every morning before I had to go to court I did a really intense workout. Sometimes I did a sauna or yoga too. And I felt great that whole trial. Same thing with the recent trial, the criminal contempt trial. I sat there watching this trial with no jury, but I worked out every morning, trusted my lawyers. I was almost—kind of like an interested spectator at my own trial. A lot of it had to do with working out and feeling good and having the right perspective.

People talk about getting “prison ripped.” What was your experience of exercise when you were sent to prison?

Prison was an interesting fitness ecosystem, one which I had never experienced before. There were people in prison who derived a good portion of their identity from how much they worked out and how big their muscles were. There was another portion of people in prison who didn’t care, who went the other way and didn’t exercise and were totally out of shape and ate tons of the junk food that you could buy from the commissary. 

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I was determined to stay in shape in prison, which was really difficult because I was in prison during COVID lockdown, and you couldn’t really get outside for several weeks. So the inmates, my colleagues, manufactured homemade weights by putting water in these giant bags and attaching them to sticks. Each had a different weight, lighter to heavy, and they would hide the bags in this bin so the guards wouldn’t see them and pop the bags. Apparently there was a rule in the prison against lifting heavy weights on your upper body because the guards did not want the inmates to become larger and stronger. It used to be a women’s prison and there was a bill passed that said prisons couldn’t buy any new weights, so there were only really light weights.

People usually have to eat a lot of protein when they work out. Was that accessible in prison?

Oh God, no. We were starving for calories. You have literally two minutes to eat like, a tiny thing of ground meat, some canned vegetables—everything processed. Sometimes you would get a boiled egg, which was great. Really tiny portions—I estimate probably a quarter of what I eat in my normal life. Occasionally there was a piece of cake made on the premises which was amazing for us.  

You’re working out really hard because that’s the only way to stay sane, but probably eating less than half of the normal calories. So people go to the commissary to get junk food for the calories. Or people would bring huge amounts of ketchup they’d buy at the commissary and slather it on a burger that’s probably an eighth-pounder—just dumping so much condiments on the patty for the calories, because we’d do hundreds of pushups a day to break up the monotony. 

There are also no mirrors in prison besides tiny ones you can buy to shave, which is really to dehumanize you, to make you forget that you’re a person. So after all this working out I thought I was in amazing shape but when I got home and looked in the mirror I looked terrible. I looked really physically sick and emaciated.

Did you learn anything about health or exercise from your clients in Ecuador?

Absolutely. A huge inspiration for my exercise is my client base in the Amazon Rainforest, and the way they live off the land and the natural world. Many of these people live 95, 100 plus years. They get really old and they look great and they’re in great shape. Part of the reason for that is until the oil came they had a pristine environment. They had clean water, clean air, great food, protein, vegetables, medicines and basic happiness. I realized that you could be incredibly rich and not have any money. That’s how it was in the forest for millennia, and when you live in our complex consumer society and you’re in the service profession you generally don’t move too much during the day. You sit. And I felt an extra obligation to stay fit given how much the people I was serving stayed in shape just by living their traditional lifestyles, to not fall out of shape and to maintain my fitness so that I could help them restore their environment.

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