Legal News

Bananas over ?Bananas!?: The Dole Case Hits the Silver Screen

By Ashby Jones

Prior to about 10 minutes ago, the only movie called “Bananas” we knew of was that zany Woody Allen flick from the early 1970s in which Allen, playing a character named Fielding Mellish, heads off to a Latin American nation in the throes of revolution to try to impress a left-leaning New Yorker girl.

But now comes another “Bananas,” (technically “Bananas!”) this one of a bit more serious mien, despite the exclamation point. The documentary chronicles the story of banana plantation workers in Nicaragua and Juan Dominguez, a Los Angeles attorney, who attempted to take on the Dole Food Co.

According to this LAT story, the filmmaker, Swede Fredrik Gertten, calls the movie a “classical David-Goliath story.”

Dole, however, hardly sees it that way. Company lawyer Scott Edelman calls the movie “a phony story” that has been discredited by the allegedly fraudulent conduct perpetrated by Dominguez. Dole vows to sue both the filmmaker and the Los Angeles Film Festival for defamation if it screens the movie this week. Click here and here for earlier LB posts on the Dole/Dominguez situation; here for the Bananas! Web site.

According to the LAT:

The events the film chronicles center on Dole’s acknowledged past use of the pesticide dibromochloropropane, or DBCP, in Nicaragua and other countries. Banana farmers and other plantation workers have taken Dole to court, seeking millions of dollars in damages, contending that they were rendered sterile by exposure to the pesticide, which has been banned in the United States since 1979.

Thousands of plaintiffs in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast and other countries have brought cases against Dole and pesticide manufacturers. Lawyers for some Nicaraguan plaintiffs have taken their cases to U.S. courts, hoping they will enforce verdicts against Dole that have been awarded by Nicaraguan courts.

Complicating the whole story is Dominguez, a Cuban-born personal injury lawyer well-known in Los Angeles. Dominguez won a jury trial in 2007 on behalf of several Nicaraguans. But this spring, a judge in Los Angeles threw out two other lawsuits against Dole after being presented with evidence gathered from Nicaraguans who said that they had been recruited and coached by lawyers and provided with false work histories and falsified medical lab reports.

Dominguez is facing contempt charges for his alleged participation in the fraud. Dominguez has denied any wrongdoing and declined further comment.

In regard to the film, on May 8, Dole sent letters to the festival’s major sponsors, including The Times, denouncing what Dole called the “false and defamatory accusations” made by the film.

Gertten believes that his movie, which essentially ends in the fall of 2007, has a valid story to tell, even as that story continues to evolve. “I have to tell the story as I saw it, and that’s what I do, and that story ends at that moment,” he said.

Dole Foods is repped by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 16, 2009 (boomark / email).