Chevron attorney Randy Mastro assailed plaintiffs’ lawyer Steven Donziger today, accusing him of running a massive scheme to extort a $19 billion environmental judgment against the oil company in Ecuador.

Launching his case in opening arguments before Southern District Judge Lewis Kaplan, Mastro said Donziger bribed a judge and had coconspirators ghost-write judicial opinions in the litigation in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, as a part of a plot to “coerce a big pay day out of the company to make the pain go away.”