The Girl From Kathmandu

by Cam Simpson

  The depositions were taken about four blocks from the North Lawn of the White House, on the top floor of an eleven-story glass box of an office building, a floor occupied exclusively by Baker & Hostetler, KBR’s law firm. The most prominent feature of the building was a ground-to-sky glass atrium dominated by a fifty-foot-long American flag hung through its center like a tapestry. There was so much glass on the outside of the building that it was hard to imagine there were any windowless rooms inside, but unforgiving bulbs provided the only light in the interior conference room where they met over the course of the ten-day period for the depositions. The effect was something like that of a casino floor, which is designed to be windowless in order to keep gamblers from marking the passage of time. Billy Donley, the KBR lawyer Fryszman had been bracing for, was nowhere in sight, with the questions coming instead from the more affable Michael Mengis, but DiCaprio had been so primed to be Fryszman’s pit bull during the depositions that he fiercely fired objections at the questions Mengis asked. It got so bad at one point that Mengis had to request a break and took Fryszman aside. “Agnieszka, what is going on here?” he asked. She apologized, having all but forgotten that her strategy with DiCaprio had been targeted around Donley. Oops, I brought the attack dog, she thought to herself, and then asked DiCaprio to turn it down a notch or two.

  There were no major stumbles or revelations throughout the opening days, as the Nepalese men testified about long-established facts of their loved ones’ journeys. If KBR and Daoud were expecting to score any body blows, as they believed they had done with Buddi Gurung, they were disappointed.

  On the afternoon of March 6, Kamala took her oath and first sat down for cross-examination. Fryszman wanted her to be the final witness. Joseph Sarles, the Los Angeles lawyer representing Daoud, took the lead ahead of Mengis, and he spent two hours picking away at the tiniest and seemingly most irrelevant details about Kamala’s life: Who, exactly, had set her up with Jeet? How many hours a day did they work on their farm, and how many days per week? Did anyone else work on the farm with them? How much were her mother-in-law’s pension payments from the British Army? What did Jeet pack for his trip to Jordan? How long was the bus ride to Kathmandu? Kamala did everything DiCaprio had asked of her, answering each question shortly and succinctly, volunteering nothing extra, and maintaining her steely posture throughout the afternoon. After nearly three hours of icy back-and-forth, they broke for the day.

  When they resumed first thing the next morning, Sarles started with a couple of questions seeking the sort of details that the defense easily could have learned from written exchanges with Fryszman’s office, such as Kamala’s home address. After Kamala gave it, DiCaprio quietly interjected, gesturing toward Sarles, “If a guy looking like him shows up, don’t answer the door.” Within a few minutes, however, Sarles cut straight into a line of questioning that seemed designed to rile Kamala’s emotions rather than elicit relevant information.

  “How old was your daughter when Mr. Jeet left for the last time?” Sarles asked her.

  “She was just twenty to twenty-two months old,” she said.

  “Before he left, did you ever talk with Mr. Jeet about what you were going to do when he returned?”

  “We had,” Kamala said, careful as always to volunteer nothing extra. Sarles wasn’t letting go.

  “What did you talk about with regard to that?” he asked.

  “He had said, ‘I will go and earn a lot of money,’” Kamala said, almost in a whisper. “‘You take care of our daughter, and you take care of mother. I’ll take good care of you when I come back.’” Her face tightened as she dropped her gaze, and then she gathered herself briefly and looked back up across the table. “‘Then we can educate our daughter and give her the best.’” After speaking these words, Kamala took a deep breath, lifted her eyes toward the ceiling, and closed them. Then she buried her face in her scarf. They were only eight minutes into the day’s questioning, and Sarles didn’t break his stride. He asked Kamala how she had planned to be in touch with her husband after he left for Jordan, and DiCaprio cut him off as they all watched Kamala quietly crumple. “Would you ask the witness if she needs a moment?” DiCaprio interjected.

  After crying into a paper napkin she had picked up off the center of the table, Kamala raised her head. “It’s okay,” she said. “Can you please repeat the question?”

  “I had asked,” Sarles said, “how Mr. Jeet had said he was going to contact you after he left.” Kamala said that her husband had promised to write home, but no letters ever came. As Sarles started to zero in on her husband’s kidnapping and murder, Kamala became more forthcoming, her emotions overtaking her preparations for the first time, perhaps by Sarles’s design. He asked her about hearing the news of Jeet’s abduction on the radio, without knowing that when it was broadcast, she had been plotting their winter vegetables on the terrace below the farmhouse in the village that cut through the clouds like a peninsula on the shores of the sky.

  “I don’t remember much, but the only thing I remember is they said his name, my husband’s name, and his address, and then they said that he had been captured. And that’s all I remember. I don’t remember much,” she said.

  As it was clear that Kamala was both upset and opening up, DiCaprio became increasingly combative, arguing with Sarles about everything, from his questions to the coarseness of the napkins KBR’s law firm had left on the table for Kamala to wipe away her tears. “We’re just trying to get some tissue,” DiCaprio said, “something that’s not quite as rough as those things, a little softer than that.”

  Sarles continued focusing on all the news Kamala had heard or seen about Jeet’s abduction and then his murder, and conversations she had had with other family members about it, asking her to burrow down in excruciating detail on the radio reports from almost a decade earlier. “Did the report say anything about how Mr. Jeet had been killed?” he asked, repeating the question as Kamala expressed bewilderment, until finally she asked for a short break.

  Soon Sarles moved to the execution video, asking Kamala to state precisely when and where and how long ago she had watched it, and precisely what she saw on the small screen of her phone when she had finally mustered the courage to see for herself what had happened to her husband.

  “I object to this line of questioning,” DiCaprio said.

  Although they were seared into her mind, Kamala found it impossible to recount the details. Sarles’s motive for this line of questioning was unclear, but lawyers for both KBR and Daoud possessed written discovery from Fryszman in which she indicated that these were the very images that most deeply haunted Kamala during her darkest moments, when she sometimes felt that she, too, might walk down the footpath that her mother-in-law had tried to follow into the gloomy shade, wanting only to wander until she was lost.

  With Sarles’s questions about the video, Kamala retreated into a kind of shell, issuing a stream of “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” and “I can’t.”

  Sarles changed course, and after digging deeply into the minutiae of her finances, he asked Kamala about “any physical ailments” she had suffered as a result of her husband’s death.

  Kamala thought about the question for a long, silent moment, and then, nearly whispering, she replied, “I feel that I’m lonely. Doing all the work by myself is very difficult. I can’t sleep at night.” She paused again, and considered her reflection in the table, still crying silently. “I can’t give the love to my daughter that she would have gotten from her father. I can’t satisfy her needs, her emotional needs. When my daughter asks about her father, I just can’t tell her what has happened to him. Whenever my daughter asks, I tell her that he’s away in foreign countries, that he’s abroad. And I know that her father is never going to come back. I know that I’m not ever going to bring her father to my daughter, but still it’s very hard for me to tell her that her father lives no more, and that they have killed him.” She covered her face again with her scarf.
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br />   “Would you like to take a break for a minute?” Sarles asked Kamala, before he was cut off by DiCaprio.

  “In fact, the witness would prefer to finish this,” DiCaprio said curtly.

  Once this segment of Kamala’s testimony had reached a natural break, the two sides paused for lunch so they could join by phone a previously scheduled status hearing with Judge Ellison. “I want to thank Your Honor for allowing us to delay a few minutes,” Michael Mengis said into the speakerphone in his firm’s Washington office and across the long-distance line connected to Ellison’s courtroom in Houston.

  “We were at a very emotional part in the testimony, and for the witness’s sake, we didn’t want to interrupt that and come back. And all the lawyers agreed that was the appropriate thing to do, and thank you for your patience.”

  In addition to the attorneys who were attending the depositions in Washington and joining in by speakerphone, Paul Hoffman, a noted human rights lawyer serving an increasingly important role as cocounsel with Fryszman, had dialed in from California. Billy Donley, the KBR defense lawyer, was in Ellison’s courtroom in person, along with another lawyer from his firm, and an in-house attorney from KBR.

  Almost as soon as he got a chance to speak, Donley began beating the drum that his client was the true victim in the case. He asked Ellison to hold a hearing and rule as soon as possible on the motion for summary judgment, which, if the judge granted it, would end the case in KBR’s favor. Donley also pressed the judge about his petition on KBR’s behalf leveling misconduct charges against Fryszman, Hoffman, and the rest of their team. “I can tell you, I’ve never filed one. I hate that I had to file one in this case,” Donley said, with dubious sincerity. “But we’ve also filed that motion as well, and would like to have that set for a hearing.”

  By the time he got his crack, Hoffman was polite if somewhat incredulous. He said that Judge Ellison still had not ruled on important discovery disputes, as KBR had continued to refuse to provide more documents that were fundamental to the heart of the case, especially those related to its relationship with Daoud. At the same time, lawyers for the families had identified the most important people from KBR at Al Asad whom they needed to depose, but KBR had both refused to provide contact information and forbade the plaintiff’s team from initiating any contact with them on their own without a ruling from Ellison. At the top of the list was Robert Gerlach, the KBR procurement manager who had executed the laundry contract under which the twelve were being delivered to work all the way from their villages in Nepal. “We’re in a—we’re in a catch-22, even with respect to depositions, where we’re trying to arrange those depositions,” Hoffman told the judge. “We have not been given their contact information, and we’ve been told not to contact them.”

  These issues were of paramount importance, Hoffman said, given that he and Fryszman, without KBR’s help in discovery, had identified other KBR personnel from Al Asad who had said in sworn declarations “that the fact that these men were trafficked was widely known at the base, that it was impossible for KBR not to know about, [that] it was discussed openly. And we, in order to get to the bottom of that, we need to take the depositions of Mr. Gerlach and the other people who were responsible at KBR and establish the relationship between KBR and Daoud, what they knew, how they worked together . . . What we should be entitled to, based on what they [KBR] actually did file as a motion, is to be able to get into their documents to show that they had control over what Daoud did, that they knew what Daoud did, that it was widely known that these men were trafficked, [but] that they didn’t do anything to deal with that. Those are the kinds of issues that we’re entitled to get discovery of.”

  A defense lawyer for Daoud on the line from Los Angeles named Zachary Krug, who had not been present for the depositions unfolding in Washington, then claimed to the judge that new evidence had emerged from the testimony of the Nepalis that could exonerate the defendants. Fryszman practically exploded. “I would just like to say that Mr. Krug, who hasn’t been present at any single one of the depositions, has completely mischaracterized what testimony we’ve received and completely misstated the evidence that’s been obtained at the depositions and—”

  “Slowly. Slowly,” Judge Ellison told Fryszman, to little effect. Perhaps because of what had unfolded that morning with Kamala; or because of the weight of the somewhat existential challenges to her case and her career bearing down on her; or because of her having to listen to Donley once again launch into a soliloquy about the victimization of KBR through her alleged misdeeds—whatever the reason, Fryszman seemed unable to slow down as she rattled off, in her machine-gun style, what she saw as the mountain of evidence against the defendants. Ellison interjected three times to try to get her to compose herself. “I’m trying,” she replied, before diving back in. Ellison repeatedly implored her with his refrain of “Slowly—slowly.” Finally, even the judge who tolerated almost anything from lawyers in his courtroom felt he had to shut her down, albeit in his genteel Southern manner. “Well, Ms. Fryszman, maybe somebody else should make the argument. We just can’t keep up with you. Mr. Hoffman?”

  “I’ll slow down,” Fryszman implored him.

  “Can you make the argument instead, Mr. Hoffman?” the judge said, cutting her off. Fryszman finally went silent, perhaps one of the few times Ellison had ever silenced a lawyer appearing before him.

  The hearing ended with Ellison offering little satisfaction to Hoffman and Fryszman. Although KBR had been sitting on the ball for years when it came to discovery and would not cooperate in the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ effort to depose Gerlach and the others, Ellison was unwilling to allow for more time before deciding whether the case deserved, finally and fully, to go before a jury. He also did not indicate how he would rule on Donley’s request to schedule a hearing on the misconduct charges.

  “Is there anything further?” Ellison said.

  “Nothing further, Your Honor,” Hoffman replied.

  “Thank you all very much,” Ellison said, signaling that he was done. In succession, Donley, Mengis, and Krug each thanked the judge. Fryszman and Hoffman were silent.

  Twenty-six minutes after they got off the phone with the judge, the lawyers from both sides assembled again in Baker & Hostetler’s Washington conference room with Kamala. The break in the deposition had given Kamala a chance to compose herself, even if it had the opposite effect on Fryszman.

  “Ms. Magar,” Sarles began, addressing Kamala, “are you seeking any money from KBR and Daoud in this case?”

  Kamala gently swiveled in the leather chair and took a long moment to consider her answer, before slightly raising her head, looking across the table, and saying quietly, “I need justice.”

  Sarles seemed taken aback, slightly stumbling as he repeated the question, but pausing between his words, staccato. “Are you asking for money to be paid to you as part of justice?”

  “Out of this case, the most important thing that I need is justice, and if I get justice, that’s enough,” Kamala said.

  Sarles then pressed her about any expenses she may have incurred because of Jeet’s journey and murder, such as the loans the family had taken to buy Jeet’s job in Jordan and the interest payments on top of them, which they had repaid to the lenders out of the charity payment they’d received from the Nepalese government in the wake of the riots. “Is one of the things that you’re asking for from KBR and Daoud in this case that they pay you for the money you paid off the loans with?” Sarles asked.

  “I want justice,” she said again.

  “Do you also want the money that you paid for the loans to be paid back to you?”

  She paused once more and swiveled slightly. “I want justice,” she repeated, unwavering.

  Plaintiffs’ lawyers have everything to lose when they put their clients into depositions. Inevitably, something will go wrong when you subject even the best-prepared clients to days of cross-examination by world-class defense attorneys. Those realities are enshrine
d in a saying among practitioners: the value of your case starts dropping the minute you leave the room after a deposition, as when you drive a new car off a dealer’s lot. The only question is: how much will it fall? As Fryszman and DiCaprio left Baker & Hostetler’s offices that day, DiCaprio turned to Fryszman and said, “This is the only time in my career I’ve ever walked out of a deposition and watched the value of my case go up.” The plaintiffs’ lawyers had little doubt that even the most cynical jury would, in the face of such testimony, savage KBR, especially given that it carried the legacy of one of the most hated companies in America.

  Kamala felt a sense of peace. When she sat at the conference table after her deposition and the room fell quiet, she thought about the exhibits on the table—photocopied pictures of her holding her baby daughter just after Jeet’s death, a picture of Jeet posed outside the farmhouse, and even a photo of her mother-in-law. All reminded her of what she’d overcome to reach that moment, and to keep the promise that she’d made to Jeet in her prayers at the famous Manakamana temple, on the other side of the horseshoe ridge: I swore I would do everything I possibly could to bring you justice. Now I’ve kept my sacred promise to you. No matter what happened in the case, she told herself, she had done everything she could to try to set things right.