This Judge Made Houston the Top Bankruptcy Court. Then He Helped His Girlfriend Cash In.

Texas proving once again it's primary concern is graft, grift and backroom dealings that grind justice into dust.

An unsigned, one-page bombshell of a letter made the rounds at Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s largest law firm by revenue. It threatened havoc for the firm and others that did business before the most powerful bankruptcy judge in the U.S.

The letter alleged that U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David R. Jones, chief of the bankruptcy court in Houston, was in a romantic relationship with Elizabeth Freeman, a Texas attorney who as Kirkland’s co-counsel helped the firm shepherd multibillion-dollar cases in Jones’s courtroom.

The anonymous letter first went to Michael Van Deelen, a former high-school math teacher with a history of filing lawsuits against people he believed had wronged him. He was angry over a bankruptcy plan from Kirkland—approved by Jones—that wiped out Van Deelen’s $146,541 investment in an oil-and-gas drilling company that had gone bust.

Van Deelen tried to submit the letter to court in his effort to disqualify Jones from the bankruptcy case involving his lost investment. In a court hearing, a Kirkland partner argued that the letter was unsubstantiated and moved to exclude it as evidence. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Marvin Isgur, Jones’s former law partner and a court colleague, sided with Kirkland. He denied Van Deelen’s request. Jones later signed an order to permanently seal the letter from public view.

The court system is notoriously corrupt and a lot of this corruption is in fact done via these sort of informal relationships.

Nothing will be done about it because the better people get to use it. It is their country after all, we are just there to pay for infrastructure and provide labour.

Real people lost their investment and pay because of this. If a company goes bankrupt the employees who are owned money become creditors

Jones decided Chesapeake was worth about $5.1 billion, a figure closer to the company’s preferred estimate. A lawyer representing the unsecured creditors asked Jones during a January 2021 court hearing to share his calculation.

“Not a chance,” Jones said. The ruling meant those creditors would be left with almost nothing. Chesapeake listed on the Nasdaq after emerging from bankruptcy the following month. The market valued the company at $7.7 billion.