Agnieszka Fryszman

Her parents left Warsaw and communist Poland as political refugees when she was a child, and in the United States she learned English from television, cartoons above all, and from books. After Brown she spent seven years on Capitol Hill, as legislative director to Representative Jack Reed, as counsel to a House Judiciary subcommittee and then as counsel to Representative Henry Waxman. She went to law school at night, the only option she could afford, and graduated from Georgetown magna cum laude in 1996.

The Case She Volunteered For

Cohen Milstein hired her in 1998 to do antitrust work. The firm was then representing survivors of Nazi-era forced and slave labor in claims against German and Austrian companies, and she volunteered for the case. "A lot of my family had perished in the Holocaust," she said. The claims ended in a settlement of 10 billion Deutsche Marks for more than 1.5 million survivors in more than 41 countries, paid through a German foundation established in 2000. The firm had also represented survivors against Swiss banks in litigation that ended in a $1.25 billion settlement.

After those cases she persuaded the firm, in her words, "to invest the cost recovery and to start a practice devoted to human rights." She founded Cohen Milstein's Human Rights practice and chairs it as a partner in Washington, representing people who were trafficked, tortured or held in forced labor and the families of people who were killed. She is admitted in the District of Columbia and New Jersey, teaches as an adjunct professor at American University's law school and was an adviser to the American Law Institute's Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States.

Sheridan Circle

On May 16, 2017, during President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's visit to Washington, demonstrators gathered on Sheridan Circle outside the residence of Turkey's ambassador to protest the Turkish government's treatment of Kurds. Members of Erdoğan's security detail crossed a police line and attacked them, kicking and punching people as they lay on the ground; one woman was beaten until she lost consciousness and had a seizure, and nine people were hospitalized. The attack was filmed and broadcast. On June 6, 2017, the House of Representatives voted 397 to 0 for a resolution calling for those involved to be charged and prosecuted, and that August a grand jury indicted nineteen people, fifteen of them Turkish security officials.

Fifteen of the protesters, among them parents with young children and local business owners, sued the Republic of Turkey in May 2018, represented by Fryszman. Turkey claimed sovereign immunity. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied its motion to dismiss in February 2020, and Fryszman argued the appeal on January 25, 2021. On July 27, 2021, a unanimous D.C. Circuit panel, in an opinion by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson joined by Judges Patricia A. Millett and Robert L. Wilkins, held that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act's exception for torts committed in the United States reached the attack, that Turkey's agents had no discretion under District of Columbia law to commit criminal assaults, and that neither the political-question doctrine nor international comity barred the suit. The Supreme Court declined review on October 31, 2022, and Turkey stopped defending the case. On October 7, 2025, Judge Kollar-Kotelly entered a default judgment holding Turkey liable for assault, battery, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and under the District's Bias-Related Crime Act for violence directed at the protesters because of their Kurdish national origin, leaving damages for a later stage.

Passports

In August 2004 insurgents in Iraq captured and killed twelve Nepali men who had been recruited from remote villages with promises of hotel jobs in Jordan and then transported to Iraq to work on U.S. military bases. Fryszman represented their families, and five surviving Nepali men who were kept working on the bases for more than a year, in trafficking suits in the Southern District of Texas against the military contractor KBR and its subcontractor Daoud & Partners. The suits alleged that the men's passports had been taken in Jordan and that the survivors' pleas and a hunger strike to go home had gone unanswered. The reporter Cam Simpson told their story in his 2018 book "The Girl from Kathmandu."

Two Indonesian fishermen, Sorihin and Abdul Fatah, escaped from the Hawaii-based longliner Sea Queen II at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. In the suit Fryszman brought for them in federal court in San Francisco, they alleged that their passports had been taken, that they were kept aboard when the boat was in port, and that they worked up to twenty hours a day for as little as 70 cents an hour. In January 2018 the vessel's owner settled, agreeing to give crews information about their rights in their own languages, set rest periods and access to their passports. "There's simply no excuse for turning a blind eye to human trafficking," she said.

Seven villagers from rural Cambodia, Keo Ratha among them, went to work at the Phatthana Seafood and S.S. Frozen Food plants in Thailand, which processed shrimp for export to the United States. In the suit Fryszman filed for them in Los Angeles in June 2016, they alleged that they had mortgaged family farmland to pay recruitment fees, that their passports were withheld and their wages cut by deductions, and that on their return they lost the land; the defendants included Rubicon Resources, a California importer. In January 2023 Congress amended the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act to cover anyone who attempts or conspires to benefit from a venture engaged in trafficking or forced labor, and her team invoked Rule 60(b)(6), arguing that the existing record would let a reasonable jury find the knowledge the statute requires.

On February 20, 2026, the en banc Ninth Circuit agreed. In an opinion by Judge Susan P. Graber, the court held that the amendment applied retroactively, that a company can participate in a venture without operating or managing it, and that a reasonable jury could find Rubicon knew or should have known of the trafficking alleged; it reversed and returned the case to the district court. "Congress gave trafficked workers the tools they need to obtain justice," Fryszman has said. In San Diego, where she represents four Indonesian men who allege forced labor, debt bondage, violence and withheld pay aboard fishing vessels that supplied Bumble Bee Foods, Chief Judge Cynthia Bashant denied the company's motion to dismiss in November 2025, holding that the statute reaches abuse committed abroad, and on June 12, 2026, denied its motion for reconsideration.

The Week Before Trial

In June 2001 eleven villagers from Aceh, Indonesia, suing under pseudonyms, brought claims in federal court in Washington against ExxonMobil, alleging that Indonesian soldiers the company retained to guard its Arun natural gas operations had committed murder, torture, sexual violence and kidnapping. Fryszman led the litigation team. The case went to the D.C. Circuit in January 2007 and again in July 2011, and in June 2008 the Supreme Court declined to review it. On August 2, 2022, Judge Royce C. Lamberth denied most of Exxon's motion for summary judgment in an 86-page opinion. The settlement was announced on May 15, 2023, a week before trial; her clients, Fryszman said, had "stuck with the fight for more than twenty years."

Seventeen Years to a Jury

In March 2007 Chiquita Brands International pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington to making payments to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, the paramilitary AUC, which the United States had designated a terrorist organization. The company admitted more than 100 payments totaling over $1.7 million from 1997 into 2004 and paid a $25 million fine; the Justice Department described its support as "prolonged, steady, and substantial." Families of people the AUC had killed in the banana-growing regions where Chiquita's Colombian subsidiary operated brought civil claims, consolidated before Judge Kenneth A. Marra in the Southern District of Florida, with Fryszman among their lead lawyers. In September 2022 an Eleventh Circuit panel, in an opinion by Judge Adalberto Jordan, held admissible the statistical evidence and expert testimony the families offered to connect the killings to the AUC, and that December Judge Marra ruled that the first bellwether cases presented triable issues.

The first trial opened in West Palm Beach on April 22, 2024, with Fryszman and Leslie M. Kroeger leading Cohen Milstein's trial team alongside lawyers from EarthRights International and Paul Hoffman. The claims were tried under Colombian law. After six weeks of trial, on June 10, 2024, the eight-member jury found that Chiquita "knowingly provided substantial assistance to the AUC" and "failed to act as a reasonable business person would have acted," rejected the company's defense that it had paid under duress, and awarded $38.3 million to the families of eight men the AUC had killed. It was the first time an American jury had held a U.S. corporation liable for complicity in human rights abuses in another country. In October 2024 Judge Marra refused Chiquita's request to reduce the award and entered judgment. "Our clients risked their lives to come forward to hold Chiquita to account," Fryszman said after the verdict.