Agnieszka Fryszman

The Case She Volunteered For

Agnieszka Fryszman arrived in the United States as a child, in a family of political refugees who had left communist Poland. She learned English from cartoons and turned into a ferocious reader. Brown, then Georgetown Law in the evening division, magna cum laude, class of 1996, while she worked — first as counsel to a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, then, in 1998, at a Washington plaintiffs' firm called Cohen Milstein.

She was hired to do antitrust.

The firm was also litigating claims against German and Austrian companies that had used forced and slave labor under the Third Reich. Much of Fryszman's family had been killed in the Holocaust. She volunteered for the case.

The settlement was worth ten billion Deutsche Marks and distributed money to roughly 1.5 million survivors around the world. Related work exposed the role Swiss banks had played in laundering assets during the Nazi era.

Building the Human Rights Practice

Fryszman proposed that Cohen Milstein use its cost recovery from the Holocaust litigation to build a practice devoted entirely to human rights. The firm would commit long-term resources to civil claims for people who had been tortured, trafficked, enslaved, or killed, against the corporations and governments responsible.

The partners agreed. Fryszman founded the practice and has chaired it since. When it opened, it was the only practice devoted entirely to human rights at a major American plaintiffs' firm.

Seventeen Years to a Jury

In 2007, Chiquita Brands International pleaded guilty in federal court to knowingly providing material support to a terrorist organization. The company admitted paying the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia — the AUC — from 1997 through 2004. The payments came to nearly $2 million. During those same years the AUC killed thousands of people in the banana-growing regions around Chiquita's most profitable operations.

A criminal plea, however, is not compensation. Families of the dead brought civil claims, and thousands of them consolidated in federal court in the Southern District of Florida, where the litigation sat for seventeen years before any jury heard a word of it.

Fryszman and Leslie Kroeger led Cohen Milstein's trial team in the first bellwether. Their clients were the surviving relatives of eight men: trade unionists, banana workers, political organizers, activists. The plaintiffs had to connect Chiquita's payments to these deaths by showing that the killings were a foreseeable consequence of the company's support for the AUC. Chiquita's defense was that the payments were extorted under imminent threat and that it had no lawful choice.

The trial took six weeks. On June 10, 2024, the jury found Chiquita liable, rejected the duress defense, and awarded $38.3 million.

It was the first time an American jury had held a major American corporation liable for complicity in serious human rights abuses committed in another country. Roughly 4,500 plaintiffs are still waiting for their trial dates.

Seven Villagers and a Second Chance

Seven Cambodian villagers went to Thailand to work in seafood-processing factories. Recruiters charged them fees they could not pay, took their documents, imposed deductions against wages, and left them in a debt that functioned as a fence.

Fryszman was lead counsel in their civil trafficking claims against a California seafood importer that bought from the Thai facilities. The claims alleged that the importer benefited from a venture engaged in forced labor while knowing, or having reason to know, what occurred there. The evidence centered on the importer's audits of those facilities and the company's response to the findings.

After intervening law changed the governing standard, Fryszman's team invoked Rule 60(b)(6) and argued that the existing record would let a reasonable jury find the required knowledge. The Ninth Circuit took the case en banc. In February 2026 it held that the intervening authority displaced the earlier judgment, agreed that a jury could find the required knowledge, and sent the trafficking claims back for further proceedings.

The ruling restored the villagers' opportunity to pursue their claims.

Sheridan Circle

In May 2017, a crowd gathered at Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., outside the Turkish ambassador's residence, to protest the Erdoğan government's treatment of Turkey's Kurdish population during the president's visit. Among them were students, small-business owners, a mother pushing a four-year-old in a stroller, and a seven-year-old girl standing with her father.

President Erdoğan's security detail pushed past a line of American law-enforcement officers and attacked the demonstrators — kicking, stomping, and beating them. Cameras recorded it. Criminal indictments followed. Congress condemned it.

Fifteen of the injured sued. The Republic of Turkey answered that it was immune from suit in American courts. The D.C. Circuit first had to decide whether sovereign immunity barred the claims.

Fryszman argued the appeal. In 2021 the D.C. Circuit held unanimously that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act's tortious-activity exception reached conduct of this kind committed on American soil, and rejected Turkey's political-question and international-comity arguments. The Supreme Court declined review in October 2022, leaving the ruling in place. The district court later entered default.

The Week Before Trial

Eleven Indonesian villagers from Aceh brought claims against ExxonMobil arising from torture and other abuses committed by security forces the company had retained. Fryszman led the litigation team. The case settled one week before trial was set to begin.

She has also represented Nepali laborers killed and injured while working for the United States military abroad.

The Practice

Fryszman is a partner at Cohen Milstein in Washington and founder and chair of its Human Rights practice. The work is logistical before it is legal: her clients are often people for whom testifying carries physical risk, and reaching them at all can require local counsel on three continents.

She has received Public Justice's Trial Lawyer of the Year Award, the Human Trafficking Legal Center's Advocate of the Year Award, and Appleseed's Pillar of Justice award.

In 2025 Georgetown appointed her its Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Chair in Human Rights for the 2025–2026 academic year, and in November she delivered the Drinan Lecture. She called it "Against the Headwinds: Human Rights Lawyering in a Fractured World."

She graduated from Brown and from Georgetown University Law Center, and is admitted in the District of Columbia and New Jersey.

Fryszman's clients had risked their lives to come forward and testify. The verdict did not give them back their husbands and sons. It placed accountability at Chiquita's doorstep, and set the record straight.