Robert Bilott

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Robert Bilott: There tends to be too much segregation among lawyers. Even after the trial where we had finally laid all this out, nobody was paying attention. This public health threat was still going completely unnoticed. I think a lot of folks were thinking, they’ll retract the standards for PFOA and PFOS. They did not.

Narrator: Welcome to “Celebrating Justice,” presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal and CloudLex. The next gen legal cloud platform built exclusively for personal injury law. Get inspired by the nation’s top trial lawyers and share in the stories that shape our pursuit of justice. Follow the podcast and join our community at www.triallawyersjournal.com. Now, here’s your host, Editor of TLJ and VP of Marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.

Chad Sands: Take your time. This is your origin story and I would love to hear why you wanted to become a trial lawyer?

Robert Bilott: Quite honestly, I didn’t necessarily start out wanting to be a trial lawyer. I didn’t even start out wanting to be a lawyer. I was thinking I was going to be an architect for a long time as a kid. Then when I went to college, I thought, yeah, I’m going to be a city planner. And when I was graduating college, I was actually got accepted into graduate school programs to get a master’s in public administration and head in that direction.

It was actually at that point in time, my dad was graduating from law school. He had been in the Air Force for 20 years and had retired and was thinking, you know, I could do the regular retiree path and go work for a defense contractor and all that. And he said, you know, I’ve always wanted to be Perry Mason.

Yeah, it was his favorite show when he was growing up and he thought, “You know, I’m just going to, I’m going to do it. I’m going to go to law school.” So he actually was going to law school when I was graduating and he had just started out in, in right about the time I was thinking of going to grad school and called me and said, hey, you know, you ought to, you ought to think about at least go take the law school admissions test. You know, think about law school. A law degree can give you so many more options and opportunities.

I thought, you know, I really had never thought of that. Really never thought about being a lawyer. Nobody in our family had ever been a lawyer. My dad was just starting out. I had no idea what lawyers would do or what that was about. But I went and took the LSAT and ended up in law school. Yeah. So I did a bit of a switch there and went to law school. And when I was graduating in 1990, interviewed around and got an offer from a firm in Cincinnati, the Taft law firm.

Chad Sands: No way.

Robert Bilott: Where I’m still at. It’s almost 36 years now. At that point in time, they had an environmental group. Again, I had no idea what that meant, what an environmental group did or what was involved. That was one class I had had in law school I thought was fairly interesting. It was environmental law. It was of an overview of the different environmental rules and laws. And so I thought, I’ll join that and see what that’s about. So in 1990, I joined our environmental group. And at the time, a lot of what the Taft law firm was doing was actually what you’d call corporate defense, right? We were representing big companies, a lot of big chemical companies. And so really for the first eight years of my career, I was working with these big companies, helping navigate all of these environmental laws and rules, helping them get permits, doing super fun cleanups all over the country.

And I guess was doing it well enough that by 1998, I was becoming a partner at the firm. And so I, it looked like my career path was pretty straightforward. Yeah, I was working with these big companies and really on the defense side here. And then kind of all changed. One day in 1998, when I got a call from a gentleman who identified himself as Mr. Tennant, in West Virginia, who was looking for help with dying cows. And of course, that was not something I did at the time. I had no idea why he was calling me. It was about to hang up the phone when he’d mentioned, he’d actually gotten my name from my grandmother. As I mentioned, my dad was in the Air Force, so we moved around a lot. But my mom had grown up in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and her whole family was there.

And that’s where Mr. Tennant was calling me from. And apparently he had been talking to local lawyers, trying to get somebody to help him figure out what was going on with the cows. None of the lawyers locally wanted to get involved. So his neighbor had been on the phone with my grandmother that day who said, hey, my grandson’s an environmental lawyer. He can help you. So I listened to that story. I thought, okay, well, you know, my grandmother’s somehow involved here. I better at listen.

That telephone conversation with Mr. Tennant ended up completely changing the trajectory of my legal career. What began with that phone call turned into what became almost now three decades of now working on the plaintiff’s side and working with folks who’ve been injured by chemicals getting into the environment. Quite a, not necessarily your direct path to trial lawyer on the plaintiff’s side.

Chad Sands: Did your dad complete law school and become a lawyer?

Robert Bilott: He did. He graduated from the University of Dayton and became a prosecutor. Did up working for the city of Dayton, Ohio for the next several decades and being a prosecutor. And, you know, that was so different from what I was doing at Taft. At least in my early career, I’m doing a lot of these big cases that are lasting a long time. I’m digging through documents and trying to piece together, know, histories of what companies set waste to these sites and kind of a lot of very detailed, long, drawn out cases. And I remember going to visit him and going into court to watch him. You know, in his day was very different. He walked into, every day he walked into court and, and you know, he’d have a stack of cases and you know, they’d be going through daily communications with the judge, with the court personnel, just very different paths. And he loved it and did it for decades. It wasn’t until much later that I got to do that.

Chad Sands: Yes, actually get into the courtroom. Your dad, it sounded like your dad was in the courtroom almost every day. Other than the guy who took on DuPont for over 20 years, but we’ll chat about that more. I always like to ask on the podcast, what makes you unique as a trial lawyer? What makes you kind of separate yourself from everyone else?

Robert Bilott: Well, I think to some degree, I kind of came into this sort of kicking and screaming. I was always very, at least as a kid and through college and law school, sort of the one who’d sit in the back, very quiet. I didn’t want to get up and talk. I didn’t want to be the one standing up in front of everybody. And even through my legal career, I preferred being in the background. I preferred being the one doing all the digging through the documents and putting the briefs together and doing all of that. And it wasn’t until much later in my career, you know, that I really sort of had my eyes open to this aspect of the law, you know, standing in the courtroom in front of juries and watching, you know, the incredibly skilled trial lawyers that we were working with, folks like Mike Papantonio, Gary Douglas, you know, folks that were able to really take all of this detail.

All this stuff I’d been putting together for years and years and weave it into a story. Being able to actually convey that to a jury in a way that they understood and saw the big picture and got the point. And I found that fascinating and really, it was really attracted to the whole storytelling aspect of it. And that kind of led sort of kicking and screaming into this other aspect of my career. I started working with other storytellers, filmmakers, folks putting documentaries together, working on a book, working on a feature film with Hollywood folks, morphing into this other aspect of the law. I had sort of grown up with this idea and training that lawyers are supposed to do things a certain way.

You stay in your lane, you’re in the courtroom and you do things by filing things in briefs and you submit it to the court. And really over the years learned there are many different ways to be representing your clients and to really bring these stories out. And it’s not just through the courtroom, it’s by doing things like films and public speaking and talking with lawmakers and with storytellers.

It’s been a real sort of radical transition over the years from somebody who sort of like to stay in the back row and not speak to, I’m now speaking to large groups almost every other day. So it’s quite a change.

Chad Sands: Before we get to the DuPont and the Wilbert Tennant case, could you share another story about a case that had an impact on you? And maybe it was from those early days when you were doing corporate defense, or maybe it was one of the PFOA cases or clients that didn’t get a movie made about them or isn’t in a book, but you had and maybe went to trial and think about that family that you could share?

Robert Bilott: It’s interesting and easy to kind of step back again after, gosh, doing this now 35 plus years and look back on the history of it and look back at my early days of my career. One of the very first trials I was involved in was actually defending a company that was being accused of creating some pollution and noise and other problems that were impacting the local residents around the facility.

And just remember back then, you know, as the defense lawyers, we were very focused on, you know, well, legally, this is not required and legally, you know, this is not happening and, you know, sort of not really paying as much attention to what the actual impact was to these folks and what the impact of that was. You look back at that now and you just, I can see, I think it was incredibly helpful training for me.

Being on both sides, so to speak, over the years, because I got to learn where the companies were coming from, where the corporate defendants, where their mind was as far as the things that were of concern to them, the financial aspects, the shareholder concerns, the public relations issues, also to start to understand where these folks that are bringing the claims are coming from, what’s going on there.

That was so critically important, to be able to have that experience and be able to see both sides, because it’s helped tremendously over the years in being able to reach pretty innovative and effective settlements between people on both ends of the spectrum, so to speak, understanding where both are coming from. I think, unfortunately, the way our legal system is set up, there tends to be too much segregation among lawyers, in my view.

You know, people that are told you have to be quote on one side or the other. And you know, I’m a firm believer and that is not the way you should have a broad experience because it helps you represent folks much better on both sides.

Chad Sands: I’ve talked to a lot of trial lawyers who start on the defense and then move to the plaintiff side, similar to you. It’s just they don’t do it while staying at the same firm. So that I think is something very unique about you and that they also say that, that their time on the defense brought this different skill set to when they started representing plaintiffs.

So let’s talk about your 30 year journey that started with this New York Times Magazine piece, The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare, and was the seed for Dark Waters. I guess, first of all, how did New York Magazine kind of come knocking on your door?

Robert Bilott: That was an interesting period of time. We had spent many years fighting with DuPont and setting up this very kind of complex, kind of unique process where we were trying to have independent scientists address a general causation piece for whether people were being made sick by a chemical. That had finally played itself out and the folks who’d been exposed were finally sort of getting their ability to move forward with claims against DuPont for having been made sick by these chemicals. And we were finally taking the first cases to trial where the story was being laid out to the public for the first time. And, I think finally, I was sort of naive at the time thinking, we’re finally here. We’re finally getting to the point where this whole story is going to be laid out in a public courtroom. People are going to see this. And finally, the regulators are going to finally start taking action. The lawmakers, the public will become aware of this. And people will start to realize this isn’t just happening here in West Virginia. This is the same chemical that’s now all over the country. It’s in everybody. That would get the story out. And I think what we saw was that wasn’t happening.

That even after the trial where we had finally laid all this out, nobody was paying attention. This public health threat was still going completely unnoticed. And it was around that time that I was contacted by this reporter, Nathaniel Rich, who said he wanted to do an interview, that he was working with the New York Times Magazine. I frankly was very hesitant about any of that.

Chad Sands: You know back then maybe you because you always like to stay in the background.

Robert Bilott: Exactly. And I had no idea, you know, what angle he was coming from, whether this was going to be just a big hit job. You know, I had no idea and was very reluctant about doing that. And I had always been told, you know, you shouldn’t be talking with media. Then and, you know, then it finally kind of hit me that this public health threat is still not being addressed. And, you know, if, if, if sitting down with this guy, if we’re able to maybe get the story out, maybe it’s worth it, you know? And so I kind of, you know, took the risk, kind of bit my tongue and said, okay, I’ll sit down with you and did the interview and really had no idea what was going to transpire from that. And, you know, what ended up being published, I was sort of blown away. He ended up putting an article together that ended up on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 2016. And then not only that, I was just floored.

By the reaction. I had never before had people starting to email me, people reaching out saying, we want to know more about this. How is this happening? And what’s going on? And it was sort of overwhelming. And one of the people that read that article and reacted was floored saying, how is this happening? It was Mark Ruffalo. It was? Yes. He had read that article.

At the time, he was involved in a lot of environmental issues, water issues, and he was shocked because he had never heard about any of this. And his concern was, wait a minute, how is this happening? And why is nobody talking about this? Why is it on the cover of the New York Times Magazine? Why isn’t it on the cover of the New York Times? How do we get this story out? It was his idea to put together a feature film to do that.

Once again, my reaction was, whoa, whoa, know, I’m a lawyer. I don’t do, you know, I’m not supposed to do that. I don’t know anything about that. But again, you know, sitting back and thinking about it, you know, if this is if this is what it would take to help get that story out, then it was worth the risk. And he was committed to doing it the right way, making sure we stuck to the facts. I after all, these were real people.

We’re going to be talking about. This was a real law firm that still existed and my real managing partner and real people. And so if we were going to do it, I wanted to make sure that we were doing with people that were going to do it the right way and that we’re going to stick to the facts. Ended up, they did a fantastic job, but that was a bizarre chain of events.

Chad Sands: It sounds like it was Mark who kind of spearheaded making the movie itself.

Robert Bilott: Yeah, he was instrumental in putting all that together, putting the team together. He was the producer and became, you know, he actually then starred in it. So he was very passionate about it.

Chad Sands: In the movie, Wilbur kind of walks into your law firm’s reception office and you had just been announced that you had made partner. But actually in the article, you kind of read more of how it plays out. And obviously when you’re making a movie that spans over 20 years and you’re compressing it down into two hours, you’re going to have these consolidations. And there’s dozens of other examples in that, I think, throughout the movie.

I was curious, you know, what it was like seeing your story on in a movie for the first time, you know, when you sat down in that theater or watch the DVD screener. What was it like?

Robert Bilott: Sort of surreal experience, that’s for sure. You know, I got to actually be there throughout the filming. Right. Yeah. In our offices. And so I got to see it being put together. You know, my sons got to be there and got to be in the background and cameos in our family. And so we got to see it being pieced together, which was an incredible process. And then to sit down and see it for the first time, I still remember we went to the studio.

Put together a screening force in Cincinnati for just the family to see it. I’m sitting there watching it. And I still remember one of my sons, they’re sitting in front of us. He had turned around and, you know, because they were growing up during this whole process. And I remember my oldest turning around saying, that’s what was going on. It’s like, yeah, I get it. And one of the others said, know, Mark nailed you. So I get the feeling that he did a good job.

Chad Sands: Did you meet with him a lot beforehand? You know, cause actors like to kind of get into the method acting or try and capture the character. I thought he did, you know, this excellent job of kind of creating this version of what felt real and his like mannerisms and characteristics. Like, did he spend a lot of time with you beforehand in terms of just trying to capture you as a character?

Robert Bilott: He did. Came out. We spent a lot of time at the house. He was frankly living here in Cincinnati throughout the filming. And we spent a lot of time together. Anne Hathaway was at the house to meet with my wife, Sarah, and just to see her mannerisms as well. And so we spent a lot of time together. And we drove out to Parkersburg together and looked at the places there. And so there was a lot of time, a lot of time, and just a tremendous guy.

Chad Sands: He, you know, everyone did a great job on the film. I thought I’ve seen it a couple of times and in a good movie, you know, there’s always the end of act two, which is kind of the lowest point where all hope is lost. And it might be simple to identify that and kind of say, well, here’s the lowest point in this two hour movie. But you had to deal with this for for decades. And not only you, your family, your wife, you said your kids, obviously you had to grow up with you just spending all of this time and energy and effort. It kind of reminds me a little bit about the Russell Crowe movie, The Insider. I don’t know if you remember that, but like just this idea of this character in person in real life too, that example that is risking almost everything, you know, your health, your marriage, obviously your career at Taft going to the partners and saying, hey, what if we become plaintiff attorneys? Was there one moment or a couple moments throughout those times where you felt like you had to walk away and that if you did what pulled you back in.

Robert Bilott: Yeah, I never felt like I needed to walk away. It was incredibly stressful. You see, we captured some of that in the film. Frankly, a lot got actually cut. The film had almost an additional hour that ended up being taken out at the end. A lot of it was during that period of time. I go into a lot more detail about that in my book to exposure. Just what was going on within the law firm, what was going on in the economy, the pressures.

You have to keep in mind a lot of this was happening, particularly a lot of the waiting around for, what’s going to happen on the science? Are we going to be able to prove that this chemical that DuPont was putting in everybody’s water was actually making people sick? That process started around 2006. It didn’t end until 2012. And I think a lot of folks forget what was going on during that period of time. We had the economic meltdown.

Happening. And there were a lot of economic pressures, particularly, you know, including in law firms during that time. And so here we are with, you know, this kind of never ending sucking sound of, know, we’re still paying experts at hours that we haven’t built on monitoring this process and reviewing the science and working with experts. And meanwhile, the economy is falling apart around us. And you see some of that captured in the film because there were real stresses and it was very difficult. I think I never really thought all this is stop. Maybe there were folks that were hoping we would, know, that, hey, you know, that we’ve had enough. But, you know, so many things lined up just the right way, you know, throughout this process, one of them being when Mr. Tennant first came to our offices in 1998, the head of our environmental group, Tom Terp.

Actually was able to come in and sit and meet with Mr. Tennant, watch the films. So he was in part of the decision to take that case on, right? He was there from the very first day that we decided to do it. Well, he actually became managing partner of the whole law firm later and he was the managing partner when the economy is coming, you know, imploding. So he was firmly the belief that no, we’re going to stick through this. I don’t know if there were others who hadn’t had a similar experience would have shared that view. It was not an easy process to live through. Throughout that, though, I kept kind of hearing in the back of my mind, know, somebody like Mr. Tennant, who kept saying, if people will see the can see these facts, and this this evidence comes out, and we were convinced, you know, when the scientists look at this, they’re going to see the same things we saw because DuPont itself was seeing this in the documents. This is a problem. We get that story out, things will change. And so I kept hearing that in the back of my mind, if we can just stick it through, once this comes, once this information comes out, we’ll see a change. And it took us a long time to get there, but Mr. Tennant was right.

Chad Sands: Yeah, there’s that scene in the movie when the discovery comes in, you know, over 100,000 pages, all of these bankers boxes and you’re in this dark basement or whatever going through all of those materials. What was it kind of like to sit alone and kind of be the person who’s kind of uncovering that story that was in DuPont’s own, you know, documents and you kind of were the one who were able to write the script or tell the story of what had gone on so long by going through all of those documents.

Robert Bilott: Now it’s been millions of pages. Right. Right. Keep in mind, these cases have gone on and on and we’ve had additional cases and additional discovery. It’s been millions and millions of pages of documents. And I know a lot of young lawyers, you know, they see that you don’t get boxes. But you have to keep in mind the timing, right? I mean, this is the late 1990s. It’s before everything started getting put on computers. So we would still get physical hard copy paper. And, you know, I guess I’m a little unusual in the sense that I like going through those files. I mean, as I mentioned, you know, when I first started out, a lot of what I was doing was going through these old files for cleanup sites across the country and trying to piece together which companies sent what waste when and you know, what was the history there. I kind of enjoyed doing that and all that difficult for me to sit down with all this paper. And again, the way I like to see things is chronologically. So I had to put everything together and I had an incredible paralegal, Kathleen Welch, who’s still working with us. She’s featured in the film as well. Just sort of our document wizard was able to put all this stuff together. And so that was a process that actually I found fascinating, through these documents. But honestly, when I started doing that, I wasn’t necessarily believing what Mr. Tennant was saying, that the other company is hiding something and they’re working in cahoots with the EPA and there’s a cover-up.

That was not my experience, all right, working with our other clients. But when I started to actually go through these documents and started to see that the company itself was saying these things, that’s when everything started to change for me, when I could see the company itself, their own lawyers, their own scientists saying that this is bad stuff and, but we better not say anything about it.

That then everything started to change and it became a bigger task of how do we get that story out to folks so that they don’t react the way I did initially when Mr. Tennant told me and just say, you know, that can’t possibly be happening and you’re over-exaggerating. No, you know, this is really happening. And I think eventually the strategy we came up with was stick to the facts, get the actual documents and the actual statements out so people can see them themselves and see that, this is what happened.

Chad Sands: I have to ask you because I think a lot of the young lawyers today would be saying, can we just scan all these pages into AI platform and have the AI kind of go through it all and then just summarize it for us?

Robert Bilott: You’re gonna get me started on one of my pet peeves here. And I’ll tell you, I always bring this up when I’m talking to law students at law school. And I have a firm believer in this. I do not think that we would have uncovered all of this if the same case started today because of the way the discovery rules all have changed over the years. I mean, back when this case started in the late 1990s, you could, in my view, you could actually engage in discovery. You could go look through files trying to find the information you need. And you would get the actual hard copy documents and you be able to look through them yourself. If Mr. Tennant walked in my office today and I was going to try to file a case against DuPont for what was going on with his landfill, I would have to sit down with DuPont at the beginning of the case and come up with a list of agreed search terms for them, all right? I wouldn’t just get all their documents turned over to me, or I wouldn’t be told, oh, come, go through our files. I would have to sit down and come up with agreed search terms of exactly what I was looking for, and then DuPont would only search for documents that mentioned those terms. Now think about that. I had no idea what chemical we were talking about, let alone that they used eight different ways of referring to the chemical. So I would never have gotten these documents.

So to me, that’s very concerning because now the discovery is almost, you know, it’s almost an oxymoron to use that word discovery. It’s almost as if you have to know already what you’re looking for before the process begins. So in a case like this, where you had something that was being covered up, it makes it almost impossible.

Chad Sands: And that’s just how the states and courts have changed the kind of idea of what discovery is and the definition of that and how the two sides can need to, as I guess you said, come to an agreement beforehand and then it can start where back then it was just no, you guys have to turn everything over.

Robert Bilott: Well, you had to ask for things within certain bounds, obviously, back in the original days now. But now, because everything shifted to these computer systems and all, you have to be much more narrow and much more focused going in. And again, it’s fine for cases where you know exactly what you need from the other side. And you know what the words are that they use. But a case like this, where you didn’t know that there was a chemical that you didn’t know the name of, it makes it almost impossible.

Chad Sands: So you’ve been again in the trenches for this for almost 30 years. What advice do you have for other trial lawyers who are fighting their own battles, you know, maybe not going up against DuPont, right? But they have their own clients and cases. How do you know when the case is worth the risk? Or how do you say maybe when this one is in mind to win?

Robert Bilott: Yeah. Well, I think, again, you know, when I’m speaking with law students and the concept, I guess I’d like these young folks going, starting out to keep in mind is be willing to take those risks, be willing to step out of the comfort zone, so to speak, just because we’ve always done things a certain way. And just because the law says you’re supposed to do it this particular way, or that’s the way the legal system’s always handled it, you know, as lawyers.

Again, going back to what my dad said at the very beginning, that law degree gives you an opportunity to do a lot of things. And one of those things, having that law degree, gives you is the ability to create new ways of handling these legal problems and changing the legal system, improving the law. And what we see, for example, with this litigation I’ve been involved in with these chemicals, called PFAS, forever chemical. We had to come up with new ways of dealing with that. There were evolution of new types of tort claims, like medical monitoring. There were new ways of trying to address how do we prove general causation, that a chemical can cause disease. And well, it’s always been done this way with experts. Well, why don’t we try doing it this way? Let’s do it with scientists outside the court system. Then we come back into the court.

Be willing to do that, be willing to innovate and to say, you know, let’s try something different. And in the end, you end up, I think, improving the legal system.

Chad Sands: Excellent. Yes. In 2024, the Biden administration kind of finalized, I guess, the first federal drinking standards for PFAS. What did that moment kind of mean for you? And not to get too political, but like, how do you think it went far enough? And do you have these fears of what might happen to those protections now?

Robert Bilott: Well, you know, that’s been a long process, right? And it’s been an incredibly difficult process. And again, one of the reasons why I say, you know, as lawyers, we can help improve this process. Because if you step back and look at the problem with the PFAS chemicals, and when we talk about PFAS, P-F-A-S, that’s the family of all these manmade chemicals that have a carbon fluorine bond, all right? There could be thousands in that family of PFAS, P-F-A-S.

And two of them, two of those in the family are PFOA and PFOS. All right. So it’s like the banana and the orange in the fruit category. Those two are the two that we have been working on, you know, for all these years, developing the science, proving, for example, PFOA can cause disease. And so once we finally were able to show that we were finally able to push this through the regulatory process to where, as you mentioned, something happened that I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, where the top agency in the United States is finally recognizing, you know, what the companies had seen decades ago, that these these two chemicals, PFOA and PFOS, are carcinogens, they’re toxic, they they’re dangerous to be in our drinking water.

Chad Sands: Yes.

Robert Bilott: And we are finally going to regulate those. I think I first sent my letter to EPA asking them to do that in 2001. It took us 25 years to get to the point where they’re actually doing it. And it’s only happening because the public finally found out through the movies, through all of this, and got engaged and demanded it happen. So we finally get to that point.

That was incredible, right? To see the US EPA come out and say, we are officially going to do this now, and we’re going to declare them hazardous under the Superfund law, which was another huge deal. And so that was an incredible moment to see that happen. It took decades to get there. And I know there’s been concern as the administration’s changed. Maybe that’s going to get repealed. Keep in mind, this has been a problem over multiple administrations, both parties going over decades. What we see, I think, is finally, what we got through all of the science that was done independently and all the stuff, all the story finally coming out was bipartisan recognition. This is a health threat to the public. It’s not now seen, I think, as much of this as, this is a left-wing environmental issue. This is a public health issue that both sides, so to speak, now recognize. And, you know, keep in mind, we had Bobby Kennedy Jr. was on our legal team, all right, the DuPont cases. And he understands the problem with PFAS. I’ve been on his podcast a couple of times talking about the PFAS problem. It’s understood this is a health threat. And so even when the new administration came in, I think a lot of folks were thinking, they’ll retract the standards for PFOA and PFOS. They did not. They reaffirmed, no, we’re going to stick with those standards, which are essentially zero. The goal is zero for these chemicals in the drinking water. So I think what we see here is the science in those facts that Mr. Tennant was talking about. If people could just see those facts for themselves, that has been effective in convincing people, including the scientific community and lawmakers, this is not a political issue. This is not a left or a right issue. It’s a public health issue. And hopefully we keep going in that direction.

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Explore what’s possible at www.cloudlex.com. Now here is this episode’s “Closing Argument.”

Robert Bilott: What is still troubling is these chemicals that we’ve been talking about, that we were dealing with in West Virginia and Ohio, gosh, 30 years ago. These are the same chemicals that are being found in the drinking water, the soil, the air, plants and animals and in people all over the planet.

It’s the same chemicals. It’s the same science. Here it took us decades in the United States to finally recognize that and to finally start restricting them and phasing them out. Well, what’s frustrating is when these same chemicals turn up in the water in Japan or in Australia or in Italy, you have communities there that are looking at it saying, know, gee, this is something new and gosh, I guess we’ve got to start studying this.

And what I’ve been trying to do is try to make sure that people understand, no, we have this history. We have this data that we should be able to use for everyone, regardless of where it’s found. So that’s still an ongoing effort is to make sure people understand what they’re finding now is the same stuff we’ve been dealing with for decades. And to hope that folks stay focused on the fact that we do have the science.

Because what’s still going on is you have the makers of these chemicals still actively trying to mislead the public, mislead lawmakers, trying to keep other countries from regulating these, saying, we just don’t know enough about the chemicals. No, we do. And we’ve spent many years, and we even have the top agency in the US now agreeing. So doing what we can to make sure that the rest of the folks in the world are exposed to this understand this is all the same stuff. And we do know enough to begin moving forward and regulating it. I think we’re making progress.

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