Les Jones

Environment > Michael Fumento Factchecks Erin Brockovich's Ass

In light of an award bestowed on her by the Harvard School of Public Health, Michael Fumento recalls some of Erin Brockovich's untruths over her legal career. Sample:

Brockovich also insisted that air samplings collected by a lab she'd hired showed massive levels of benzene, a human carcinogen. "When they came back I said, 'I can't believe this.' So we went four times, five times, six times," Brockovich claimed. "And each time we were getting the same results."

But the regional air quality authority conducted its own tests and found no high levels of any toxic pollutant. As it happens, neither had she. Her lab's data, which the city was forced to subpoena, showed benzene levels ranging from low to unmeasurable.

This isn't the first criticism of Brockovich or the case that made her famous. The science in that case was without basis.

Earlier, a panel evaluating exposed residents near a New Jersey landfill "estimated that the plausible incremental cancer risk to individuals at residential sites would be substantially less than one in 1,000,000." In a town like Hinkley, with fewer than 1,000 residents, that's less than a tenth of one percent of a tumour. In a town like Hinkley with fewer than a 1,000 residents, the odds are astronomical that even one chromium-6 cancer would show up.

Coincidentally, a study by Blot and others just published in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine evaluated almost 52,000 workers who worked at three PG&E plants over a quarter of a century. One was the Hinkley plant, another is near Kettleman, Calif., where Miss Brockovich's firm is also rounding up plaintiffs. The researchers found that not only was there no excess of cancer when compared to the general California population, but that the overall PG&E worker death rate was significantly much lower than those of other Californians.

The relationship between the plaintiff's lawyers and the arbitration judges who made the 333 million dollar settlement was ethically questionable

Additionally, it later developed that the two L.A. lawyers who teamed with Brockovich’s firm to handle the case, Thomas Girardi and Walter Lack, were on unusually friendly terms with some of the judges in the arbitration, who had joined the arbitration firm JAMS after retiring from the regular California bench. One judge had officiated at Girardi’s second wedding, another had flown in Girardi’s Gulfstream to attend the World Series, and so forth. Laurence Janssen, a partner in the L.A. office of the Washington law firm Steptoe &Johnson, told Sharp: "I became aware that I should absolutely stay away from JAMS or its retired judges when it came to any dealing with Tom Girardi …The common lore imparted to me was that it would be crazy to get in front of any JAMS arbitration with Girardi."

Not long after the case was settled, generating $133 million in lawyers’ fees, Girardi and Lack just happened to invite the three Hinkley case arbitrators to join a week-long Mediterranean cruise for 90 guests, including 11 public and private judges, on a chartered ship. "One judge," reports Sharp, "called it ‘absolutely incredible.’" A luxury yacht floated on azure waters; tuxedoed butlers balanced silver trays of free champagne; young bikini-clad ladies frolicked on the sun-splashed deck, according to retired Judge [William] Schoettler, who was a guest. As another bare-chested judge remarked at the time: ‘This gives decadence a bad name.’"

The distribution of the settlement between the plaintiff's lawyers and the plaintiffs was heavily contested.

Now, many of the townspeople who sued complain their awards were smaller than they deserved. Some have even hired lawyers to get back excessive legal fees charged to children. They say the attorneys kept their awards for six months after the settlement money was delivered, and that they didn't receive interest on it. They complain that there was little or no apparent logic behind the varying amounts of money individual plaintiffs received; some claim that the arbitrators never even looked at their medical records.

Brockovich seems an unlikely candidate for an award from Harvard.