The lawyer who became Dupont’s worst nightmare. Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. The farmer, Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, W.Va., said that his cows were dying left and right. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until ...
Jan 10, 2016 · The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare. Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he. and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution. Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer.
Jan 15, 2016 · The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare. by Admin · Published January 15, 2016 · Updated September 19, ... Images jumped and repeated. The sound accelerated and slowed down. It had the quality of a horror movie. In the opening shot the camera pans across the creek. It takes in the surrounding forest, the white ash trees shedding ...
The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s W orst Nightmare Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.
Robert Bilott | |
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Spouse(s) | Sarah Barlage ( m. 1996) |
Children | 3 |
As unbelievable as it may sound, DuPont really did, in the 1960s, offer some of its staff Teflon-laced cigarettes as a human experiment into the potential side effects of the PFOA-produced nonstick material, as the movie recounts. As company scientists noted in internal documents, “Nine out of ten people in the highest-dosed group were noticeably ill for an average of nine hours with flu-like symptoms that included chills, backache, fever, and coughing.”
Late in the film, a disillusioned Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), up against a wall, ...
In real life as in the film, Bilott’s earliest professional experiences after law school were working on behalf of chemical companies for his employer, Taft Stettinius & Hollister, providing the firm’s corporate clients with guidance on how best to comply with the so-called Superfund law passed by Congress in 1980 to regulate sites tainted with hazardous substances. As in the movie, he at first had a cozy relationship with DuPont, though some of the details of the relationship in the movie are invented. For example, the DuPont executive played by Victor Garber, “Phil Donnelly,” seems to be a composite, and the scene where he turns on Bilott, hissing at him, “Fuck you, hick,” appears to be invented.
Similarly, Bilott’s boss, Tom Terp (Tim Robbins), is not on the record as ever having threatened to cut Bilott’s balls off “and feed them to DuPont himself” if his subordinate were to ever again unilaterally send internal documents found via discovery to a federal regulatory agency or speak on his findings to Congress.
As one of Bilott’s colleagues told the New York Times, ‘‘To say that Rob Bilott is understated is an understatement.’’ .
In 2016, the New York Times published an article about Bilott's work, The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare. Of those who read the article, actor Mark Ruffalo, who was curious enough to reach out to Bilott directly about turning his story into a movie. Speaking to Variety, Ruffalo said, "I felt like the article probably couldn’t get ...
November 22, 2019. Robert Bilott always specialized in environmental law , but before 1998 he worked with large corporate clients, helping them understand and obey legislation relating to toxic materials and their release.