· Bryan Schutmaat for The New York Times Feature The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that...
 · The Todd Haynes-directed movie Dark Waters, now playing in theaters, tells the story of how the lawyer, played by Mark Ruffalo, switched allegiances. As happened in real life, the movie depicts...
 · Dark Waters Tells the True Story of the Lawyer Who Took DuPont to Court and Won. But Rob Bilott’s Fight Is Far From Over By Alejandro de la Garza November 25, 2019 12:03 PM EST R ob Bilott, a...
 · 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 …
 · NEW YORK (AP) — A top environmental lawyer, the inspiration for a film starring Mark Ruffalo, has a book coming about his 20-year battle with DuPont. Rob Bilott’s “Exposure” …
$671 million dollarsHis litigation efforts yielded more than $671 million dollars in damages for approximately 3,500 people. DuPont also settled with the EPA, agreeing to pay a mere $16.5 million fine for failure to disclose their findings about C8, a toxin that is now estimated to be present in 98 percent of the world's population.
It wouldn't surprise anyone that a lawyer dogged as Bilott is continuing the same work. He remains at the same law firm he began at, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP, having become a partner back in 1998.
Bilott serves on the board of directors for Less Cancer, the board of trustees for Green Umbrella, and served on the alumni board for New College of Florida from 2018-2021.
Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLPBilott | People | Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP.
The other companies named in the suit — the 3M Company, Dyneon, the Chemours Company, Archroma, Arkema, AGC, Daikin Industries and Solvay Specialty Polymers — did not respond to requests for comment.
The logic of Bilott’s new suit is to force chemical companies to pay to find answers. Rather than seeking monetary damages for the millions of Americans with PFAS in their blood, the lawsuit demands the Chemours and the other chemical companies pay for an independent science panel to definitively establish the health effects of PFAS.
Bilott used to be on the other side. The Todd Haynes-directed movie Dark Waters, now playing in theaters, tells the story of how the lawyer, played by Mark Ruffalo, switched allegiances. As happened in real life, the movie depicts Ruffalo’s Bilott as a lawyer who defends large chemical companies before he is approached for help in 1998 by Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), a West Virginia farmer whose land was contaminated by chemical giant DuPont. Inflamed by that injustice, and the complicity of local authorities, the lawyer risks his career as he embarks on a decades-long legal siege of one of America’s most powerful corporations. He works, at first, on Tennant’s behalf, then pursues a class action suit representing around 70,000 people living near a chemical plant that allegedly contaminated drinking water with PFOA, a toxic chemical used in the production of Teflon. In recent years, studies have correlated long-term exposure to PFOA with a number of illnesses, including some types of cancer.
He works, at first, on Tennant’s behalf, then pursues a class action suit representing around 70,000 people living near a chemical plant that allegedly contaminated drinking water with PFOA, a toxic chemical used in the production of Teflon.
As happened in real life, the movie depicts Ruffalo’s Bilott as a lawyer who defends large chemical companies before he is approached for help in 1998 by Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), a West Virginia farmer whose land was contaminated by chemical giant DuPont.
In a statement, DuPont defended its safety and environmental record, and said that it does not produce PFAS chemicals, though it does use them. “We are leading the industry by supporting federal legislation and science-based regulatory efforts to address these chemicals,” the company wrote in an email.
Philippe Grandjean, a professor of environmental health at Harvard, conducted a study that appeared to suggest that babies exposed to PFAS could suffer impaired immune-system development. “I fell off the chair,” says Dr. Grandjean. “When I looked at those data it was mind-boggling.”.
Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he#N#took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career —#N#and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.
Wilbur Tennant explained that he and his four siblings had run the cattle farm since their father abandoned them as children. They had seven cows then. Over the decades they steadily acquired land and cattle, until 200 cows roamed more than 600 hilly acres. The property would have been even larger had his brother Jim and Jim’s wife, Della, not sold 66 acres in the early ’80s to DuPont. The company wanted to use the plot for a landfill for waste from its factory near Parkersburg, called Washington Works, where Jim was employed as a laborer. Jim and Della did not want to sell, but Jim had been in poor health for years, mysterious ailments that doctors couldn’t diagnose, and they needed the money.
Bilott is known for the lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of plaintiffs from West Virginia. Bilott has spent more than twenty years litigating hazardous dumping of the chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS).
After Bilott discovered that thousands of tons of DuPont's PFOA had been dumped into the landfill next to the Tennants' property and that DuPont's PFOA was contaminating the surrounding community's water supply, DuPont settled the Tennants' case. In August 2001, Bilott filed a class action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of the approximately 70,000 people in West Virginia and Ohio with PFOA-contaminated drinking water, which was settled in September 2004, with class benefits valued at over $300 million, including DuPont agreeing to install filtration plants in the six affected water districts and dozens of impacted private wells, a cash award of $70 million, and provisions for future medical monitoring to be paid by DuPont up to $235 million, if an independent science panel confirmed "probable links" between PFOA in the drinking water and human disease. After the independent scientific panel jointly selected by the parties (but required under the settlement to be paid for by DuPont) found that there was a probable link between drinking PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia, and ulcerative colitis, Bilott began opening individual personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of affected users of the Ohio and West Virginia water supplies, which by 2015 numbered over 3,500. After winning the first three for $19.7 million, in 2017 DuPont agreed to settle the remainder of the then-pending cases for $671.7 million. Dozens of additional cases filed after the 2017 settlement were settled in 2021 for an additional $83 million (announced in conjunction with a $4 billion settlement between DuPont and its spin-off, Chemours, over PFAS liabilities), bringing the total settlement value in the personal injury cases for those exposed to PFOA in their drinking water to over $753 million.
Bilott was admitted to the Bar in 1990 and began his law practice at Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP in Cincinnati, Ohio For eight years he worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients and his specialty was defending chemical companies. He became a partner at the firm in 1998.
Bilott represented Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, West Virginia whose cattle were dying. The farm was downstream from a landfill where DuPont had been dumping hundreds of tons of perfluorooctanoic acid. In the summer of 1999, Bilott filed a federal suit against DuPont in the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia. In response, DuPont advised that DuPont and the United States Environmental Protection Agency would commission a study of the farmer's property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the Environmental Protection Agency. When the report was released, it blamed the Tennants for the dying cattle claiming that poor husbandry was responsible: "poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control."
Robert Bilott is the author of the acclaimed memoir Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, published in 2019 by Atria Books. The audio book version (also available through Atria Books) is narrated by Jeremy Bobb with the first chapter narrated by Mark Ruffalo.
In response, DuPont advised that DuPont and the United States Environmental Protection Agency would commission a study of the farmer's property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Bilott's story also became the basis for Dark Waters, a 2019 film starring Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, and Anne Hathaway as Bilott's wife, Sarah Barlage.