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Erin Brockovich-Ellis
Director of Environmental Research Masry & Vititoe Law Offices
Answers to Questions from the Audience
Q: How accurate was the movie, and were you really able to remember all of the victim's personal histories?
A: I can still go through all 634 plaintiffs. I learned to do that because of my dyslexia. I had no real coping skills; I could not read and comprehend in my brain the way a lot of you do.
So I learned most of everything in my life by memorization, and it paid off for me in Hinkley. I've been able to read documents and I scan, and I know what I'm looking for I operate off a hunch. I can be on page 550 and stop and go, "Wait a minute, that's not what they said on page 69," and go back and find the exact thing, because as I'm scanning, I'm memorizing.
Is the movie accurate? Yes. It's about 98 to 99 percent accurate. They took very, very few liberties. One of the liberties was, I was not Miss Wichita, I was actually Miss Pacific Coast, right here in California. Steven Soderbergh thought it would be cute since I was from Kansas to throw that in there.
Do you remember the scene where Julia Roberts tells one of those snot-nosed defense attorneys, "We had that water brought in special for you folks"? I love that scene. It happened but in a different context. It happened in a court of law.
What a lot of people don't understand, and sometimes I get disgruntled because I think PG&E wants you to believe there was no trial there was a trial, there was a very good trial. And, based on our evidence, PG&E got just what they deserved.
There was an expert on the witness stand who had been touting that he was drinking hexavalent chromium with no health effects, so while he was on the witness stand Mr. Girardi, who had him under cross, brought out a bottle of hexavalent chromium. He set it on the table and asked the expert to drink it. The expert said no. Mr. Girardi said, "Why not?" and the expert said, "Because I don't know what's in the water." Girardi said, "No one in Hinkley knew what was in their water either; drink it."
I've got to tell you that by this point the judge was riveted and he was leaning over the bench and he goes, "Drink it, damn it!" He wouldn't, so the judge threw out his $7 million groundwater model and his testimony.
You can sit here all day long and argue with me about chromium 6 and its adverse health effects versus ingestion, inhalation, dermal exposure frankly I don't care. Chromium 6 is a poison, and you are not supposed to drink it.
Q: When the investigation seemed too personally costly to pursue, how did you get though those times, what did you tell yourself?
A: Ed Masry and I have had a great balance as a relationship: When I'm down, he's up, and when he's down, I'm up. I remember specifically a day that was very daunting, and we didn't think we were going to get through this because everybody told Mr. Masry, "You will not get past the statute of limitations." I was sitting in a conference room with Ed and he said, "What do you think, kid?"
Ed's very good at taking in different aspects, different information, going different avenues; he's got that rebel kind of behavior, which is why we get along so well. I said, "You know, Ed, if I was an attorney, and as I sit here today and look at all of your law books, how do you think that case law came to be?
Somebody went out on a limb; somebody went the extra mile, to make it a law. What do we have to lose? We're doing the right thing, for some wonderful people, and we have great evidence.
So you just go for it." That's the decision we made, based on the health and welfare of these people; we had nothing to lose.
So when we get down and out, we still have that same philosophy and that same mindset. You can go out there and make a big difference, and so what if you go out there and make a big difference but it doesn't turn out financially the way you wanted it; you still did the right thing.
Q: Your personal health has been compromised because of some of the investigations that you've done with chemicals. How has that affected the way you see victims of environmental contamination?
A: I've always had great sympathy for victims of environmental contamination. I have a much better understanding of them today because of my own health issues. I have a greater appreciation of the fear that they go through. I live in my own toxic dump, and that is a fact.
I just recently found out that I have a home that is so contaminated with stachybotris and aspergillus and penicillium molds that I've been requested to move out. I can't just abandon my home, and for the first time I relate to Roberta Walker more than ever.
Roberta Walker only came to the law firm because she just didn't want to sell her home. I got more curious about my own home and what was going on, so I started doing my own water samples, and I was shocked when I got them back. I almost fainted when I saw how much benzene I have in my tap water at home: way above state and federal levels. Ed and I are working very hard, and we want to see some changes, in the standards for chemicals on what levels will or won't hurt you.
Our issue with that is those standards are done on a healthy 35-year old male. What about women? What about a woman pregnant with a child? What about children? They do not react the same way to contaminants as a 35-year old healthy male does. My son can get stung by a bee and go into a coma; my other child can get stung by a bee ten times and it doesn't even phase her. We're not all the same; every body is an individual.
So we're going to push really hard for some legislation to start making changes at that level so we can start monitoring these chemicals more closely.
Q: What do you see as the major environmental goals of the next decade? What changes must the Bush administration address so that our children can grow up in a safer, healthier world?
A: I don't think Bush is going to help any of us. Within the first 30 days after the movie, we had 100,000 hits on our web site. We have had over 3,000 toxic cases come into our law firm just in the U.S. There is a real corporate mentality all the way up to the federal level.
PG&E, for all of the 25 to 30 years that they never lined their ponds, were never once fined by the state. They not once paid any penalty. As a matter of fact, they have been known to be at the legislative assembly with $18 to $20 million and they are passing out envelopes.
But since the release of the movie, I have seen LA City Council up on their feet making a difference for the chromium 6 problem I have in my own back yard. Senator Barbara Boxer has called me, and I'm going to be working with her on a state-wide assessment and U.S. assessment on hexavalent chromium and other contaminants in getting these levels reduced at federal and state standards.
LA City Council got up to Governor Gray Davis and they passed the Brockovich Bill: the first step to making water purveyors hold up their standard of care, hold them to their responsibility, and make them start testing our water more than every quarter it needs to be tested weekly.
Q: You had a biker boyfriend in the movie who seemed too good to be true to me. Whatever happened to him?
A: I'm always asked, "Did you marry George?" If he looked like Aaron Eckhart I would have never kicked him out. George is real. He took care of the kids for five years. We didn't part on good terms; there got to be a lot of tension between the two of us.
There was even more tension between us when we had the whole extortion issue come down and George was a part of that with my first husband. My first husband and George Halaby and their attorney were arrested on extortion charges. I haven't seen him in a couple of years, but I did get married to somebody else.
Q: Can you tell us what the status of the Kettleman case is?
A: Kettleman, California sits off Interstate 5. I uncovered the Kettleman case in 1995. It has been in preparation for trial ever since, and we go July 2nd. But they have put up a huge fight. Just when I think PG&E isn't going to shock me, they shock me.
One of the first documents that I uncovered was from the Department of the Interior, the United States of America, to PG&E headquarters, San Francisco, notifying them that they had excessive hexavalent chromium that was in 1964.
Nobody did a thing; it just sat there. We've got some Kelly Fry motion and Daubert rules to jump, but we feel confident we're going to get through those. Those are on our experts, on causation issues, but we feel confident we'll prevail.
Q: You've had hundreds of requests for help with investigative lawsuits since the movie. How do you pick which ones to pursue?
A: The process really boils down to this: We're not going to do anybody any favors if we get involved in a case and we can't prove it. We're going to drag everybody through the process; you're going to get a lot of false hopes. The first thing that is the most critical in making the decision on which cases we will or won't take is I have to have the documents.
I have to go to the sites, I look for documents; don't think that people don't shred documents, because they do. As plaintiff's attorneys we have the burden, we have to prove they did what they did; you can't guess, you can't speculate.
Unfortunately there have been many, many cases where we didn't have the documentation. There have been many cases where the people did not want to come forward. When I first got involved with the PG&E employees they took a vow of silence against me. When you get into an area where there is contamination, these people have been working with these companies for 10, 20 and 30 years and they have a mindset that they are "family." I appreciate where they are coming from.
I can't imagine how I would feel today if somebody gave me documentation that proved and showed that Ed Masry, who I had thought of as my family, had knowingly been hiding from me that I was being poisoned.
So in many instances when we get into a community, they do not want to get involved. And if you don't have plaintiffs, you don't have a case. So if all the factors aren't there, I'm not doing anybody any good.
Q: When you found out that Julia Roberts was playing you in the movie, how did you react, and what did you think of her performance?
A: This is a true story: Ed Masry loves to tease me. He wakes up every day and thinks, "What can I do to Brockovich today?" We used to be driving back from Kettleman, Hinkley, whatever case we were on, two or three years before this movie ever came out. And he'd ask, "Who do you want to play you?" I said, "I don't know Ed. I don't sit around and think about it." And I really didn't. He goes, "I don't care either, so long as it's not Julia Roberts." I said, "Really, you don't like her?" He goes, "No. She can't play you. Roseanne Barr can." That is true and that is what he said, so I had fun with him the day Universal called and said Julia Roberts is going to play the part. He goes, "You're kidding me; she can't play that part." I thought her performance was fantastic.
The very first time I saw the movie I was very focused on Albert Finney, who by the way played a perfect part for Ed Masry. Ed was speechless; he said, "Oh my God, more often than not I sat there and watched that and said to myself, That was Erin.'"
Q: Of the $333 million settlement from PG&E, how much of that went to the individuals in Hinkley?
A: Even if I knew that, I wouldn't tell you that. Hinkley was not a class action lawsuit. Hinkley was a direct action lawsuit: each plaintiff was hurt as an individual. How long they had lived in a contaminated plume, what their injuries were, is what the judges based their individual awards on. I do not know any of the 634 individual awards. A lot of the families don't want other people to know what they did and didn't get.
As a matter of fact, they made decisions amongst themselves not to tell their own families what they did or didn't get. Until you suddenly have that kind of money dropped into your lap, you don't understand the resentment that it can cause, because every single person believes that their health and what they have suffered is the most important, and I don't know how you put a dollar figure on that. So the awards varied.
If you lived on the plume for 25 years and had cancer, I'm sure your dollar amount was higher than the person who moved out to the plume in 1989 as the contamination had gotten less and less, who have no health effects. And we think that's fair, and that's what happens in a direct action suit.
Q: When do you feel that it's important to bring a lawsuit versus using other means to solve environmental contamination problems?
A: Money isn't the answer. I don't want anyone thinking that we think just because you go in to Hinkley, California, or any other case, that $333 million or $500 million is the answer. It's not. It's only a representation of some justice for the individual.
I justify it when I so significantly can see a corporation that never made an effort to clean it up, never made an effort to do anything about it, and made every effort to go out and deliberately lie to a person's face, who as they sat there and talked to them knew they had cancer, they knew a child had died that's despicable.
That is where I talk to you about right and wrong, and that is wrong. And whether there is a big financial outcome or not, we have to do something about that.
Q: The movie inspired a hailstorm of criticism from big business and anti-environmental agencies as to the validity of the settlement. How do you regard such attacks on your crusade, and how do you respond to critics of the settlement?
A: Bring it on. I really don't care. That question might be referring to maybe Michael Fumento. Fumento works for the Hudson Institute, which is funded by corporate America, period. Michael Fumento does not have the facts. I wish he were here today. One, he quotes in his article a 0.58 part per million hexavalent chromium reading as the highest reading ever in Hinkley, but he never saw those documents, he never met those people. He hasn't a clue what he's talking about.
I will tell you what the highest readings were from a person's tap water in Hinkley, California: 24 parts per million. He touts that PG&E came out and did all of this work on their employees and not one of them was sick; that is a lie. What Mr. Fumento didn't tell you in his article was that since this case settled in 1996, 50 of our 634 original plaintiffs have died. What Mr. Fumento didn't tell you is that since 1996, 53 of the employees have died. There was no testing. He sits there and says, "Chromium 6 by ingestion can't cause cancer."
They don't know whether it can or cannot cause cancer. When you ingest chromium 6, I assure you it will make you sick. Pick up an Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Report; I can cite you articles all day long. Ingestion of chromium 6 can kill you, so why are we arguing about whether chromium 6 by ingestion does or doesn't cause cancer? The other thing Mr. Fumento missed out on, the inhalation factor, which he claims and confirms does cause cancer: What do you think happened to those people in Hinkley?
The ground water was contaminated; they use that water to swim in; they use that water to bathe in, to shower in, to irrigate in; they use that water to run through their swamp coolers. If that's not inhalation, I don't know what is.
Q: Did the huge civil settlement from PG&E send a signal to other companies, or do they have a "it won't happen to me" mindset?
A: They have egos. From the day one, when we sat down and talked about what we honestly thought PG&E's final downfall would be, it would be ego. No, they are not always willing to run to the table.
Frankly they are more willing to spend $30, $40, $50 million to cover up their lie than they are to just come to the table.
Do you think this case would have happened if anybody from PG&E went up to those people and said, "Look, we have a hexavalent chromium problem. It can make you sick. We need to move you out of here." Would those people have come back and sued them? I promise you they would not have. PG&E would have shown themselves at that point to be making an effort, to come forward to clean it up, to preserve the family, to get them off the plume, to do something to help them, to admit to their mistake.
I don't see a problem if you make a mistake and then admit to it. We see across the board that corporate America takes that same mindset: Lockheed took it, Dole took it, Del Monte took it, PG&E took it again, after everything in Hinkley, in Kettleman.
All of the refineries have done it: We had a big case against Unocal in San Francisco they took it. That's their mindset. It's going to be hard to break.
Q: Did the settlement have any impact on PG&E's current financial woes, and do you have an electric utility service at home?
A: I can't imagine that they would ever let anyone think that it impacted their financial woes. Unfortunately, with a $333 million settlement they raised their rates, and frankly we paid for it, you all did. No, it didn't impact them, it really didn't they don't like it when that happens to them, it's the only way you can get them to wake up.
But they are not broke. I'm no different to any of the rest of you, and I'm going to get up tomorrow and go on with my battles like the rest of you.
As for my utility service, I have Southern Cal Edison, and just thank God it's not PG&E, because I'd live in the dark.
