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April 22, 2021 - RFK Jr. The Defender

35:37

Confidential Chemicals and Teflon with Rob Bilott and David Whiteside

Rob Bilott uncovered the most heinous corporate environmental conspiracy in history. Mark Ruffalo plays Bilott in the new film, Dark Waters. David Whiteside is suing The 3M Company with his nonprofit organization Tennessee Riverkeeper.

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	Hi, everybody.
	We have an amazing guest today.
	My friend Rob Blatt and colleague and co-counsel on the DuPont cases in partnership with West Virginia.
	The PFAS, we call PFAS, which is the family of chemicals.
	At that time, we were calling it C8 or PFOA. Those are part of that family.
	And we've done a lot of litigation on that all over the country.
	But Rob is famous.
	Largely because Mark Ruffalo played him in the film Dark Waters, which is the film that Ruffalo made about the case.
	And Rob and I met for the first time, I think it was in 2016, at the federal courthouse in Cincinnati.
	When we were about to begin trying that first case, I was lucky enough to be part of the legal team.
	But you actually had a, before I met you, you had a 16-year saga That took you from being a corporate lawyer in one of the most hardcore white shoe pro-corporate law firms in America.
	Robert Taft, the president's old law firm.
	It took you to being one of the major, most important plaintiff's lawyers in America and disrupted your life and pissed off your partners.
	I think pretty much stood by you throughout, despite the Pain and acne that you caused in their business.
	Tell us what happened.
	It started with a farmer writing you a letter about his cows dying.
	Yeah, actually started, gosh, 22, 23 years ago in the fall of 1998.
	I get a phone call from a guy on the other end of the line who tells me he's got dying cows in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and I need to help him.
	And, you know, I was about to hang the phone up.
	It's not the kind of thing I did.
	You know, I was at the time, as you mentioned, working at the TAF law firm in Cincinnati, working for primarily big corporate clients and a lot of big chemical companies.
	And so helping with dying cows was not really something, you know, that I was accustomed to.
	At that time, you were about, I think, one or two months, I recall, away from being named partner in the firm, which is another thing that happened.
	Every lawyer in that kind of track, that partnership track, is waiting for.
	And you have, part of your background, we shared this at one time, was very different than the rest of the people in that firm.
	Most of the people in that firm were Ivy League lawyers.
	And you had come from a very different background.
	So you were kind of an outsider.
	You were a military brat and moved around, really a hardscrabble fighter to get to where you were in that firm.
	Yeah, you know, my dad was in the Air Force, so we had moved around a lot.
	And, you know, really, I had no idea what being in a law firm was about.
	Nobody in my family had ever been in a big law firm.
	You know, and I had been trying my best to figure out what all that was about.
	And I've been spending eight years on it when I got that call.
	You know, it was at that point that farmer mentioned he got my name from my grandmother.
	And that was my mom's side of the family.
	Even though my dad was in the Air Force and we moved around and went to a bunch of different schools.
	We always came back to Parkersburg when I was a kid for family holidays, birthdays.
	So I kind of saw that as my hometown.
	So when I heard this guy was calling me from that town, I paid a little closer attention and wanted to see if there was something I could do to help him.
	And he actually knew your grandmother.
	Yeah, he had actually been on the phone with his neighbor.
	And the neighbor was longtime friends with my grandmother.
	In fact, as a kid, I had spent time on that next door farm, milking the cows and riding the horses as a kid.
	And he had been trying to find local lawyers that would help him.
	And was complaining to his neighbor that day, you know, that he couldn't get anybody to help him out because of who he thought was causing the problem.
	And so he needed somebody from out of town to help him.
	And his neighbor had just been on the phone earlier that day with my grandmother, who was bragging about her grandson, who was an environmental lawyer in Cincinnati.
	You were the wrong kind of environmental lawyer.
	Exactly.
	I think DuPont had been your client at one point, right?
	You had worked with him on cases.
	You were representing polluters.
	Well, yeah, we were representing a lot of big chemical companies.
	DuPont was never actually a firm client, but I knew their lawyers because we were doing a lot of Superfund work, a lot of work for hazardous waste cleanup sites all over the country where all the big chemical companies would be fighting about who gets to pay to clean these sites up.
	So I'd be there representing our chemical company clients.
	And typically, the lawyers for DuPont would be there because DuPont had cleanup sites and hazardous waste spread all over the country.
	So I knew the company, but they were not a client of our firm.
	So then Wilbur Tennant, who is the farmer, comes into your law firm and he brings all of these boxes of videotapes, which I later became very familiar with, of cows dying.
	He couldn't find a vet because...
	Just to set the stage, DuPont completely owned this town.
	They owned every vet in the district, they owned every lawyer, they owned the judges, they owned everybody.
	Yeah, you know, Parkersburg happened to have a massive DuPont plant.
	In fact, a lot of the folks in town either worked for DuPont or they had family members who worked for DuPont or knew somebody that worked at the plant.
	So when this farmer, Mr.
	Tennant was his name, when the farmer started complaining that he thought a landfill owned by DuPont was causing the problem, Nobody wanted to get involved.
	You know, none of the local lawyers really wanted to take on the town's biggest employer.
	This was sort of synonymous with the whole town's identity.
	So that was how that call came to me, you know, looking for somebody who would be willing to take on DuPont.
	And he comes into your white shoe law firm with a thick Appalachian accent that nobody can understand, and I think a John Deere hat or something and a blad shirt.
	And these big boxes and your partners are saying, who the heck is this guy?
	Because they've never had somebody going to TAF who wasn't wearing a suit and tie before.
	It was a bit of an unusual event.
	And I was fortunate that the partner who was the head of our environmental group at the time, Tom Turp, happened to be walking down the aisle as Mr.
	Tennant came into the office with all of these boxes and videotapes.
	And so I invited him to come sit in and look at this.
	And it was so fortunate that he did.
	Because he was able to see what was on the videotapes and to look at these photographs that I was seeing as well and seeing the massive problem that was evident.
	When you looked at these videotapes, you could see white foaming water coming out of this landfill Owned by DuPont.
	It had a big DuPont label on the discharge pipe.
	And you could see cows standing in the white foaming water with tumors.
	Their teeth were black.
	There were pictures of dead animals.
	And it wasn't just the cows.
	It was the fish.
	It was the deer or the wildlife in the area.
	We were able to see all that.
	Luckily, Tom was there as well.
	Very fortunate that Tom became managing partner of the whole firm as the years went on and as this case dragged on.
	A lot of things aligned the right way for this case to have developed and to have worked out the way it did.
	One of those was having Tom, my partner, be there on that day and be the one to help make that decision and And eventually ended up being the lead of the firm for many, many years while the case was dragging on.
	I remember looking at those videos, the most horrific one to me was, I think he had already, I think maybe two or 300 cows on his arm.
	I think 160 of them had died.
	He's really this grim inventory of horrible, horrible diseases.
	And the cows, which used to kind of come up and approach them, you know, him and his wife and children, whenever they see any member of the tenant family, instead would attack them like a wild bull.
	And there's one of those videos where a cow is charging him and he shoots it.
	And he's very, very upset and emotional because it's almost like a pet for dairy cows.
	And then he autopsies on the spot.
	And it's, you know, it's organs are black.
	It's just like opening up a horror movie.
	Yeah, you know, those folks who were able to see the movie Dark Waters or the documentary The Devil We Know, a lot of those actual videotape clips that you were mentioning are in those films.
	And we used the actual videotape because it was so powerful.
	It was pretty obvious when you could see what was going on there, particularly, as you mentioned, Mr.
	Tennant would cut into some of these animals and videotape what he was seeing, you know, the deformed organs, the discolored organs, the black teeth, dead, stillborn calves, and, you know, very, very powerful stuff.
	And, you know, after I saw those videos and we saw those photographs, and after listening to Mr.
	Tennant, And his wife.
	His wife came with him when visiting the firm.
	I mean, just to hear in their voice how devastating this was to them.
	You know, this wasn't just livestock.
	This was like family members for them.
	You know, this was their entire livelihood.
	As you said, they had been almost wiped out.
	Almost the entire herd had been wiped out in a matter of just a couple of years by the time he met with us.
	So it was a really horrific scene and horrific situation to be watching.
	At that time, I was with Mike Papantonio's firm, but DuPont had not just poisoned cows on one farm.
	They had poisoned an entire community of 70,000 people and multiple water districts, and they had known for years.
	Their PFOAs were in and PFASs were in all of the water.
	They were in the dust that was in people's homes.
	It was literally everywhere.
	And it was in the bodies and the blood supply.
	This is what they call a forever chemical.
	It's caused testicular cancer, kidney cancer.
	And a whole lot of other diseases.
	And DuPont knew it.
	You actually, they handed you, I don't know how many boxes, but hundreds and hundreds of thousands of documents, and they were all disordered.
	And they just thought that you would never be able to go through them.
	And you sat on the floor of your office for, I think, eight or nine months and read all of those documents and put that story together.
	Yeah, it was pretty mind-opening, to put it mildly, you know, getting all of these documents.
	And at the end of the day, I think it was millions of pages of documents that we had to go through.
	And as you said, I mean, these were the days before things were on computers.
	It was hard copy paper, just sitting through, organizing it, reading through, trying to figure out, what is this chemical?
	Because we found out that this chemical was, you mentioned, called PFOA. Was in the water that these cows were drinking.
	Massive quantity of it, like 7,000 tons of sludge soaked with this chemical had been put into this landfill and was in the water that the cows were drinking.
	Well, we started digging through these files from DuPont when we brought the lawsuit from Mr.
	Tennant.
	You know, starting to see the history of what was known about this chemical, because I'd never heard of it.
	I couldn't find any information about it back then.
	This is the year 2000.
	It was unregulated.
	Yeah, totally unregulated.
	Nobody knew what this stuff was.
	But as we dug into the DuPont documents, They had been doing testings and studies going back into the 1950s, toxicity testing on rats and monkeys and all kinds of animals showing all kinds of toxic effects.
	And as you indicated, some of the most disturbing information was the ability of this completely man-made chemical.
	It didn't exist on the planet until man created this weird carbon-fluorine bonded chemical.
	Had the ability, once it got out into the environment, to never break down.
	It would virtually stay there forever.
	That's why, as you indicated, they're called forever chemicals now.
	Because this stuff, when it gets into the soil, when it gets into the water, it stays there.
	So for the last 70 years, this stuff was pumped out into our air, into our soil, into our water.
	All of it's still there.
	So not only would it stay there, it stayed there, it got into people and living things.
	It's in everybody.
	It is, in fact, Teflon.
	And to coat pans, and people, you know, if you cook with a Teflon pan, people still have them in their homes.
	And it started smoking while you were cooking, and you were breathing this stuff, and people were getting something they called Teflon flu.
	So what we found out is not only through this manufacturing process, but through all of these other ways in which this chemical and related chemicals, also man-made with this carbon fluorine bond, been used in all kinds of things, not only cookware, nonstick cookware, but stain-resistant, waterproof clothing, carpeting, fast food wrappers and packaging, firefighting foams.
	All of this stuff has got out into the environment through these manufacturing processes and releases.
	Got into the air and the water, and not only does it stay in the environment, it gets into living things, into people, and it stays in our blood and builds up.
	And the companies have been doing testing and were aware that this stuff would result and was associated with all kinds of adverse human health effects going back decades as well.
	Yet we're denying it and telling everybody, don't worry about it.
	And as you pointed out, new, the stuff was getting into drinking water around the West Virginia plant in Parkersburg going back into the 80s and didn't tell anybody about it.
	And all of that was in these internal files.
	And so we tried to find ways to bring that out to the public, get it out so that the community knew what they were drinking, what they were being exposed to, and importantly, Tell the US EPA, tell the regulators, tell the scientists so they can start delving into what is this stuff and how do we deal with it now that we know it's out there?
	One of the most, to me, one of the most interesting depositions that I was involved in was, I forgot the name of the guy, nobody will remember.
	He was the in-house Dupont attorney.
	He was using his Dupont email.
	To send emails to his son in Iraq.
	And he was talking about how corrupt the company was and how bad this chemical was.
	And he did not think it would be discoverable, but it was.
	We got a hold of it.
	And he was a very, very sweet man because he was deeply, deeply concerned about what the company was doing.
	He was telling them not to do it.
	And he was complaining to his son, who was serving our country in Iraq, on trying to get them to act You know, behave in a way that's honorable.
	And they absolutely refuse.
	And those were really powerful documents.
	And that deposition, which we videotaped and showed to the jury, was one of the amazing kind of turning points of the trial.
	Yeah, you know, it was a really unusual turn of events that, you know, in this case, we ended up getting copies of emails, as you mentioned, from one of the in-house attorneys, Mr.
	Riley, you know, who worked in-house and didn't realize that these emails were being captured by the company's computer server.
	This is the early days of BlackBerrys and things.
	And so those emails ended up getting turned over because they weren't privileged.
	It wasn't like the lawyers were giving advice, but it gave us a great insight into what was going on with the company.
	You had the scientists and lawyers trying to warn the company to do the right thing, to go out and take care of this issue.
	And their client, the business people within the company, just weren't listening to them.
	So yeah, that was a powerful deposition.
	In their own email, they were calling it devil's piss.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And in fact, you see some of that deposition excerpt in the documentary, The Devil We Know.
	You see some of that very deposition where you and I were there and this lawyer was asked about these emails that were going back and forth.
	And then in the end, DuPont's best friend turned out to be the West Virginia EPA. And basically, they brought West Virginia EPA, I think at the time, DuPont's internal documents The maximum safe amount of exposure was one part per billion.
	And then our experts came in and said, no, it's one-tenth that.
	It's 0.1 part per billion.
	It is dangerous.
	They went to EPA, and they got EPA to actually create the first standards.
	And EPA's standards were 150 parts per billion.
	So they basically just created standards to protect DuPont during our lawsuit.
	To shield them from liability.
	And that was a big blow to your, you know, strategy from the beginning.
	It was very disturbing because what we saw was even though this chemical wasn't regulated because information had been withheld from the regulatory agencies, so they couldn't regulate something they didn't know even existed.
	But the company itself, DuPont's own scientists, had sat down back in the 80s when the first cancer results came back, showing that the chemical caused testicular tumors in the rats.
	They sat down and developed a drinking water guide, 0.6 parts per billion, which they rounded up to one.
	And that was basically the lowest level you could detect in the water back then.
	So their own scientists were saying, if we can find it, we're concerned about it.
	So that was the standard they had set.
	They found levels three, four times, five times higher than that in the local water supply.
	But when our litigation was filed, we pointed to their own internal standard, since there were no government standards, and said, you're above even your own standard here.
	That's when they went, as you pointed out, they went to the state of West Virginia's EPA. And asked them to come up with a government-approved safety guideline.
	And they came back with 150 parts per billion.
	150 times higher than DuPont's own standard.
	DuPont never changed its internal standard.
	Yet they went to the state and used the state to try to tell the public, oh, nothing to worry about here, no problem.
	So when that happened, that's when the US EPA got involved and said, we're going to do our own priority review of this chemical.
	They ended up then suing DuPont a couple years later, saying, you withheld all kinds of risk information from us that maybe if we had gotten a long time ago, we could have begun regulating this.
	So the US EPA got involved, and then when they finally came out with their drinking water guideline, it took 10 years.
	Parts per trillion is what US EPA said.
	70 parts per trillion.
	At that time, it was a huge penalty for EPA, but I think they had to pay 16 million, as I recall.
	It was 16 million because EPA fined them.
	Correct.
	For our case.
	Correct.
	US EPA brought this lawsuit saying information had been withheld, you violated federal law.
	DuPont ended up settling that for what EPA at the time claimed was the largest civil administrative penalty in the history of the US EPA. Sixteen million dollars, you know, which is not much to a company of DuPont's size and volume, but for EPA, that was, at least it showed you how seriously they were worried about what they were seeing in the science that they were finally getting.
	Talk about, just about, kind of, because you were sitting with this for 18 years, and you were Really just a, I would say, a template for sheer anxiety during that period, because you had your partners who were being supportive,
	but you knew you were costing them money, and you had your clients who were never happy with what you were doing because it was taking so long, and they were watching their neighbors, their friends, their relatives die.
	And they were saying to you, we have cancer, we need money to treat my sister, etc.
	You know, you were just slugging it out for 18 years.
	Yeah.
	It was incredibly stressful, to put it mildly, and this is something I tried to really explore in the book, exposure that I did, trying to summarize what was going on here, because really what was happening was this community and these people, and this is something that's really affecting everybody across the U.S., The community was told it's their burden to come forward with enough evidence to confirm that this chemical was actually making them sick before they could get any relief.
	Under our legal system, they were told they've got to come forward with enough evidence to prove that the chemical was causing these problems, despite everything we had seen in the company's own documents showing this problem.
	Nevertheless, it was their burden.
	They were going to have to prove this.
	We had set up this process to try to do that and to try to do it in a way with independent scientists that could confirm what we'd been seeing in DuPont's own documents.
	And as you indicated, that process ended up confirming links with six diseases.
	Testicular cancer, kidney cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, preeclampsia, high cholesterol.
	But that took, nobody had really ever done this before.
	So that process took seven years.
	And what was happening during this period of time?
	That started around 2006, ended in 2012.
	What's going on during this period?
	Well, first of all, the entire US economy is collapsing.
	Major economic meltdown going on.
	The community, these people are continuing to get sick.
	You know, while they're waiting for this scientific process, you've got people with cancer that are dying.
	You've got family members that are saying, what's going on?
	What's taking so long?
	You know, at the end of the day, We were able to finally confirm through independent scientists that the chemical did, in fact, have these risks.
	You know, one of the few times in U.S. history, the community has been able to do that and confirm that, yet it took so long.
	So it was very stressful watching that process unfold and not being able to do much about it.
	The science took what it took because we had 60 29,000 people who came forward and gave blood, who provided medical information.
	Think about all of that data.
	So all of that had to be analyzed and all of these different epidemiology studies.
	So it took an incredible amount of time and, you know, happened during one of the worst times in the economy to be wondering whether or not all of this expense and all of this time that we're sinking into these cases will ever, ever be reimbursed and these people will ever get the relief they're entitled to.
	Tell what happened at the end.
	Eventually, the science panel, these independent scientists, were able to confirm by the end of 2012 that those six diseases were linked.
	So that kind of finally brought us to this next phase in the litigation where everybody in that community then was entitled to free medical testing and monitoring, paid for by DuPont, up to $235 million.
	Under a settlement agreement we had.
	So they're going to get free testing to look for these diseases.
	We had thousands of people came forward and are now getting that free testing.
	But everybody in that community that already had one of these six diseases, they were told they were able to now finally move forward and bring damage claims against DuPont.
	And DuPont could not dispute.
	Yes, DuPont could not dispute that the chemical could cause those six diseases.
	Those are the cases that you were talking about earlier, where we were getting ready for trial in Columbus, and the first one went to trial in 2016.
	So I think we won 1.6 million, as I recall, in that first trial.
	The second trial, I think we had a little less, and then the third trial, I think we had three or three million something.
	And at that point, Blunt came back and said, okay, we want to sell it all.
	And we got $671 million.
	Exactly.
	During the middle of the fourth trial, we got verdicts in favor of the plaintiffs in every one of those trials.
	And the amounts were steadily going up when you combine the punitives.
	So in the middle of the fourth one, DuPont agreed to settle all of those pending cases.
	There were about 3,500 at that point for $671 million.
	And just recently, because keep in mind, People continue to be monitored in the community.
	People continue to get cancers.
	So even after that settlement, dozens more cases have been filed.
	DuPont just settled another round of those cases for another 83 million.
	So there's been about 750 million plus that's been paid to those people in that community.
	The problem is, we now know it's not just Parkersburg.
	This stuff's in drinking water all over the country, all over the planet.
	So you've now got new communities coming forward.
	And what happens?
	DuPont?
	It's disappearing.
	They jettisoned the entire Teflon business into a new company called Chemours.
	They then merged with Dow Chemical and split into three new companies, and now the assets are all going away.
	So as this is finally coming out and the public is finally realizing it, the company is slowly disappearing.
	You know who I got here?
	I'm going to call David Whiteside.
	I didn't tell him I'm going to do this, but...
	You, of course, know David.
	He is a Tennessee riverkeeper, and he's in Nashville, and he, 3M, which is a manufacturer of PFA, has, I think David found a new landfill this weekend that had this stuff pouring out of it.
	Tell people briefly what you've been doing.
	Sure.
	Thank you, Bobby.
	Tennessee Riverkeeper is suing the 3M company and other polluters for dumping PFAS chemicals and the related contamination in the Tennessee River Valley.
	3M operates a problematic factory on the river And these polluters have poisoned the fish and negatively impacted the drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people in the area.
	Riverkeeper's mission is to protect the drinking water for 6.3 million Southerners.
	So we sued 3M and these polluters to fulfill that mission to clean up the mess.
	Right.
	The PFOA chemical was made by 3M and DuPont purchased it to use in making Teflon.
	So it was a material they used in the manufacturing process to make things like Teflon pans and things like that.
	The PFOS and the PFOA, which are two specific types of these PFAS chemicals, have been banned.
	And what 3M and DuPont and these other companies did, they added or removed a molecule here or there and And created this new secret confidential chemical as it's declared in the business world.
	And there's all sorts of variants of this chemical out there that have not been banned.
	So by moving the molecule, they have essentially the same chemical.
	That's a different name that has not been banned.
	And one of the hardest parts is figuring out which of these secret chemicals they've dumped out.
	And there's hundreds, if not thousands, of variants.
	And what are the chemicals used in today?
	Yeah, I mean, it's rather disturbing, because as you've mentioned, as the information finally...
	I think they're in the 3N medical masks, too.
	I have seen reports about that, that they're now finding that possibly these PFOS chemicals might be in some of that as well.
	Because what happened is as that information finally came out about PFOA and PFOS, activity finally started happening to restrict those, phase them out in the U.S., not make those anymore.
	But as you said, what happened, the companies tweaked them just a bit.
	They knocked a couple of carbons off.
	DuPont, for example, had been making PFOA, which has C8, eight carbons attached to fluorine.
	They knocked two off, making a C6 and calling it Gen X, something new.
	And they said, well, all of that information about PFOA, all those health effects, that's irrelevant because now this is a new chemical and you have no evidence that this one causes any problems.
	And it's now showing up in the drinking water where they're making right outside of their plant in North Carolina.
	It's now showing up in the drinking water down the Ohio River because they ship it up to the plant in Parkersburg now and use it there.
	So it's almost like this whack-a-mole game where you finally address one of these PFAS chemicals.
	They simply change it a little bit, call it something new, and you're told you have to start all over again.
	And who pays the price for that?
	The community.
	The people that are exposed, being the guinea pigs, are told, you're going to have to wait and you're going to have to come forward with enough evidence to show you're actually being made sick.
	Let's wait and see how much cancer you get, how many people die, then we might address it.
	So I think you're seeing a lot of folks that are saying, we can't do it this way anymore.
	There's got to be a different way to approach this.
	I have a nonprofit organization, Tennessee Riverkeeper.
	When we have to look at abandoned landfills and other sites where they may have dumped these invisible chemicals, we really only know a handful that they have admitted that they've dumped, and the other we have to figure out on our own.
	We go take a sample.
	One sample costs $250.
	That's the cheap price from a certified lab, and they test for about 40 different PFAS chemicals, and 26 of them show up.
	They've only admitted to dumping a few of those.
	So the burden, not only do I have to raise the money to pay for those lab costs, but then the burden is on my staff and I to figure out which one of these chemicals are dangerous, if any, or all of them, and where they come from, what they're used for.
	They're completely hidden under this confidential business information.
	Well, exactly.
	You know, that's one of the biggest problems is there's not much information available to the public or even to the regulators, frankly, or scientists about which chemicals are even out there.
	What are they being used in?
	What products are they in?
	Because a lot of it's claimed confidential business information.
	It's secret.
	We won't tell you.
	And now we've even had a situation come up in New Jersey where somebody has finally identified that there was one of these new unknown chemicals We're good to go.
	So it's just mind-blowing when you think about it.
	First, we won't tell you what's out there.
	Then when you find one of these, we won't give you the information you need to even look for it.
	So it's a system that needs a lot of fixing right now.
	Rob, what are you doing now?
	I know you're doing a lot of these cases.
	What else are you doing?
	Well, right now we're working with states.
	We're working with water providers all over the country that are facing the problem of how do we address the fact that we now have this massive PFAS contamination throughout our state.
	State attorney generals that are trying to deal with Cleaning up the natural resources, the soil, the fish, the wildlife in the state.
	Water providers all over the country that are being told, this stuff's in your water, now you're going to have to put in million dollar, multi-million dollar treatment systems that may cost you millions of dollars a year to run, that are saying, we don't have the money to do this.
	So I'm working with these people trying to make sure that the companies that put the chemicals out there, the manufacturers, are held liable and responsible for those costs.
	There's a lot of that litigation going on in federal court in South Carolina, a lot of it involving contamination from firefighting foams.
	I'm also working on a new case where we are seeking to bring a nationwide class action On behalf of everyone that has this bigger group of PFAS chemicals in their blood.
	And it's not for money.
	What it is for is to require the companies that are putting all these different PFAS chemicals out there To pay for the independent scientists to confirm and tell us exactly what they're doing to us, what those health effects are.
	In other words, you can't sit back, put this stuff out into the environment and say, there's no evidence that they cause harm, but we won't do the studies either.
	They should be paying for independent scientists to do that.
	As you can imagine, the companies tried to get the case thrown out saying you can't bring claims like this under U.S. law.
	We survived that.
	We're now fighting about whether or not it can go forward on a class on behalf of everyone that has this stuff in their blood in the country.
	On my firm, Kennedy Madonna, Is working with you on many of these cases, and we represent water districts in New York and New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
	But if you have PFOAs in your local waterway, contact us and we will help put Rob to work cleaning up the mess in your backyard.
	Please buy Rob's book, Exposure.
	It's an amazing book, and you will really enjoy it if you care about children, children's health, and chemical exposure in this country, and also the capture of our government, of our democracy by these big corporations who are trying to liquidate our landscapes for cash, commoditize our people, poison our children for profit.
	Rob, a lot.
	Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for your extraordinary commitment to making this country a cleaner, safer, healthier place for our children.
	Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for having this discussion.
	To me, this is incredibly important to have venues like this where we talk about these issues and actually let people know what needs to be done to get these things fixed.
	So thank you so much.
	I appreciate it.
	Thank you, Rob, a lot.
	Thank you, Robbie.

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