American attorney (born 1965)
Robert Bilott (born August 2, 1965) is an American environmental attorney from Cincinnati, Ohio. Bilott is known for the lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of plaintiffs injured by waste dumped in rural communities in West Virginia. Bilott has spent more than twenty years litigating hazardous dumping of the chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS).
Bilott's litigation was the foundation for a memoir titled Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont. He became the subject of increasing media attention in the late 2010s and became more visible through the 2019 film Dark Waters and 2018 documentary The Devil We Know which documented his legal battles with Dupont. This public attention led to a number of awards, including the international Right Livelihood Award.
Career
Bilott was admitted to the bar in 1990[3] and began his law practice at Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP in Cincinnati, Ohio.[4] For eight years he worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients and his specialty was defending chemical companies.[5] He became a partner at the firm in 1998.[1]
Initial actions against DuPont
Bilott represented Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, West Virginia, whose cattle were dying.[1] 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."[5]
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.[1]
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 losing the first three for $19.7 million, in 2017 DuPont agreed to settle the remainder of the then-pending cases for $671.7 million.[1][6] 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.[7]
Subsequent actions
In 2018, Bilott filed a new case seeking new studies and testing of the larger group of PFAS chemicals on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of everyone in the United States who has PFAS chemicals in their blood, against several PFAS manufacturers, including 3M, DuPont, and Chemours.[8] This new litigation is ongoing as of May 2020[update].[9] In March 2022, the federal court overseeing the case certified the case to proceed as a class action on behalf of millions of people with PFAS in their blood.[10]
Media notice
In 2016, Bilott's story was the focus of a featured cover story by Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times Magazine, entitled, "The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare". Rich's story was later published in his book, Second Nature (2021).[11] Bilott's work was also featured in extensive articles in The Huffington Post ("Welcome to Beautiful Parkersburg") and The Intercept (multi-part The Teflon Toxin series).
Robert Bilott is the author of the acclaimed memoir Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, first published in English in 2019 by Atria Books,[12] and later translated into Chinese (2022)[13] and Japanese (2023).[14] The audio book version is narrated by Jeremy Bobb with the first chapter narrated by Mark Ruffalo. 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. The story is also featured in the feature-length documentary The Devil We Know; the Swedish documentary, The Toxic Compromise; was the subject of the poem, Watershed by U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith; is the subject of the "Toxic Waters" episode of the multi-part feature documentary, Parched, which aired on the National Geographic TV channel in 2017.
He is also the subject for the song and video "Deep in the Water" by The Gary Douglas Band, and the song "Blank" / "Worker" by emo revival band The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die.[15] He also appears in Devil Put The Coal In The Ground, a 2022 documentary about the suffering and devastation brought on by the coal industry and its decline.[16] Additionally, Bilott appears in the Belgian documentary, Solvay, the Invisible Pollution, about chemical giants and the vast pollution of PFAS.[17] Bilott also authored the foreword of the book Forever Chemicals Environmental, Economic, and Social Equity Concerns with PFAS in the Environment,[18] published in 2021 by CRC Press, and is the author of the foreword to the book PFAS – The Eternal and Invisible Pollutants in the Water: Stories of Denied Rights and Active Citizenship, which was published in Italy in 2024.[19] He also appears in the film released in 2023 entitled, Burned: Protecting the Protectors, which focuses on PFAS exposures among firefighters.[20]
Accolades
In 2017, Bilott received the international Right Livelihood Award, also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize", for his decades of work on PFAS chemical contamination issues, and was featured on a stamp issued in Austria, commemorating the award.
In 2020, Bilott was part of a "Fight Forever Chemicals" social media and outreach campaign that was a Winner in Entertainment and a Finalist in Global Campaign, Media Partnership for the social media Shorty Awards. "Fight Forever Chemicals" also received a Gold Distinction in Environment and Sustainability.[21]
Bilott serves on the board of directors for Less Cancer, the board of trustees for Green Umbrella,[22] the board of directors of the New College Foundation, and served on the alumni board for New College of Florida from 2018 to 2021. In 2021, Bilott received an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree from New College of Florida[23] and an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree from The Ohio State University's Environmental Science Graduate Program.[24] In 2023, Bilott received an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree from Thomas Moore University.[25]
He is also a fellow in the Right Livelihood College, an Honorary Professor at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina, and a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, Department of Environmental Health Sciences.[26]
