FIGHTING BACK - THE FAMILIES WHO REFUSED TO SIT DOWN: THE SACKLERS AND PURDUE PHARMA — PART 2

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, I'm Garrett Fisher. Thursday May fourteenth, twenty twenty six. Yesterday we covered how Purdue Pharma built the OxyContin machine, the lie at the center of the marketing campaign, the payments to doctors, the uncapped commissions for salespeople, the manufactured medical consensus that said opioids were safe for routine pain management. And we covered the two thousand and seven guilty plea that cost them six hundred million dollars and changed almost nothing because the people who ran the company personally were not charged, and the company kept selling the drug and the Sackler family started moving money. Today we cover what happened when the country finally caught up with them more than two thousand, six hundred lawsuits, a bankruptcy filing that was designed not just to resolve those lawsuits but to shield the Sacklers personally from ever having to face one in court. The families who drove to depositions and sat across from Sackler family members with photographs of their dead children and said, this is who you killed.

1:07 And a Supreme Court that in June twenty twenty four told the Sacklers they could not buy their way out of personal accountability using a bankruptcy court they weren't even technically a party two, and finally, in November twenty twenty five, a resolution imperfect, inadequate, and real. By the mid two thousands, the opioid crisis had become impossible to ignore, and the legal reckoning that had been building for years began to arrive all at once. State attorneys general, city governments, county governments, Native American tribes, hospitals, insurance companies, and individual families filed suits against Purdue and the Sacklers, in numbers that eventually exceeded twenty six hundred federal and state cases. The scale of claim damages was extraordinary. At one point, creditors had filed more than forty trillion dollars in claims against the company, a figure that represented not legal expectation of actual payment, but the scale of the harm that people were asserting had been done to them and their communities. In twenty nineteen, Massachusetts Attorney General Morriheely filed what became one of the most significant of these suits, naming not just Purdue as a company, but eight specific members of the Sackler family as personally responsible for the opioid crisis, alleging they had micromanaged a deceptive sales campaign and knowingly directed the conduct that caused it. The Massachusetts complaint introduced internal documents and

2:39 communications into the public record that made clear the Sackler family was not a passive ownership group that had trusted executives to run the company honorably. They were present Richard Sackler was exchanging emails about the effectiveness of dinner programs for physicians and the need to sell aggressively. The family knew what the machine was doing, the documentation, and said so. In September twenty nineteen, facing a mounting legal exposure that the company could not absorb, Purdue Pharma filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy in federal court in the Southern District of New York. The Sackler family members, who were the owners of the company, did not file for bankruptcy themselves. They were not debtors in the preceding What they proposed instead was a settlement as part of Purdue's bankruptcy plan, in which they would contribute several billion dollars to a fund for victims and opioid abatement in exchange for something quite specific, a legal release that would permanently immunize them from any future civil lawsuits related to the opioid crisis, without requiring them to put all of their personal wealth on the table, and without their own consent being required from the people who wanted to sue them. In other words, the Sackler family, who had moved approximately eleven billion dollars out of Purdue in the years before the bankruptcy, wanted to use Purdue's bankruptcy to buy their way out of personal accountability, to convert their legal exposure into a finite dollar amount, and then close the door forever on any victim who might otherwise have the right to sue them directly in court.

4:11 Before the bankruptcy plan moved through the courts, there were depositions Members of the Sackler family were required to sit for questioning under oath, and the families of people who had died from OxyContin overdoses were in some proceedings present. What those sessions produced is not something that appears neatly in court documents, but the people who were there have described it, and it is worth knowing. Families drove to those depositions carrying photographs of their dead children. They sat in rooms across from members of one of the wealthiest families in the world, and they held up those photographs and they said, this person existed, and your company killed them, and you are going to look at this picture. They were not there as legal counsel. They were there because the system had given them a narrow window to be present, and they used it the only way they could, by refusing to be invisible, by making the people on the other side of the table understand that the numbers in the legal filings were not abstractions, but human beings with names and faces and people who love them. Kathleen Scarpone, who lost her son to oxy contin addiction, stood outside the Supreme Court during the oral arguments in December twenty twenty three with other families. Jen Trejo was there holding a photograph of her son, Christopher, who was thirty two when he died. She said, simply, you can't just kill my child and just pay a fine. That is the whole case. That is what years of litigation and bankruptcy proceedings and Supreme Court oral arguments came down to. You

5:45 cannot put a price on it that makes it acceptable. And the people who tried were the Sacklers, not the mothers holding the photographs. In twenty twenty one, the bankruptcy Court in New York approved a play that would have Purdue payout more than four point five billion dollars, growing to five point five billion dollars, with the Sacklers contributing the majority of that over several years. In exchange, the Sacklers would receive the liability shield they had sought, blanket protection from future civil lawsuits, including cases for wrongful death and fraud, without needing the consent of the people who wanted to bring those cases. Several states objected. California, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia refused to sign on, arguing that the bankruptcy court had no authority to grant immunity to people who had not themselves filed for bankruptcy. The US Department of Justice's bankruptcy watchdog agency joined them. The case worked its way through the courts.

6:50 A federal district court vacated the original bankruptcy approval, an appeals court reinstated it. The Supreme Court agreed to take the case, and In June twenty twenty four, in a five to four decision written by Justice Neil Gorsich, the Supreme Court ruled that the Bankruptcy Code does not authorize a court to discharge claims against a non debtor, someone who has not themselves filed for bankruptcy, without the consent of the people holding those claims. Gorstch wrote that the sacklers sought to extinguish even claims for wrongful death and fraud without putting anything close to their total assets on the table. He wrote bluntly described the relief the sacklers seek, how you will. Nothing in the Bankruptcy Code contemplates, much less authorizes it. The dissent, written by Justice Kavanaugh and joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Soda, Mayor and Kagan, argued the decision was devastating for the victims who had approved the earlier settlement and were now deprived of the money they had negotiated. Both things were true simultaneously. The ruling was legally correct and procedurally painful. The sacklers got what they deserved, and the families waiting for settle money had to wait longer. After the break the negotiation that followed the Supreme Court ruling, the seven point four billion dollar deal that was confirmed in November twenty twenty five.

8:12 What the Sackler family actually keeps and what thirty million internal documents about how they ran Purdue are about to tell the world. After the Supreme Court ruling, both sides went back to the negotiating table. The states that had objected to the original deal, the ones who had fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, now led a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general in hammering out a new settlement. In January twenty twenty five, they announced a deal valued at seven point four billion dollars, the largest settlement ever reached with individuals responsible for contributing to the opioid crisis. The Sackler family would pay up to six point five billion dollars over fifteen years, with one point five billion dollars due on the day the plan took effect.

9:03 Perdue Pharma would contribute an additional nine hundred million dollars in available cash. All fifty states, the District of Columbia, and US territories ultimately approve the plan. In November twenty twenty five, US Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane formally signed off on it. The new deal is structurally different from the one the Supreme Court rejected. The Sacklers do not receive blanket immunity. Instead, victims and creditors who accept settlement payments agree to release their claims against the family, but those who do not accept can preserve the right to sue the Sacklers personally. It is a consensual structure rather than a forced one in practice. Given what the alternative looks like years of individual litigation against family members who still have substantial resources and very good lawyers, the overwhelming majority of creditors are expected to opt in. More than ninety nine percent of voting creditors supported the plan. The distribution of the money reflects how difficult it is to compensate individual victims at the scale of this catastrophe. About eight hundred and fifty million dollars of the total is designated to go directly to individual victims, people who were prescribed oxy contin, or their survivors. Those payments expected to be distributed in twenty twenty six range from roughly eight thousand dollars to sixteen thousand dollars per person, depending on the length of their prescription and how many people qualify for the pool. An addiction recovery advocate who had himself been on oxy contin for more than a decade called the

10:36 individual victim Compensation and f because eight thousand dollars to sixteen thousand dollars for the destruction of a life is not justice by any reasonable measure, he is right. The bulk of the money, billions of dollars, goes to state and local governments for opioid abatement programs, addiction treatment, recovery services, overdose reversal medicine, the infrastrate structure for dealing with the crisis that Purdue created and then left the public sector to manage. What the Sacklers keep. This is the part that is hardest to sit with, so I want to be direct about it. The Sackler family transferred approximately eleven billion dollars out of Purdue before the bankruptcy. The total they are paying in the settlement six point five billion dollars over fifteen years, is less than the amount they extracted from the company while the lawsuits were accumulating. They are paying with money that, by any reasonable reading of the timeline, was removed from the company. Specifically to insulate it from exactly this kind of accountability. The government called it a milking program. The Supreme Court agreed it was problematic, and at the end of all of this, the Sackler family retains wealth, substantial wealth. The settlement is not a confiscation.

11:52 It is a negotiated payment that leaves the family materially secure. As part of the deal, the Sacklers are permanently banned from manufacturing, selling, or marketing opioids in the United States. They give up all ownership and control of Purdue Pharma, which dissolves and is replaced by a new company called Noah Pharma, a public benefit company owned by an independent foundation whose purpose is to provide opioid use disorder treatments and overdose reversal medications at no profit. The Sackler family will have no interest in or roll with Canoa. Their name, which appeared on the walls of museums and universities and medical institutions on two continents, has been removed from most of those buildings following sustained pressure from activists. The Metropolitan Museum, the Louver, the Guggenheim, the Tate Modern, the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Sackler name is coming down, and the philanthropy that put it up will not restore what was built with the money that generated it. The documents one provision of the settlement that I think deserves more attention than it typically gets. The deal mandates the release of more than thirty million internal Purdue documents to a public repository. Thirty million documents related to how Purdue marketed OxyContin how the Sacklers manage the company, what they knew and when they knew it, and what they did with that knowledge. Those documents are going to be available to researchers, journalists, historians, and lawyers for years to come. Some of what comes

13:24 out of those files may be the most important part of this entire case, not the dollar amount, not the corporate dissolution, but the permanent public record of exactly what this family and this company chose to do. The Connecticut Attorney General, in his statement after the November twenty twenty five confirmation, said the settlement would make the Sackler name forever synonymous with greed, shame, and devastation. That is going further than legal language typically goes, and I think he meant every word of it. The settlement cannot undo anything. There is no number that undoes it. But the historical record of what they did, documented in their own emails, their own memos, their own internal market analyzes, will be permanently accessible, and that matters in ways that are different from money. Here's what I want to end on, because I think it is the true center of this story, and it is not the dollar figure. The families who lost people to oxycont and overdoses did not win the kind of victory that makes the loss acceptable. They will receive eight thousand dollars to sixteen thousand dollars for a dead child, a dead parent, a dead spouse. There is no number that would make that acceptable. What they want is something else. The legal ruling that says a billionaire family cannot use a bankruptcy they did not file for to permanently escape the consequences of what they did. They

14:55 won the precedent that corporate wealth cannot simply buy permanent immunity from the people its owner harmed. They won thirty million documents going into a public repository. They won the dissolution of the company. They won the permanent opioid ban on the Sackler name they won, the Sackler name. Coming off the museums. Jen Trejo stood outside the Supreme Court with a photograph of her son, Christopher, who was thirty two when he died, and said, you cannot just kill my child and pay a fine. She was right, and the Supreme Court agreed with her. The fine got bigger, the accountability got more real. Christopher is still gone, and sixteen thousand dollars does not change that, and nothing ever will.

15:37 But the system, greeking slow, imperfect, maddening in its pace and its limitations, eventually said that what the Sacklers did was not acceptable and they could not simply buy their way past it. That matters, not enough, but it matters. The people who died of prescription opioid overdoses in this country since nineteen ninety six number in the hundreds of thousands. Most of them had names and families and lives that were not statistics. Their names deserve to be said, even when there are too many to say, remember them. That's the Purdue Pharma's story. Tomorrow we go somewhere quieter and older, and in some ways more haunting. A nuclear plant in Oklahoma in nineteen seventy four a woman named Karen Silkwood and the documents she was carrying when she died on the way to meet a New York Times reporter. The documents were never found, she never made it to that meeting, and the case she left behind changed how America thinks about whistleblowers, corporations, and plutonium. That's tomorrow, Do Better. Disclaimer.

16:48 Daily Crime Injustice is produced by Calaroga Shark Media. This episode draws on court records, congressional testimony, US Supreme Court opinion in Harrington versus Purdue Pharma LP. Twenty twenty four, State Attorney General filings, NPR, PBS AP reporting, and AI assisted research. We do our best to get it right. We are a podcast, not a courtroom. This is entertainment and commentary, not legal fact.