FIGHTING BACK - THE WOMAN WHO WOULDN'T QUIT: ERIN BROCKOVICH VS. PG&E — PART 1

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher Monday, May eleventh, twenty twenty six, and we are back for Week two of Fighting Back. Last week we covered five black and Latino teenagers interrogated for thirty hours without lawyers for a crime they didn't commit. Factory workers told to lick a radioactive paintbrush hundreds of times a day, and a seventy nine year old grandmother turned into a national punchline by the corporation that burned her. This week, we go bigger. A woman with no law degree who took on a utility company worth billions of dollars and won the largest direct action lawsuit settlement in American history. A family that turned their dead children into a legal reckoning that reached all the way to the Supreme Court, a nuclear plant whistleblower who vanished on the way to a meeting with a reporter, her documents never found.

0:58 And a man who handwrote a letter to the Supreme Court and pencil from a prison cell and changed the Constitution. We start today in the Mojave Desert, a town called Hinckley, California, about one hundred and twenty miles northeast of Los Angeles, population not much, and a woman who in nineteen ninety three showed up there with no formal legal training, a stack of files that didn't make sense, and a refusal to be told it was none of her business. Hinckley, California. Hinckley in the early nineteen nineties was a small, quiet desert community, the kind of place where people had lived for generations, where everyone knew each other's kids, where families had built their lives and expected to stay. It had the virtues and the vulnerabilities of isolated small towns everywhere, strong community ties, limited resources, and a near total dependence on the goodwill of the largest employer and landowner in the area, which in Hinckley's case was Pacific Gas and Electric Company pg and E had operated a compressor station in Hinckley since nineteen fifty two, a facility that pumped natural gas through the pipelines connecting Texas to California. To keep the cooling towers in that compressor station from rusting, PG and E used a chemical called hexavalent chromium chromium six.

2:20 It is cheap, it is effective at preventing corrosion, and it is a known human carcinogen. The wastewater from those cooling towers, saturated with chromium six, was discharged into ponds near the facility. Those ponds were unlined, meaning the contaminated water had nothing between it and the soil beneath. From nineteen fifty two to nineteen sixty six, approximately three hundred and seventy million gallons of chromium laced wastewater percolated down through that soil and into the groundwater aquifer that supplied Hinckley's drinking wells. PG and E knew about it, at least in part, as early as nineteen sixty five, when some of their own workers noticed chromium in. The water around the facility.

3:01 The Regional Water Quality Control Board put the site under its regulations in nineteen sixty eight. But the broader community of Hinckley, the families whose wells drew from that same contaminated aquifer, who bathed in it and cooked with it and gave it to their children, was not told, not told what PG and HE knew, Not told what the water contained, not told that the chemical in their wells was the kind that causes cancer. What Hinckley's residents knew because they were living it was. That something was wrong. Cancer rates in the community were elevated in ways that didn't make statistical sense. People were developing tumors breast cancer, uterine cancer, Hodgkins lymphoma, cervical cancer, kidney cancer at a rate that seemed impossible to explain by chance. Women were suffering miscarriages, some of them multiple miscarriages, over and over.

3:55 Children were sick with chronic respiratory problems and nosebleeds. Spouses were dying, And whenever anyone raised a concern with PG and E or with the waterboard, the answer was essentially the same. The water meets safe standards. There's nothing to worry about. Your health problems are a coincidence. In nineteen ninety one, Aaron Brockovich was thirty one years old, twice divorced, the mother of three children, and employed as a file clerk at a small personal injury law firm called Masri and Vitato in Thousand Oaks, California. She had come to that job in an unconventional way. She had been seriously injured in a car accident in Reno hired the firm to represent her, lost the case, and then talked the attorney ed Mazri into giving her a job because she needed the income and wasn't going to let the matter drop.

4:48 She had no law degree, She had no formal legal training. She had an associate's degree in applied arts from a business college in Dallas. What she had was persistence, a genuine instinct for talking to people and getting them to trust her, and, as it turned out, an almost preternatural ability to understand when something in a file didn't add up. In nineteen ninety two, she was organizing documents on what appeared to be a routine real estate case involving a Hinckley homeowner named Donna Jensen and PG and E. P g and E wanted to buy Donna's property standard enough, but as Aaron went through the file, she found something that had no business being in a real estate case.

5:31 Medical records, blood tests, health records for Donna Jensen and her family. Aaron had seen plenty of real estate files. Medical records didn't belong in them. She started asking questions. Ed Masry gave her permission to look into it further. She drove out to the Mojave Desert to meet Donna Jensen in person. What Donna Jensen told her and what Aaron then heard from neighbor after neighbor as she spent weeks driving back and forth to Hinckley, knocking on doors, sitting in people's kitchens listening to their stories was a portrait of a community being slowly destroyed. Donna's husband had a tumor. Her neighbor's wife had had five miscarriages. The family down the road had lost a child. The man at the end of the street was on chemotherapy. And woven through every one of these stories was the water.

6:24 Everyone in Hinckley drank from the same wells. Everyone in Hinckley was sick. And PG and E, which had been buying up properties in Hinckley quietly for years, had been paying the medical bills of residents who asked, a practice that, as Aaron recognized, made no sense for a company that claimed the water was safe. You don't pay someone's medical bills if you're not worried about what made them sick. Hexavalent chromium is not the same as the chromium that occurs naturally in the environment or the chromium in your multivitamin. It is a specifically toxic, specifically industrial form of the element classified as a known human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. It damages DNA inhaled It causes lung cancer ingested through drinking water over extended periods.

7:12 The science links it to stomach cancer and potentially to a range of other malignancies. It is genotoxic, meaning it attacks the genetic material in cells in ways that can cause mutations that develop into cancer over years or decades, and it is persistent once it's in the groundwater. It doesn't break down and go away on its own. The residents of Hinckley had been drinking it for decades, not knowing what it was, not knowing it was there, not knowing that the utility company supplying their community had discharged it into the ground, and known for years that it had migrated into the aquifer their wells drew from. When Aaron went to the local water board and pulled every document she could find on PG and e's chromium discharges, what she found confirmed what the residents by bodies had already been telling her. There was a plume of contaminated groundwater running approximately eight miles long and two miles wide under the Hinckley Valley, and PG and E had known about it the internal company documents that eventually surfaced were damning in the specific cold way that internal corporate documents often are written in the language of business rather than malice, which somehow makes them worse. A nineteen sixty six memo from PG and E's own operations showed that company headquarters knew the water was contaminated with hex's avalent chromium, and rather than warning the community, advised the Hinckley operation to keep it internal, not fix it, not disclose it, keep

8:45 it quiet. For the families in Hinckley, who had spent years wondering why their neighbors kept getting cancer, that memo was the answer to a question they had been too scared to ask out loud. After the break, Aaron Brakovich goes door door across the Mojave Desert, signing up more than six hundred plaintiffs. Ed Masri, a personal injury lawyer who normally handles fender benders, finds himself staring down a twenty eight billion dollar utility company, and PG and E hires consultants to falsify the science that could have stopped them.

9:27 What Aaron did between nineteen ninety two and nineteen ninety three is worth sitting with for a moment because it is genuinely remarkable, and it happened without any of the institutional resources that are supposed to make these things possible. She had no law degree, she had no investigative budget to speak of. She had a car, a phone, and the willingness to drive to the Mojave Desert repeatedly and sit with people for as long as it took for them to trust her enough to tell her what was happening in their bodies and their families. She talked to residents the way that no one from PG and E had ever talked to them, not as potential liabilities, but as people. She remembered the names of their children and the details of their diagnoses. Between visits, she helped families understand what chromium six was and why the pattern of illness they were experiencing wasn't a coincidence, and she asked them one by one if they wanted to be part of a lawsuit against the company that had poisoned them.

10:26 By the time she was done going door to door across Hinckley and the surrounding area, she had signed up more than six hundred plaintiffs, current and former residents, all of them with documented exposure to the contaminated water, most of them with documented health consequences. It was one of the largest collections of plaintiffs in a direct action toxic torque case in American history, assembled by a woman who officially worked as a file clerk. Ed masriy to his credit, saw what she had built and understood what it meant. Masri and Vitito was a small personal injury firm. This was not the kind of case that small personal injury firms take against twenty eight billion dollar utility companies, but Masri committed to it, brought in co council and expert help as the case developed, and filed suit on behalf of the Hinckley residents against PG and E in nineteen ninety three. PIG and EA's legal strategy had two components that operated simultaneously. The first was the standard corporate defense posture dispute, the science dispute. The causation argued that the chromium levels in the water were not definitively linked to the health outcomes the plaintiffs were experiencing and make the case as expensive and time consuming as possible. The second was something that went considerably beyond standard legal strategy. In nineteen eighty seven, a Chinese epidemiologist named John Dong Jong had published a study finding a strong link between hexavalent chromium and drinking water and stomach cancer in a Chinese

11:57 industrial town. This This study became important evidence in the Hinckley case, the kind of scientific foundation that plaintiff's attorneys needed to connect PG and ease contamination to the health damage it caused. In nineteen ninety four, a judge in the Hinckley case ruled that the Jong study would be influential in the proceedings. PG and E's legal team understood that this was a problem for their defense, and what they did about it is one of the most brazen pieces of scientific fraud in any environmental case on record. PG and E hired a consulting firm with offices in China, whose employees tracked down doctor Jang, who was elderly, retired, spoke little English, and had no computer, and paid him a token amount for access to his original research data.

12:44 Their consultants then conducted their own analysis of that data, deliberately manipulating the statistics in ways that obscured the link to stomach cancer. Wrote up the results as a scientific paper under doctor Jong's byline, and submitted it for publication in a scientific journal without disclosing that they worked for consultants hired by PG and E and without disclosing PG and e's involvement or funding. Jang was paid less than two thousand dollars total. The consulting firm charged PG and E between twenty thousand dollars and thirty thousand dollars for the work. The fraudulent paper was published in nineteen ninety seven and was subsequently cited by the EPA and other regulatory agencies as evidence that chromium six in drinking water did not cause cancer, which affected not just the Hinkley case but regulatory decisions about chromium six standards for years afterward.

13:39 The fraud wasn't exposed until years later through documents surfaced in subsequent litigation. By then, the damage to the scientific record had spread well beyond Hinckley. That's the playbook. When the science is against you pay someone to rewrite the science, launder it through a journal, and cite it in court. There's a word for that. It's it's not mistake, it's not error, it's fraud. Executed deliberately and with full knowledge of what it would mean for the families in Hinckley who were trying to prove that the water had made them sick. One more piece of the case deserves attention because it speaks to how thoroughly PG and E understood what exposure meant for them.

14:28 Among the plaintiff's most significant discoveries was a former PG and E employee named Charles Embry, who had worked at the Hinckley compressor station. Embry came forward and told Aaron and the legal team that he had been ordered by PG and E to destroy documents from the station, documents that contained incriminating evidence about the company's knowledge of the contamination. He had not destroyed his own records, he gave them to Aarin. Think about that for a moment. PG and HE had not just contaminated a town's water and concealed it from the community. When a legal exposure started to become a parent. They had instructed at least one employee to destroy evidence. The only reason those records existed at all is that one person, a middle level employee with no particular stake in the outcome of a lawsuit, he had and filed decided not to follow that instruction. The case against PG and E rested in part on documents that survived only because Charles Embry made a private decision to keep them rather than shred them. Nobody was paying attention to him either, until Aaron knocked on his door.

15:34 That's Part one. A file clerk with three kids and no law degree drove into the desert, sat in stranger's kitchens, and built a case that would become the largest direct action lawsuit settlement in American history. Tomorrow Part two. The legal strategy, the three hundred and thirty three million dollar settlement, the bonus check that made Aaron Brockovich's family's lives unrecognizable overnight, and what happened to Hinckley after the cameras left. Hint It's not a happy ending. The plume is still there, the cleanup will take decades, and the town that fought back hard enough to win is slowly becoming a ghost town.

16:14 Do Better Disclaimer. Daily Crime and Justice is produced by Calaroga Shark Media. This episode draws on court records, environmental agency filings, the environmental working groups, published investigations, ABC News 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.