In this episode, my friend, Hunter Lundy, joins me to talk about his career as a trial lawyer in Louisiana. He s won every award that our profession can honor a trial attorney with, and is one of the few people in the country who have specialized in suing the oil and gas industry. We talk about some of his most memorable cases, including the case against Jimmy Swaggart, the one that resulted in the largest defamation verdict in the history of Louisiana, and the case that led to the $50 million settlement against Carmichael for creosote contamination. He also talks about the Kerr-McGee case, and how he and his co-counsel, Bobby Kennedy, have been able to take on some of the most important environmental issues in the state of Louisiana. This is a must-listen episode for anyone who s interested in environmental issues, especially those related to the environment, and wants to know how they can do their part to protect the environment and the people who live there. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and share it with your friends, family and loved ones. Thank you so much for tuning in! -Bobby Kennedy and Hunter Lundey - Thank you also for supporting this podcast and for supporting our efforts to make a difference in the field of environmental justice and human rights and human dignity. Thank you for being a friend of the fight for our planet. . Thanks to Bobby Kennedy for being such a great friend of mine, and for being so generous with your time, and your support of our profession, and giving us the chance to do what we need to do the best we can do to improve our day to day life. - thank you, Bobby and hope you can do your part to help us all in this podcast, to do our best to make an impact in the world, to keep us all a little bit more of what we can all of us can do more of a better day to make the world a better place for us all. , and we hope you all can do our part in the next episode, to make us better, thank you! to be kinder, more like that in the future, more of you, and keep us better than the next one, more than we can see you in this one, and more of those who listen to us, we appreciate you, Thank you, thank you. Thanks, Bobby, for listening.
00:00:01.000My guest this afternoon is Hunter Lundy, my friend, my colleague, my co-counsel, Lake Charles, Louisiana, one of the finest, most revered trial lawyers in America, won every award that our profession can honor a trial lawyer with.
00:00:23.000Last week, Hunter, and I'm co-counseling on this case, Filed a case, really a groundbreaking case against the Motorola and the cell phone industry for causing cancer specifically in a Louisiana preacher named Frank Aaron Walker who died at the age of 49 after using a Motorola cell phone for 25
00:00:56.000And he got the same kind of glioblastoma cancer.
00:01:01.000I killed my uncle Ted Kennedy in 2009, my friend Johnny Cochran in 2006.
00:01:08.000And Hunter has really pioneered this area of litigation, trying to get some justice from these cell phone companies who've known For decades that their cell phones are causing cancer and continue to tell them, encourage people, children and adults to use them at terrible, terrible risk.
00:01:33.000And Hunter, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.
00:01:39.000I'm honored to be on your show and those were some kind statements you said about my career.
00:01:45.000Let me ask you, let me get you just to talk about some of the other cases that you've brought in the past so people can kind of understand what your interests are.
00:01:55.000Your interests have kind of overlapped with mine on a lot of the environmental issues.
00:02:00.000You're from Louisiana and yet you sue oil companies which are sanctified and untouchable in your state.
00:02:11.000You won a $50 million Historic settlement against Carmichael for creosote contamination.
00:02:20.000You've won one of my favorite lawsuits of yours, your septic system lawsuit, and I've sued so many septic companies, and you're one of the few other attorneys in this country who have kind of specialized in suing that industry.
00:02:37.000One of your most interesting cases was against Jimmy Swaggart.
00:02:41.000Can you just tell us a little bit about that?
00:02:45.000In the mid to late 80s, I was hired by a pastor out of New Orleans, Reverend Paul Gorman, who had been defamed by Reverend Swigert in the denomination that he was affiliated with.
00:02:57.000And so we filed a lawsuit in New Orleans for defamation, invasion of privacy, and violation of Pastor Gorman's First Amendment rights.
00:03:07.000And it ended up in 1991 in a 10-week trial.
00:03:11.000Resulting in probably the largest defamation verdict in the history of Louisiana.
00:03:28.000But that was a kind of a pioneering case on the First Amendment.
00:03:32.000And I was a very young lawyer at the time when I met him in 1985, or as we like to call them, puppy lawyers.
00:03:41.000I had just started my law firm, and so that was kind of the story.
00:03:47.000Of course, back then, we didn't have social media, and I tell people that when we argued that case in the Court of Appeals, the Tokyo News and the BBC and every major network was there, and I tried that case with a famous trial lawyer that came out of World War II, Tommy D. Frazier from Oklahoma, who was a paraplegic and was quite a Quite a mentor in the profession to me.
00:04:13.000And so it was a great experience in life, and it was a great opportunity for my law firm to start off on.
00:04:21.000And there was a book written about it called Let Us Play, P-R-E-Y, and that gives the history and it develops the characters of Marvin Gorman, Jimmy Swigert, and Tommy D. Frazier.
00:04:34.000It's a nonfiction, but it's pretty descriptive in parts.
00:04:40.000And people can go back and research the history that was behind all of that, but just a chapter in my career.
00:04:47.000But, you know, you mentioned the Kerr-McGee case.
00:04:49.000We filed that in 99, and we represented residents from Bossier, Louisiana, local Pennsylvania, most of the ones from Columbus, Mississippi, that made up the largest number of the cases.
00:05:02.000And we did have a great result, shy of a trial.
00:05:06.000But the case that you might see in textbooks Is the Vista Chemical case.
00:05:12.000There's a community right outside of Lake Charles on the other side of the river called Mossville.
00:05:17.000Conoco had their chemical plant there for years, and then a company named Vista Chemical bought it out.
00:05:24.000And their tank form, they had never replaced the tanks, and they leaked into this small, economically, or I would say economically deprived, but African-American community, was right on top of the plant.
00:05:37.000And the ethylene dichloride, which is very lethal, had gotten into the groundwater.
00:05:42.000And so me and some colleagues brought a suit against them that ended up in a very good result, relocating about 2,000 people and greenbelting that area that had been contaminated.
00:05:54.000So that was a great start into the environmental practice.
00:06:04.000From that point on, like you, Bobby, I've been doing environmental work in different states, primarily in Louisiana and Mississippi and Arkansas, some in Ohio and various other places.
00:06:19.000Dabbled in California a little bit, but not much.
00:06:22.000I try to leave that to the smart lawyers.
00:06:30.000Originally, I know you've been interested many, many years, trying to get me into litigation, and you haven't had to try that hard.
00:06:39.000As I said, I'm convinced my Uncle Ted Kennedy died of one of these tumors, and my friend Johnny Cochran, and many, many other people.
00:06:49.000In 2008 and 2009, I started looking at products that were on the market.
00:06:55.000There were screen devices, there were chips, there were things that were being put on Cell phones to help change exposure or reduce exposure and I was interested in it but one day I got a call from Erin Brockovich and I had met Erin years ago.
00:07:13.000We had worked on contamination in Beverly Hills and she said she had a lady that was looking for a lawyer whose husband had a glioma and he believed it was from he was a realtor and he had an abundance of cell phone exposure So I had already done some research on the cell phones and so I ended up being co-counsel for a gentleman named Alan Marks in California and we filed the suit along with a group of other cases in the District
00:07:43.000of Columbia of Superior Court and that's kind of how we got into it.
00:07:47.000A lawyer out of Detroit had filed some suits earlier and had gone up to the Court of Appeals and they'd come back and there'd been some decisions And so because the nonprofits involved in the cell phone industry, the lobbying groups, are located in D.C., it made what appeared to be a good venue for cases that could be joined together in that venue that were from around the country.
00:08:12.000So no matter where you were located and where you got your tumor and where you bought your cell phone, you could bring your case in the District of Columbia.
00:08:20.000So we did that, and so we've been Walking through this process for a decade almost in the District of Columbia, and we had a Fry hearing, and as you know, Bobby, there's a standard called the Daubert standard,
00:08:37.000which are, of course, the Frenchmen in Louisiana like to say dober, but the Daubert standard is applicable in most all of the states, and it's a standard in which you challenge the experts of parties, but District of Columbia was still operating under the Fry standard, That standard meant you challenged a witness to see if his opinion was generally, or the methodology that he used to form his opinion, was generally accepted in the scientific community.
00:09:08.000So our listeners understand, when you sue somebody because of an environmental exposure, the courts will not let you go to a jury.
00:09:19.000Until the judge makes an independent determination that there is reliable science that shows that that exposure indeed can cause that particular injury.
00:09:34.000And if the judge does not find that there is some kind of prevalence in science, if one or two studies is not enough, it needs to be a certain threshold of studies that makes it In the judge's view, reliable.
00:09:51.000And only then will he let you take it to the jury.
00:10:03.000And so we tried our experts under Frye and they challenged them.
00:10:08.000And the court entered a ruling which was favorable for us for most all of the experts.
00:10:13.000But then it was taken up on appeal and the court reversed it.
00:10:18.000Saying, we're going to now apply Daubert.
00:10:22.000So we had to go back and do a redo under a new standard.
00:10:26.000Instead of Frye, we had to redo it under Daubert.
00:10:29.000And it's still sitting with the court.
00:10:31.000And in D.C., they change the judge every year.
00:10:34.000So we're now on our fifth judge on those group of cases.
00:10:39.000But as you stated when we started, we're working together on Pastor Frank Walker's case.
00:10:47.000He's deceased now for his widow and two kids that we filed in federal court in Louisiana.
00:10:52.000And, of course, we'll have the Daubert Challenge, just like you explained to the audience here.
00:10:58.000But I think that we're going to move much quicker than what we just seem to be bogged down in the District of Columbia.
00:11:06.000And we have an advantage now because the science also has matured enormously.
00:11:12.000And there have been over a thousand studies now that show that, yes, That cell phones can indicate that cell phones can cause cancer.
00:11:22.000The International Agency for the Research on Cancer, IARC, which is kind of a key metric in these kind of losses, has also found that it's a probable carcinogen.
00:11:36.000And the probably most convincing of all The cell phone industry hired a, what we used to call a biostitute, an industry insider, a scientist who normally just does science for the industry to prove that a certain exposure is safe.
00:12:02.000And around 1990, the Industry Trade Association, which we are suing also in this case, And they gave him $28 million, and they told him, go out and find the science to show that cell phones are safe.
00:12:20.000And he was so alarmed by the science that he actually found, that showed it damaged DNA, they cause cancer, they penetrate the blood-brain barrier, that it alters the cellular system.
00:12:35.000Performance and function of children's brains after only three or four minutes of exposure.
00:12:41.000And he was so alarmed by that, that he told the industry who had paid him $28 million, I cannot do what you want me to do.
00:12:56.000And then they had to spend a lot of money trying to Trying to discredit George Carlow and I back in the early or the mid 90s, I actually had him on our television show, on our radio show and TV show that Mike Papantonio and I used to do, which is Ring of Fire.
00:13:17.000He was really an extraordinary character, but he's one of the kind of the major figures in this day.
00:13:24.000Carlow was in the, I would say, had inside information About decision-making that took place in the cell phone industry.
00:13:34.000And, of course, if you read the complaint that we filed in federal court here a week or so ago, it outlines the information and the history of the development of the phone and so forth.
00:13:46.000But we know that they've known for many years the dangers involved, and they have not educated the public with the dangers.
00:13:56.000Under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act of Louisiana that people have been deceived of the dangers or misled of the dangers involved in using cell phones.
00:14:08.000And Bobby, you know, just like I know, that we know we have free will.
00:14:11.000But you can't use that free will unless you're educated and told.
00:14:17.000All we want is people to be able to make choices.
00:14:20.000And you and I both believe that this technology, we wouldn't be doing this podcast.
00:14:24.000But for the fantastic technology that exists today.
00:14:28.000But we just want to be educated on the dangers, especially our children.
00:14:32.000And I know you're aware that the CDC in 2014 put a warning on their website, especially to the children on the hazards involved or the potential hazards involved with exposure to cell phone radiation.
00:14:50.000And within two weeks, they had it down.
00:14:53.000They took it down because of the pressure from the wireless community.
00:14:58.000I mean, there's an unhealthy relationship between industry and government agencies.
00:15:06.000And I know you know this, but Tom Wheeler, who was head of the CTIA during the George Carlo years, became the chairman of the CTIA. It is the trade association, the lobby association for this industry, and it is just a rank criminal enterprise.
00:15:28.000They are just, they are creating havoc.
00:15:32.000They're killing people across the country for money.
00:15:38.000And they, well, go ahead and tell them what happened.
00:15:45.000The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, and there's another one called TIA, the Telecommunications Industry Association.
00:15:55.000But they're the lobbying firm, and they're driving legislation, they're driving instructions to the federal agencies, and they're working with industry.
00:16:08.000And so they had a guy running that organization named Tom Wheeler.
00:16:13.000Who was making the decisions and he made a decision that's very significant to the health of the world as well as the American public and that was when we went from analog phones to digital phones.
00:16:26.000They never did any testing on what the consequences of the digital phones would be that run from a code versus a frequency like the old analog phones.
00:16:39.000Wheeler made that decision And he made it for the purposes of industry, for the purposes of selling off the old phone frequencies.
00:16:49.000But I mean, that's something that is detailed information we can talk about later.
00:16:54.000It's very unhealthy between business and industry.
00:16:59.000I don't know if people understood what we were saying, but the head of the lobbying group...
00:17:07.000Was involved in this criminal activity, became the head of FCC. And while he was at FCC, he was making all these rules that favored his industry and utterly ignored any of the health problems that he knew this technology was causing children.
00:17:30.000And to have the CDC alter their website at the pressure of of industry is sad because we've seen so much inconsistency and of course there were many articles written in 2015 and 2016 about that change on the website warning children but Bobby the audience needs to know that an individual's skull and brain does not reach its full formation until they're in their early 20s
00:18:00.000and so children are getting much greater exposure Than adults are when they're putting cell phones up next to their brain.
00:18:35.000Then they got married when they were 22, 23 years old, and they never had a landline.
00:18:41.000So you don't find landlines in homes anymore.
00:18:43.000People are saving their money and using cell phones.
00:18:46.000So then they're on the cell phone for another decade.
00:18:49.000So now kids that were 12, 14, 15 years old that got on phones are getting tumors when they're in their 30s because they've had 20 years of exposure.
00:19:01.000And you know that the science reveals that 10 years or more of exposure, more than 30 minutes a day, increases your risk by two-fold of getting glioma or acoustic neuroma, which are the two focused tumors in this litigation.
00:19:17.000And of course, I'm not going to talk about the individual client, but we'll talk in general concepts.
00:19:23.000But these lawsuits all involve gliomas and acoustic neuromas.
00:19:30.000And classically, the glioma or the acoustic neuroma occurs in the back of the ear at people's favor for their cell phone.
00:19:40.000And that's what happened to my uncle, Ted Kennedy.
00:19:42.000That's what happened to Johnny Cochran.
00:19:44.000Johnny Cochran knew that it was a cell phone tumor that killed him before he died, of course.
00:19:49.000One of the studies that George Carlow uncovered is a study that actually measures the amount of radiation that penetrates the brain.
00:20:00.000And two inches into the brain, into the skull, into the actual brain tissue, the exposure levels to radiation are about two billion times background levels.
00:20:15.000They've studied and try to regulate for the depth and breadth of the radiation that goes in the brain.
00:20:25.000But we've learned through time, and you mentioned a thousand studies That have occurred since the early years.
00:20:33.000And recently, we've had animal studies that confirmed everything that the epidemiology, the human health studies revealed.
00:20:41.000And as you remember, Bobby, in 2011, when the International Association of Research on Cancer came back and said that it's a possible carcinogen, they rated it to be cell phone radiation.
00:20:55.000And they said possible because we don't have enough animal studies at this time.
00:21:00.000We had the human epidemiology, and they had studies from Dr.
00:21:06.000Hardell, and they had what was called the Interphone Study, which was done among 14 countries.
00:21:10.000But they were still waiting on animal data.
00:21:13.000Well, in 2016, 17, and 18, the United States had funded a study.
00:21:19.000The National Institute of Environmental Health, called the National Toxicological Program, funded a study.
00:21:27.000They said rats and mice, and it came back Showing just what we're saying.
00:21:32.000That animal study, the largest and most robust animal study conducted in history on cell phone radiation, showed that this stuff would increase the risk of these exposures, would increase the risk of getting gliomas and acoustic neuromas.
00:21:59.000Anybody that says anything that's contrary to what the wireless industry believes, they immediately try to destroy the messenger or hurt the credibility of the scientists who say it.
00:22:37.000And these are the scientists that are now saying it's a probable carcinogen.
00:22:41.000And you and I know that there's nine billion cell phones on this earth.
00:22:46.000And my concern is those young people, our children, Who got on phones when they were teenagers are at high risk today because they were on them.
00:22:56.000I started telling mine, you know, 10 years ago, you know, you need to speaker it.
00:23:05.000Do anything you can to reduce your exposure.
00:23:08.000Use your Bluetooth in your car or your truck or wherever.
00:23:11.000Reduce your exposure because it's all about distance, as you pointed out, the study that reflected it.
00:23:17.000How much was going into the brain when you hold it up next to your head?
00:23:21.000So these are things that the industry has secretly started mentioning in some of their phone literature, but you and I know that the public needs to be warned, just so they can make a choice.
00:23:34.000We see warnings on cigarette packs, and it took a long time to get those warnings on those cigarette packs.
00:23:42.000Well, that's what we did in the Roundup case.
00:23:45.000If Monsanto had just told people this is a possible carcinogen and this can cause Monsanto's lymphoma, we wouldn't have had any case.
00:23:55.000We weren't saying we should ban Roundup.
00:24:00.000We were saying people should be able to make an informed choice.
00:24:03.000And when they take a risk, they may choose to take that risk.
00:24:07.000And most of us would probably choose to take a rather high risk when it comes to cell phones.
00:24:12.000We need to have the choice and we need to have the knowledge to tell our kids don't sleep with that thing next to your head.
00:24:22.000Don't leave that in your room near your head all night.
00:24:26.000And because this is a huge mass experiment, as you say, we have, you know, we have the most prominent scientists in the world who are, some of them who are testifying versus this lawsuit.
00:24:42.000They are basing their opinions in large part on studies that were funded and performed by the United States government.
00:24:52.000The idea that there's any ambiguity about this science, it's kind of laughable.
00:24:57.000There's a data that reflected 30% of our teenage children sleep with their cell phones.
00:25:04.000I mean, it's just a ubiquitous environment now because of As many towers that are going up and many wireless devices that are in place.
00:25:14.000And I know our litigation is about the cell phone and our focus is on the cell phone because everybody's got one and many have two and three.
00:25:23.000And I could name off a list of people.
00:25:26.000You mentioned your Uncle Ted Kennedy and Johnny Cochran.
00:25:30.000I think the former Attorney General of Delaware died with a brain tumor.
00:25:47.000Because, and realtors and lawyers and doctors, people who back in the 1980s were frequently traveling, frequently could afford, remember the cell phone bills were outrageous when they first came out.
00:26:02.000Somebody who was on the road And you mentioned me in the Garmin Swagger case.
00:26:07.000I used to drive back and forth from New Orleans daily, 200 miles from Lake Charles, and I was on the cell phone.
00:26:15.000Sometimes those phone bills were, you know, $1,000 a month.
00:26:24.000And so you see people in our age bracket that started getting tumors in their 50s and their 40s and 50s because they could afford those phones.
00:26:34.000And then you see people in rural areas because, you know, the towers, the location of the towers control the amount of radiation that is either going in or coming out of the phone because when you're searching for a signal, the energy causes it to search with a deeper power.
00:26:53.000You remember the days when you were looking at the bars on your phone.
00:26:56.000If you saw low bars on your phone, that meant you were searching for a tower.
00:27:01.000So you were getting, when a signal came in or a signal went out, you were getting high exposure.
00:27:06.000In rural areas, it was worse than in urban areas because of the distance of towers between each other.
00:27:13.000So all of that plays into the role of who gets the most exposure.
00:27:17.000But then we started putting these cell phones in our children's hands.
00:27:22.000It's sad to say that the Europeans are way ahead of the Americans.
00:27:27.000And even Israel and some of the other countries and India and others are way ahead of us on protecting their citizens.
00:27:36.000Some of them would not allow children under 16 to use cell phones.
00:27:40.000Some of them banned the use of the cell phone to kids under 16 years of age.
00:27:46.000Unfortunately, American public, we fought a lobby that was stronger than the consumer lobby that has allowed this thing to They wanted, let's just be truthful, they wanted market saturation before the Bobby Kennedys and Hunter Lundys and others of the world started educating people on the dangers of cell phone.
00:28:21.000I'm seeing personally In a community like I live in, where young people in their 30s are getting glioblastomas, it's sad, but we've got to have a day in court.
00:28:36.000Russia definitely knows more about cell phone radiation than at any place in the world because they were the ones who did all the initial studies on it back in the 50s, the 60s, and the 70s.
00:28:51.000And they're so cautious about it in Russia, they don't let it.
00:28:55.000They have laws over there against allowing cell phones in those schools.
00:28:59.000Their exposure levels that are allowable in Russia are 1,000 of the exposure levels that we have here in this country.
00:29:11.000And another thing people should know about it is that the amount of radiation that your cell phone is emitting is Largely related to its functionalities.
00:29:23.000If you have a lot of apps on that cell phone, you are getting more and more and more radiation.
00:29:41.000For them, it's like living without air.
00:29:45.000And I'm in a constant battle with them, telling them, get that thing away from your head.
00:29:50.000I haven't put a cell phone next to my head for years, because I interviewed George Carlin in the late 1990s, Carlo in the late 1990s.
00:30:00.000After that, I was like, wow, I'm not gonna, this thing is dangerous.
00:30:05.000But the people who really probably have the most exposure and where you're seeing these really disastrous impacts are first responders, police, Firefighters and the military and it really is a national crisis what's happening in those professions.
00:30:25.000And think of your hotel clerks now and you think of other hospitality areas and you go and you watch them and they have a cell phone.
00:30:35.000They're holding it on their shoulder and their ear and they're taking notes here with their hand because people have gone away from landlines and they're all using these cell phones And so they're getting much higher exposure with these cell phones and they're doing it all day.
00:30:50.000And again, the science is indicative that latency and the cumulative amount of exposure is relevant to the risk.
00:31:01.000So the longer the exposure and years and hours, the greater the risk.
00:31:06.000I just encourage people, whoever's listening to this conversation, that they take, follow the precautionary advice and And speaker, text, wear earbuds, whatever.
00:32:01.000They've addicted our children with cell phones.
00:32:05.000One of the government agency employees did a peer-reviewed published study That talked about the addictive nature of the cell phone.
00:32:16.000And of course they told her not to write anything else or she'd be fired.
00:32:21.000They know that what they were doing, getting market saturation, and now they got our kids and everybody addicted to phones.
00:32:28.000If you happen to walk through a Target, a Walmart, a mall of some kind, You don't see anybody looking at one another as they're walking down the mall.
00:32:39.000They all have their hand next to their ear with their phone or else they're looking at their phone.
00:32:51.000But it's just like you say, we want the right to choose.
00:32:55.000And if you don't give people the information and you don't tell people the truth, they'll never have the right to choose.
00:33:04.000I mean, one of the reasons the Russians know so much about it is they moved very aggressively in the 60s and 70s to weaponize cell phone radiation and wireless radiation and they were very successful and the U.S. government now has weaponized it too and can do God knows what with it,
00:33:25.000but the Russians understood the danger very, very early and You know, a lot of the best publications on cell phone injury and damage, cancer, and DNA damage, cellular damage, chromosomal damage is coming out of Russia.
00:33:44.000Hunter, let's talk just, you know, as we close down here, let's tell the audience what the status of the case is.
00:33:53.000We have our Daubert hearing in July coming up.
00:33:57.000And that's really going to be the big milestone because if we go forward, if the court finds that we can go forward, if we have sufficient science to go forward, it really is the beginning of a changing tide for this industry.
00:34:11.000The hearing was set a year ago, and the process has been slow.
00:35:26.000After the judge makes the decision on which witnesses will be allowed to testify and which ones won't, then we will go back and seek a trial date for an individual plaintiff.
00:35:36.000At that time, we'll have to disclose who our specific causation witness is.
00:35:41.000And so the audience knows a specific causation witness is one that goes beyond saying that I know that the radiation causes the disease.
00:35:50.000That doctor has to say, I know that the radiation caused this person's disease.
00:35:56.000And they do what they call a differential diagnosis and they eliminate other potential causes and say that the substantial contributing cause was a cell phone radiation.
00:36:05.000So that's the next stage in the litigation.
00:36:08.000And like I said, you and I hope we live long enough to see a case tried.
00:36:12.000This is what I want to see happen because I've been waiting for years.
00:36:16.000And so we're filing suits in other states now.
00:36:29.000Again, we have been denied the right to get the liability documents of the industry.
00:36:38.000We've gotten their scientific documents, but we want the documents between them and their insurance companies.
00:36:45.000And because the insurance industry quit writing for the wireless industries back in around 2000, when Lloyds quit writing them, You know there was some communication going on because they knew of the dangers.
00:36:57.000So we want that evidence, and we haven't been provided the opportunity to get that evidence.
00:37:03.000And so when that happens, I think, and you know, you mentioned Roundup a while ago.
00:37:08.000You know, when those studies became public about what happened in the 1970s when they were trying to decide whether or not glyphosate was a carcinogen or not, when the studies became public, The whole atmosphere of that litigation changed, and so the truth gets out.
00:37:27.000As a trial lawyer, you know, we're truth seekers.
00:37:30.000We want the public and the consumers to know so they can make an informed decision, but they really need to know what happened in the background in the beginning, and that's what we want.
00:37:41.000All we want is the truth to come out and have an opportunity to have our day.
00:37:45.000Don't deny our day in court because, I mean, it's the jury that so often changes.
00:37:52.000The safety of America, and I could go through a list of the things that they've done.
00:37:57.000The reason we have seat belts and shoulder harnesses, steel-toed shoes and helmets, and we can go on.
00:38:03.000The reason the Ford Pinto gas tank was taken off all was because of what juries did and what information.
00:38:11.000Of course, we owe that one to a journalist who exposed them first, the one about the Ford Pinto.
00:38:33.000And it was the Chicago Tribune who recently outed them on their test data, too.
00:38:42.000I want the audience to understand what Honor just said to me that it was the insurance industry in 2001 that said, we are not going to write policies for your industry anymore.
00:38:58.000It's not just this Lake Charles, Louisiana attorney and Robert Kennedy were saying cell phones are dangerous.
00:39:07.000It is the guys from Wall Street with the suits and the ties from the AIG, from Lloyd's in London, Who are the ultimate arbiters of risk in our society?
00:39:20.000Who said, this activity that you're conducting is so dangerous that we are not going to write you an insurance policy because you could never afford it.
00:39:31.000It's the same, you know, the same industry did the same thing with vaccines.
00:39:36.000And the vaccine makers, you know, they told the vaccine makers, if you want an insurance policy, you're going to have to pay so much for it that you won't be able to afford to make that product anymore.
00:39:47.000So Congress had to pass laws that said, you know, you can't sue them and insulate them from lawsuits.
00:39:54.000And in this case, they're self-insuring, but, you know, they don't want to discuss and they don't want the public to know the rationale at the insurance companies, the information that the insurance companies Had available when they made that hard-nosed decision.
00:40:14.000We're going to drop this very, very lucrative industry, and we're not going to make any money from you anymore because we think the hazards of what you're doing...
00:40:27.000Are so enormous that it's going to cost us more money in the long run.