RFK Jr. The Defender - Confidential Chemicals and Teflon with Rob Bilott and David Whiteside

00:00:00.000 Hi, everybody.

00:00:01.000 We have an amazing guest today.

00:00:03.000 My friend Rob Blatt and colleague and co-counsel on the DuPont cases in partnership with West Virginia.

00:00:10.000 The PFAS, we call PFAS, which is the family of chemicals.

00:00:15.000 At that time, we were calling it C8 or PFOA. Those are part of that family.

00:00:22.000 And we've done a lot of litigation on that all over the country.

00:00:25.000 But Rob is famous.

00:00:30.000 Largely because Mark Ruffalo played him in the film Dark Waters, which is the film that Ruffalo made about the case.

00:00:38.000 And Rob and I met for the first time, I think it was in 2016, at the federal courthouse in Cincinnati.

00:00:45.000 When we were about to begin trying that first case, I was lucky enough to be part of the legal team.

00:00:54.000 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.

00:01:11.000 Robert Taft, the president's old law firm.

00:01:14.000 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.

00:01:24.000 I think pretty much stood by you throughout, despite the Pain and acne that you caused in their business.

00:01:31.000 Tell us what happened.

00:01:32.000 It started with a farmer writing you a letter about his cows dying.

00:01:37.000 Yeah, actually started, gosh, 22, 23 years ago in the fall of 1998.

00:01:44.000 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.

00:01:53.000 And, you know, I was about to hang the phone up.

00:01:56.000 It's not the kind of thing I did.

00:01:57.000 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.

00:02:08.000 And so helping with dying cows was not really something, you know, that I was accustomed to.

00:02:14.000 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.

00:02:25.000 Every lawyer in that kind of track, that partnership track, is waiting for.

00:02:31.000 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.

00:02:37.000 Most of the people in that firm were Ivy League lawyers.

00:02:41.000 And you had come from a very different background.

00:02:43.000 So you were kind of an outsider.

00:02:45.000 You were a military brat and moved around, really a hardscrabble fighter to get to where you were in that firm.

00:02:54.000 Yeah, you know, my dad was in the Air Force, so we had moved around a lot.

00:02:59.000 And, you know, really, I had no idea what being in a law firm was about.

00:03:02.000 Nobody in my family had ever been in a big law firm.

00:03:06.000 You know, and I had been trying my best to figure out what all that was about.

00:03:11.000 And I've been spending eight years on it when I got that call.

00:03:13.000 You know, it was at that point that farmer mentioned he got my name from my grandmother.

00:03:17.000 And that was my mom's side of the family.

00:03:19.000 Even though my dad was in the Air Force and we moved around and went to a bunch of different schools.

00:03:24.000 We always came back to Parkersburg when I was a kid for family holidays, birthdays.

00:03:29.000 So I kind of saw that as my hometown.

00:03:31.000 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.

00:03:39.000 And he actually knew your grandmother.

00:03:42.000 Yeah, he had actually been on the phone with his neighbor.

00:03:46.000 And the neighbor was longtime friends with my grandmother.

00:03:49.000 In fact, as a kid, I had spent time on that next door farm, milking the cows and riding the horses as a kid.

00:03:57.000 And he had been trying to find local lawyers that would help him.

00:04:01.000 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.

00:04:08.000 And so he needed somebody from out of town to help him.

00:04:11.000 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.

00:04:22.000 You were the wrong kind of environmental lawyer.

00:04:26.000 Exactly.

00:04:27.000 I think DuPont had been your client at one point, right?

00:04:31.000 You had worked with him on cases.

00:04:33.000 You were representing polluters.

00:04:36.000 Well, yeah, we were representing a lot of big chemical companies.

00:04:39.000 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.

00:04:56.000 So I'd be there representing our chemical company clients.

00:05:00.000 And typically, the lawyers for DuPont would be there because DuPont had cleanup sites and hazardous waste spread all over the country.

00:05:08.000 So I knew the company, but they were not a client of our firm.

00:05:13.000 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.

00:05:25.000 He couldn't find a vet because...

00:05:28.000 Just to set the stage, DuPont completely owned this town.

00:05:32.000 They owned every vet in the district, they owned every lawyer, they owned the judges, they owned everybody.

00:05:39.000 Yeah, you know, Parkersburg happened to have a massive DuPont plant.

00:05:43.000 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.

00:05:52.000 So when this farmer, Mr.

00:05:54.000 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.

00:06:03.000 You know, none of the local lawyers really wanted to take on the town's biggest employer.

00:06:07.000 This was sort of synonymous with the whole town's identity.

00:06:11.000 So that was how that call came to me, you know, looking for somebody who would be willing to take on DuPont.

00:06:18.000 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.

00:06:31.000 And these big boxes and your partners are saying, who the heck is this guy?

00:06:35.000 Because they've never had somebody going to TAF who wasn't wearing a suit and tie before.

00:06:41.000 It was a bit of an unusual event.

00:06:43.000 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.

00:06:53.000 Tennant came into the office with all of these boxes and videotapes.

00:06:57.000 And so I invited him to come sit in and look at this.

00:07:01.000 And it was so fortunate that he did.

00:07:04.000 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.

00:07:14.000 When you looked at these videotapes, you could see white foaming water coming out of this landfill Owned by DuPont.

00:07:21.000 It had a big DuPont label on the discharge pipe.

00:07:24.000 And you could see cows standing in the white foaming water with tumors.

00:07:28.000 Their teeth were black.

00:07:30.000 There were pictures of dead animals.

00:07:33.000 And it wasn't just the cows.

00:07:34.000 It was the fish.

00:07:35.000 It was the deer or the wildlife in the area.

00:07:38.000 We were able to see all that.

00:07:40.000 Luckily, Tom was there as well.

00:07:43.000 Very fortunate that Tom became managing partner of the whole firm as the years went on and as this case dragged on.

00:07:50.000 A lot of things aligned the right way for this case to have developed and to have worked out the way it did.

00:07:57.000 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.

00:08:10.000 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.

00:08:22.000 I think 160 of them had died.

00:08:25.000 He's really this grim inventory of horrible, horrible diseases.

00:08:32.000 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.

00:08:44.000 And there's one of those videos where a cow is charging him and he shoots it.

00:08:48.000 And he's very, very upset and emotional because it's almost like a pet for dairy cows.

00:08:54.000 And then he autopsies on the spot.

00:08:56.000 And it's, you know, it's organs are black.

00:08:59.000 It's just like opening up a horror movie.

00:09:03.000 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.

00:09:15.000 And we used the actual videotape because it was so powerful.

00:09:18.000 It was pretty obvious when you could see what was going on there, particularly, as you mentioned, Mr.

00:09:24.000 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.

00:09:37.000 And, you know, after I saw those videos and we saw those photographs, and after listening to Mr.

00:09:43.000 Tennant, And his wife.

00:09:45.000 His wife came with him when visiting the firm.

00:09:47.000 I mean, just to hear in their voice how devastating this was to them.

00:09:52.000 You know, this wasn't just livestock.

00:09:53.000 This was like family members for them.

00:09:56.000 You know, this was their entire livelihood.

00:09:58.000 As you said, they had been almost wiped out.

00:10:00.000 Almost the entire herd had been wiped out in a matter of just a couple of years by the time he met with us.

00:10:06.000 So it was a really horrific scene and horrific situation to be watching.

00:10:12.000 At that time, I was with Mike Papantonio's firm, but DuPont had not just poisoned cows on one farm.

00:10:20.000 They had poisoned an entire community of 70,000 people and multiple water districts, and they had known for years.

00:10:30.000 Their PFOAs were in and PFASs were in all of the water.

00:10:36.000 They were in the dust that was in people's homes.

00:10:38.000 It was literally everywhere.

00:10:41.000 And it was in the bodies and the blood supply.

00:10:46.000 This is what they call a forever chemical.

00:10:48.000 It's caused testicular cancer, kidney cancer.

00:10:53.000 And a whole lot of other diseases.

00:10:56.000 And DuPont knew it.

00:10:57.000 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.

00:11:05.000 And they just thought that you would never be able to go through them.

00:11:08.000 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.

00:11:19.000 Yeah, it was pretty mind-opening, to put it mildly, you know, getting all of these documents.

00:11:25.000 And at the end of the day, I think it was millions of pages of documents that we had to go through.

00:11:30.000 And as you said, I mean, these were the days before things were on computers.

00:11:33.000 It was hard copy paper, just sitting through, organizing it, reading through, trying to figure out, what is this chemical?

00:11:40.000 Because we found out that this chemical was, you mentioned, called PFOA. Was in the water that these cows were drinking.

00:11:47.000 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.

00:11:57.000 Well, we started digging through these files from DuPont when we brought the lawsuit from Mr.

00:12:02.000 Tennant.

00:12:03.000 You know, starting to see the history of what was known about this chemical, because I'd never heard of it.

00:12:08.000 I couldn't find any information about it back then.

00:12:10.000 This is the year 2000.

00:12:11.000 It was unregulated.

00:12:15.000 Yeah, totally unregulated.

00:12:17.000 Nobody knew what this stuff was.

00:12:19.000 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.

00:12:32.000 And as you indicated, some of the most disturbing information was the ability of this completely man-made chemical.

00:12:40.000 It didn't exist on the planet until man created this weird carbon-fluorine bonded chemical.

00:12:47.000 Had the ability, once it got out into the environment, to never break down.

00:12:53.000 It would virtually stay there forever.

00:12:55.000 That's why, as you indicated, they're called forever chemicals now.

00:12:58.000 Because this stuff, when it gets into the soil, when it gets into the water, it stays there.

00:13:03.000 So for the last 70 years, this stuff was pumped out into our air, into our soil, into our water.

00:13:09.000 All of it's still there.

00:13:11.000 So not only would it stay there, it stayed there, it got into people and living things.

00:13:17.000 It's in everybody.

00:13:18.000 It is, in fact, Teflon.

00:13:20.000 And to coat pans, and people, you know, if you cook with a Teflon pan, people still have them in their homes.

00:13:30.000 And it started smoking while you were cooking, and you were breathing this stuff, and people were getting something they called Teflon flu.

00:13:38.000 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.

00:14:01.000 All of this stuff has got out into the environment through these manufacturing processes and releases.

00:14:06.000 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.

00:14:15.000 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.

00:14:27.000 Yet we're denying it and telling everybody, don't worry about it.

00:14:30.000 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.

00:14:41.000 And all of that was in these internal files.

00:14:44.000 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?

00:15:03.000 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.

00:15:12.000 He was the in-house Dupont attorney.

00:15:14.000 He was using his Dupont email.

00:15:17.000 To send emails to his son in Iraq.

00:15:20.000 And he was talking about how corrupt the company was and how bad this chemical was.

00:15:27.000 And he did not think it would be discoverable, but it was.

00:15:31.000 We got a hold of it.

00:15:32.000 And he was a very, very sweet man because he was deeply, deeply concerned about what the company was doing.

00:15:38.000 He was telling them not to do it.

00:15:40.000 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.

00:15:48.000 And they absolutely refuse.

00:15:50.000 And those were really powerful documents.

00:15:53.000 And that deposition, which we videotaped and showed to the jury, was one of the amazing kind of turning points of the trial.

00:16:01.000 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.

00:16:11.000 Riley, you know, who worked in-house and didn't realize that these emails were being captured by the company's computer server.

00:16:20.000 This is the early days of BlackBerrys and things.

00:16:23.000 And so those emails ended up getting turned over because they weren't privileged.

00:16:27.000 It wasn't like the lawyers were giving advice, but it gave us a great insight into what was going on with the company.

00:16:34.000 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.

00:16:43.000 And their client, the business people within the company, just weren't listening to them.

00:16:47.000 So yeah, that was a powerful deposition.

00:16:50.000 In their own email, they were calling it devil's piss.

00:16:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:16:55.000 And in fact, you see some of that deposition excerpt in the documentary, The Devil We Know.

00:17:00.000 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.

00:17:09.000 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.

00:17:30.000 And then our experts came in and said, no, it's one-tenth that.

00:17:35.000 It's 0.1 part per billion.

00:17:36.000 It is dangerous.

00:17:38.000 They went to EPA, and they got EPA to actually create the first standards.

00:17:44.000 And EPA's standards were 150 parts per billion.

00:17:48.000 So they basically just created standards to protect DuPont during our lawsuit.

00:17:54.000 To shield them from liability.

00:17:55.000 And that was a big blow to your, you know, strategy from the beginning.

00:18:00.000 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.

00:18:12.000 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.

00:18:23.000 They sat down and developed a drinking water guide, 0.6 parts per billion, which they rounded up to one.

00:18:30.000 And that was basically the lowest level you could detect in the water back then.

00:18:34.000 So their own scientists were saying, if we can find it, we're concerned about it.

00:18:38.000 So that was the standard they had set.

00:18:40.000 They found levels three, four times, five times higher than that in the local water supply.

00:18:45.000 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.

00:18:54.000 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.

00:19:03.000 And they came back with 150 parts per billion.

00:19:06.000 150 times higher than DuPont's own standard.

00:19:10.000 DuPont never changed its internal standard.

00:19:13.000 Yet they went to the state and used the state to try to tell the public, oh, nothing to worry about here, no problem.

00:19:19.000 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.

00:19:28.000 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.

00:19:41.000 So the US EPA got involved, and then when they finally came out with their drinking water guideline, it took 10 years.

00:19:48.000 Parts per trillion is what US EPA said.

00:19:53.000 70 parts per trillion.

00:19:54.000 At that time, it was a huge penalty for EPA, but I think they had to pay 16 million, as I recall.

00:20:03.000 It was 16 million because EPA fined them.

00:20:05.000 Correct.

00:20:06.000 For our case.

00:20:08.000 Correct.

00:20:09.000 US EPA brought this lawsuit saying information had been withheld, you violated federal law.

00:20:14.000 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.

00:20:39.000 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,

00:20:57.000 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.

00:21:11.000 And they were saying to you, we have cancer, we need money to treat my sister, etc.

00:21:18.000 You know, you were just slugging it out for 18 years.

00:21:24.000 Yeah.

00:21:25.000 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.

00:21:54.000 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.

00:22:07.000 Nevertheless, it was their burden.

00:22:09.000 They were going to have to prove this.

00:22:10.000 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.

00:22:20.000 And as you indicated, that process ended up confirming links with six diseases.

00:22:26.000 Testicular cancer, kidney cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, preeclampsia, high cholesterol.

00:22:32.000 But that took, nobody had really ever done this before.

00:22:35.000 So that process took seven years.

00:22:39.000 And what was happening during this period of time?

00:22:42.000 That started around 2006, ended in 2012.

00:22:45.000 What's going on during this period?

00:22:47.000 Well, first of all, the entire US economy is collapsing.

00:22:51.000 Major economic meltdown going on.

00:22:53.000 The community, these people are continuing to get sick.

00:22:56.000 You know, while they're waiting for this scientific process, you've got people with cancer that are dying.

00:23:02.000 You've got family members that are saying, what's going on?

00:23:05.000 What's taking so long?

00:23:06.000 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.

00:23:15.000 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.

00:23:23.000 So it was very stressful watching that process unfold and not being able to do much about it.

00:23:29.000 The science took what it took because we had 60 29,000 people who came forward and gave blood, who provided medical information.

00:23:38.000 Think about all of that data.

00:23:40.000 So all of that had to be analyzed and all of these different epidemiology studies.

00:23:44.000 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.

00:24:02.000 Tell what happened at the end.

00:24:04.000 Eventually, the science panel, these independent scientists, were able to confirm by the end of 2012 that those six diseases were linked.

00:24:13.000 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.

00:24:26.000 Under a settlement agreement we had.

00:24:28.000 So they're going to get free testing to look for these diseases.

00:24:31.000 We had thousands of people came forward and are now getting that free testing.

00:24:35.000 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.

00:24:47.000 And DuPont could not dispute.

00:24:49.000 Yes, DuPont could not dispute that the chemical could cause those six diseases.

00:24:54.000 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.

00:25:05.000 So I think we won 1.6 million, as I recall, in that first trial.

00:25:11.000 The second trial, I think we had a little less, and then the third trial, I think we had three or three million something.

00:25:19.000 And at that point, Blunt came back and said, okay, we want to sell it all.

00:25:23.000 And we got $671 million.

00:25:27.000 Exactly.

00:25:28.000 During the middle of the fourth trial, we got verdicts in favor of the plaintiffs in every one of those trials.

00:25:33.000 And the amounts were steadily going up when you combine the punitives.

00:25:37.000 So in the middle of the fourth one, DuPont agreed to settle all of those pending cases.

00:25:42.000 There were about 3,500 at that point for $671 million.

00:25:46.000 And just recently, because keep in mind, People continue to be monitored in the community.

00:25:52.000 People continue to get cancers.

00:25:54.000 So even after that settlement, dozens more cases have been filed.

00:25:58.000 DuPont just settled another round of those cases for another 83 million.

00:26:02.000 So there's been about 750 million plus that's been paid to those people in that community.

00:26:07.000 The problem is, we now know it's not just Parkersburg.

00:26:10.000 This stuff's in drinking water all over the country, all over the planet.

00:26:14.000 So you've now got new communities coming forward.

00:26:17.000 And what happens?

00:26:18.000 DuPont?

00:26:19.000 It's disappearing.

00:26:21.000 They jettisoned the entire Teflon business into a new company called Chemours.

00:26:26.000 They then merged with Dow Chemical and split into three new companies, and now the assets are all going away.

00:26:32.000 So as this is finally coming out and the public is finally realizing it, the company is slowly disappearing.

00:26:39.000 You know who I got here?

00:26:41.000 I'm going to call David Whiteside.

00:26:43.000 I didn't tell him I'm going to do this, but...

00:26:46.000 You, of course, know David.

00:26:47.000 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.

00:27:03.000 Tell people briefly what you've been doing.

00:27:06.000 Sure.

00:27:07.000 Thank you, Bobby.

00:27:08.000 Tennessee Riverkeeper is suing the 3M company and other polluters for dumping PFAS chemicals and the related contamination in the Tennessee River Valley.

00:27:17.000 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.

00:27:30.000 Riverkeeper's mission is to protect the drinking water for 6.3 million Southerners.

00:27:35.000 So we sued 3M and these polluters to fulfill that mission to clean up the mess.

00:27:41.000 Right.

00:27:42.000 The PFOA chemical was made by 3M and DuPont purchased it to use in making Teflon.

00:27:49.000 So it was a material they used in the manufacturing process to make things like Teflon pans and things like that.

00:27:55.000 The PFOS and the PFOA, which are two specific types of these PFAS chemicals, have been banned.

00:28:02.000 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.

00:28:16.000 And there's all sorts of variants of this chemical out there that have not been banned.

00:28:21.000 So by moving the molecule, they have essentially the same chemical.

00:28:24.000 That's a different name that has not been banned.

00:28:26.000 And one of the hardest parts is figuring out which of these secret chemicals they've dumped out.

00:28:32.000 And there's hundreds, if not thousands, of variants.

00:28:34.000 And what are the chemicals used in today?

00:28:38.000 Yeah, I mean, it's rather disturbing, because as you've mentioned, as the information finally...

00:28:43.000 I think they're in the 3N medical masks, too.

00:28:47.000 I have seen reports about that, that they're now finding that possibly these PFOS chemicals might be in some of that as well.

00:28:55.000 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.

00:29:06.000 But as you said, what happened, the companies tweaked them just a bit.

00:29:10.000 They knocked a couple of carbons off.

00:29:11.000 DuPont, for example, had been making PFOA, which has C8, eight carbons attached to fluorine.

00:29:17.000 They knocked two off, making a C6 and calling it Gen X, something new. 0.73

00:29:23.000 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.

00:29:33.000 And it's now showing up in the drinking water where they're making right outside of their plant in North Carolina.

00:29:40.000 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.

00:29:48.000 So it's almost like this whack-a-mole game where you finally address one of these PFAS chemicals.

00:29:55.000 They simply change it a little bit, call it something new, and you're told you have to start all over again.

00:30:00.000 And who pays the price for that?

00:30:01.000 The community.

00:30:02.000 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.

00:30:12.000 Let's wait and see how much cancer you get, how many people die, then we might address it.

00:30:17.000 So I think you're seeing a lot of folks that are saying, we can't do it this way anymore.

00:30:22.000 There's got to be a different way to approach this.

00:30:24.000 I have a nonprofit organization, Tennessee Riverkeeper.

00:30:28.000 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.

00:30:40.000 We go take a sample.

00:30:43.000 One sample costs $250.

00:30:45.000 That's the cheap price from a certified lab, and they test for about 40 different PFAS chemicals, and 26 of them show up.

00:30:54.000 They've only admitted to dumping a few of those.

00:30:57.000 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.

00:31:14.000 They're completely hidden under this confidential business information.

00:31:17.000 Well, exactly.

00:31:19.000 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.

00:31:30.000 What are they being used in?

00:31:31.000 What products are they in?

00:31:33.000 Because a lot of it's claimed confidential business information.

00:31:35.000 It's secret.

00:31:36.000 We won't tell you.

00:31:37.000 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.

00:32:04.000 So it's just mind-blowing when you think about it.

00:32:06.000 First, we won't tell you what's out there.

00:32:08.000 Then when you find one of these, we won't give you the information you need to even look for it.

00:32:13.000 So it's a system that needs a lot of fixing right now.

00:32:18.000 Rob, what are you doing now?

00:32:20.000 I know you're doing a lot of these cases.

00:32:22.000 What else are you doing?

00:32:25.000 Well, right now we're working with states.

00:32:27.000 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.

00:32:38.000 State attorney generals that are trying to deal with Cleaning up the natural resources, the soil, the fish, the wildlife in the state.

00:32:46.000 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.

00:33:01.000 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.

00:33:12.000 There's a lot of that litigation going on in federal court in South Carolina, a lot of it involving contamination from firefighting foams.

00:33:20.000 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.

00:33:31.000 And it's not for money.

00:33:33.000 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.

00:33:48.000 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.

00:33:56.000 They should be paying for independent scientists to do that.

00:33:59.000 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.

00:34:06.000 We survived that.

00:34:07.000 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.

00:34:17.000 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.

00:34:28.000 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.

00:34:40.000 Please buy Rob's book, Exposure.

00:34:42.000 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.

00:35:09.000 Rob, a lot.

00:35:10.000 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.

00:35:19.000 Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for having this discussion.

00:35:24.000 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.

00:35:34.000 So thank you so much.

00:35:35.000 I appreciate it.

00:35:36.000 Thank you, Rob, a lot.

00:35:37.000 Thank you, Robbie.

RFK Jr. The Defender - April 22, 2021

Confidential Chemicals and Teflon with Rob Bilott and David Whiteside

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