Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against Dupont

In July 1996, cattle farmer Wilbur Earl Tennant stood beside Dry Run Creek on his family's multigenerational farm south of Parkersburg, West Virginia, filming foaming, discolored water with a camcorder. Over the preceding two years, Earl had lost more than 100 calves and 50 cows. He conducted his own autopsies, finding blackened teeth, enlarged organs, and abnormal tissues. He traced the contamination to Dry Run Landfill, operated by DuPont on land purchased from local families, including his own. Despite contacting state agencies and veterinarians, Earl was ignored.

In October 1998, Rob Bilott, a 33-year-old corporate environmental defense attorney at Taft Stettinius & Hollister in Cincinnati, Ohio, received a call from Earl, whose name had been passed along by Bilott's grandmother through a neighbor. Bilott's career had been spent defending corporations, not suing them, through work on Superfund sites (government-mandated cleanups of contaminated land) and regulatory compliance. Earl and his wife, Sandy, visited Taft's offices with boxes of photographs, videotapes, and documents. The footage convinced Bilott and senior partner Tom Terp that something was seriously wrong, and Taft agreed to represent the Tennants on a contingency-fee basis, meaning the firm would be paid only if the case was won or settled.

Over the next eight months, Bilott filed public records requests and reviewed thousands of regulatory documents, but nothing in the known, regulated chemicals explained the cattle deaths. He filed a complaint against DuPont in federal court. DuPont's in-house counsel, Bernard Reilly, suggested delaying discovery because a joint DuPont-EPA "Cattle Team" was investigating the farm. Bilott agreed. When the report arrived in early 2000, it blamed all the cattle problems on Earl's "deficiencies in herd management." Bilott realized the delay had been strategic.

On his 35th birthday in August 2000, a new box of documents arrived from DuPont. Inside, Bilott found a letter referencing a chemical called APFO (ammonium perfluorooctanoate), used at DuPont's Washington Works plant near Parkersburg. With help from a chemistry expert, Bilott determined that APFO and PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) were names for the same unregulated chemical: a surfactant—a soap-like substance that reduces surface tension—essential to manufacturing Teflon. PFOA does not break down in the body and accumulates over time. DuPont's own 1988 internal guidelines had recommended no more than 1 part per billion of PFOA in drinking water, a threshold already exceeded in local water supplies and in creek runoff at levels reaching 1,600 ppb. Studies by the chemical manufacturer 3M had also found PFOA in the blood of the general US population.

Bilott deposed DuPont scientists and uncovered decades of internal research: a 1978 monkey study in which all high-dose animals died, and rat studies showing organ damage dating to 1962. In March 2001, he mailed a 19-page letter with 950 pages of supporting documents to federal and state regulators, outlining the contamination history and signaling intent to bring suit on behalf of the broader community. DuPont sought a gag order, but Federal Judge Joseph Goodwin denied the motion, ruling that citizens have a right to petition their government.

In July 2001, the Tennant family accepted a settlement after hours of debate. Earl, who wanted a public admission of guilt, yielded reluctantly. Bilott, however, could not walk away from the larger problem. Joe Kiger, a Lubeck schoolteacher, contacted Bilott after learning his own water contained PFOA. Bilott discovered a recent West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals decision recognizing "medical monitoring," a legal claim allowing people exposed to toxic substances to seek medical testing before becoming sick. On August 30, 2001, Bilott and co-counsel filed a class action on behalf of the contaminated community, with Kiger among the 13 named plaintiffs.

The case survived early procedural challenges. State court Judge George Hill certified the class and compelled DuPont to produce documents. Among 248,000 new pages, Bilott found candid emails from Reilly and evidence that DuPont employees had destroyed records. He also uncovered a DuPont pregnancy study that had reviewed seven births to female workers exposed to PFOA in the Teflon division and found two babies with eye defects matching earlier findings in rats; DuPont never completed or reported the study. A 1984 executive meeting memo revealed that DuPont leaders, knowing PFOA had contaminated community water, chose to continue using the chemical rather than jeopardize the Teflon business.

Bilott deposed DuPont CEO Chad Holliday, who repeatedly said he was "not aware" of the birth-defect data or the water contamination. Judge Hill granted injunctive relief ordering blood testing for the entire class, but DuPont appealed, freezing proceedings. ABC's 20/20 aired a segment featuring Bucky Bailey, who was born with a misshapen eye and partial nasal formation after his mother worked in DuPont's Teflon division during pregnancy without warning about PFOA's risks. EPA filed its own suit against DuPont for failing to report PFOA toxicity data.

In September 2004, the two sides reached a landmark settlement. DuPont agreed to pay $70 million, fund water filtration for all contaminated supplies, and create an independent Science Panel of three epidemiologists to determine whether PFOA exposure was linked to disease. If the panel confirmed links, DuPont would fund medical monitoring up to $235 million. The legal team used the $70 million to pay class members $400 each for blood samples and health questionnaires, enrolling approximately 69,000 people by late 2006 in one of the largest community health studies ever undertaken.

The years that followed tested Bilott severely. The Science Panel's work stretched far beyond initial estimates. Internal documents revealed that DuPont had worked behind the scenes with EPA to secure a pause on regulation in exchange for a voluntary PFOA phaseout program; EPA took no significant action for a decade. Earl Tennant died of a heart attack in 2009 at age 67. Bilott suffered unexplained neurological episodes, including blurred vision, numbness, violent tremors, and loss of speech, that doctors could not diagnose.

In December 2011, the Science Panel released its first finding: a probable link between PFOA and preeclampsia, a form of pregnancy-induced hypertension. By July 2012, it had confirmed links to six diseases: kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, and preeclampsia. Approximately 3,500 class members with linked diseases filed individual lawsuits, consolidated into a multidistrict litigation (MDL)—a procedure for combining thousands of similar cases under a single judge—before Judge Edmund Sargus in Columbus, Ohio. DuPont filed more than 100 motions to exclude evidence and relitigate causation; all were denied.

The first bellwether trial, a test case meant to indicate how similar claims may fare, began in September 2015 for Carla Marie Bartlett, a grandmother diagnosed with kidney cancer after drinking contaminated water for 17 years. In closing arguments, Mike Papantonio, a Florida-based mass tort attorney enlisted to lead Bilott's trial team, revealed a 1997 safety data sheet from 3M explicitly warning DuPont that PFOA "contains a chemical which can cause cancer." The jury awarded Bartlett $1.6 million. Two subsequent trials yielded escalating verdicts, including findings of "actual malice." After the judge scheduled 40 additional trials, DuPont agreed in February 2017 to pay $670.7 million to settle all pending cases.

By 2018, PFAS contamination had been documented at more than 700 sites in 49 states. PFAS, the broader family of synthetic chemicals to which PFOA belongs, was present in the drinking water of an estimated 100 million Americans. EPA promised action but delivered little. On October 4, 2018, Bilott filed a new federal class action against eight chemical companies on behalf of all Americans contaminated with PFAS, seeking court-ordered funding for independent research into the health risks of these chemicals. He received the Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm, spoke at the Sundance Film Festival premiere of the documentary The Devil We Know, and testified before the New York State Senate, continuing to advocate for regulation as Congress failed to act.