Tom Girardi is one of the lawyers who shot to prominence after they got California utility PG&E to issue a shocking settlement in a case where it was alleged that hexavalent chromium was causing diseases in Hinckley, California.
Where were the bodies? They didn't exist, according to science, and history has shown it to be a hoax. There are no more cases of cancer, disease, or anything else. Like President Biden claiming a "cancer alley" in, unsurprisingly, a state that votes Republican, it just exploited the average to get a jury to side against a company.
The average doesn't tell us much about our individual risk, since the average man has under two testicles and the average woman has under two breasts. Yet juries don't have to accept any science, that is left to an appeals court, which is why jury findings claiming that plants are tiny green people and so a weedkiller may be harming humans get overturned in appellate courts routinely.(1)
How to get an Academy Award from wealthy elites. Be a wealthy elite but play a champion of 'the little guy' in a film where lawyers are the heroes and science a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Despite a movie being made about them, the residents in Hinckley who got the California state government to tell PG&E, it's de facto official utility, to settle and then pass the costs along to every customer, received very little money. There were $10 million in mystery charges by the attorneys who looked so sympathetic in the film. Residents got $10,000, lawyers got $133,000,000. And a movie where Hollywood spun them as heroes.
One of those Hollywood lawyers, Tom Girardi, became so wealthy his wife got into one of those faux reality shows, "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills", which led to him getting even more clients, but eventually he was going to be caught.(2) Exploiting residents of a rural town was one thing, exploiting people when your wife is a on a TV show displaying wealth is another.
Still, he is a shady lawyers so he pulled out every trick. He was too poor to use anything except a public defender, he said, and they argued he was mentally incompetent and couldn't possibly have engineered that level of fraud. He was only a "Weekend At Bernie's" prop and the partners were masterminding the schemes. Except the crimes that finally busted him were from 2010. He was still being propped up a decade later and no one noticed he was clueless?
No one was buying it, not even a California jury, and in just four hours they found him guilty.
If only anti-science claims could get that same level of scrutiny by juries, products would be a lot more affordable and the world would be no less safe.
NOTES:
(1)That, and the fact that a key epidemiology paper trotted out by lawyers has been dismissed by the San Francisco judge assigned to look at weedkiller cancer cases as junk science.
(2) She immediately divorced him, but prosecutors saw through that simplistic tactic and she was charged for aiding and abetting him, since she only divorced him after the charges, so she could protect half of their assets.
