ERIN BROCKOVICH
G'day folks,
Erin
Brockovich is best known for her involvement in one of the largest direct
action lawsuits in U.S. history and is the subject of the 2000 film 'Erin
Brockovich.'
Synopsis
Consumer
advocate and environmental activist Erin Brockovich was born in Kansas in 1960.
While working as a file clerk at a Los Angeles law firm in 1992, Brockovich
uncovered documents that ultimately led to more than 600 residents of Hinkley,
California, filing a lawsuit against utility giant PG&E. The $333 million
settlement they received is the largest of its kind in the history of the
United States. The story of Brokovich’s life and involvement in the case was
the subject of the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, which starred Julia Roberts in the title role. Since the
film’s release, Erin Brockovich has continued to work as a consumer advocate
and environmental activist.
Early Life
Consumer
advocate and environmental activist Erin Brockovich was born Erin Pattee in
Lawrence, Kansas, on June 22, 1960. The youngest of four children, she grew up
in a tightknit middle-class family. Her father was an industrial engineer, and
her mother was a journalist. Diagnosed as dyslexic at a young age, Erin was not
a particularly good student. After graduating high school in 1978, Erin briefly
attended Kansas State University before transferring to Miss Wade's Fashion
Merchandising College (now Wade College) in Dallas, Texas, where she graduated
with an associate’s degree in applied arts in 1980.
After
earning her degree, Erin moved with a friend to Newport Beach, California.
After working briefly as a management trainee at Kmart, in 1981 she quit and
entered and won the Miss Pacific Coast beauty pageant. She also met her first
husband, Shawn Brown, around this time, whom she married in April 1982. The
young couple moved around the country for the next few years, during which time
Erin gave birth to two children, Matthew and Katie. However, their marriage eventually
fell apart, and they were divorced in 1987.
Now a single mother, to support her children
Erin found work as an assistant at a Reno, Nevada, brokerage firm, where she
met Steve Brockovich. They married in 1989 but had divorced within a year, at
which point Erin learned she was pregnant with her third child, Elizabeth. The
events that followed would set Erin Brockovich on the path to her eventual
fame.
Hinkley and Hollywood
Shortly
after her divorce, Brockovich was involved in a severe car accident that
necessitated her having neck surgery. She then moved to Los Angeles’s San
Fernando Valley, where she was referred by a friend to the law firm Masry &
Vititoe, whom she hired to represent her in her accident case. Brokovich was
eventually awarded a small settlement, but not enough to support her family
with. Feeling sorry for her, in 1992 attorney Ed Masry offered her a clerical
job at the firm.
One day, while filing
documents for a real estate case involving the utility giant Pacific Gas &
Electric (PG&E), Brockovich noticed that the paperwork included blood
samples. Her suspicions aroused, she asked Masry permission to look into the
matter further. In subsequent visits to the California desert town of Hinkley,
Brockovich eventually uncovered evidence linking a rash of illnesses there to
high levels of hexavalent chromium found in the drinking water. When the
pollution was eventually traced back to the PG&E compressor station in
Hinkley, in 1993 more than 600 hundred of the town’s residents hired Masry
& Vititoe to represent them. After information surfaced during the trial
that suggested PG&E had been aware of and tried to cover up the pollution,
in 1996 the case was settled for $333 million, the largest in United States
history for a case of its kind.
For her part in bringing the case to the firm, Brockovich
received a fee of $2.5 million. But the publicity that the case received also
brought Brockovich to the attention of Danny
DeVito’s production company, Jersey Films, who
bought the rights to Brockovich’s story in 1995. Released in 2000, the film Erin
Brockovich stars Julia Roberts as
Brockovich and Albery Finney as Masry in a mostly accurate recounting of the
Hinkley lawsuit. It also features a small cameo by Brockovich herself, who
appears briefly onscreen as a waitress. The movie was a critical and commercial
success, earning multiple Academy Award nominations, and for her performance as
Brockovich, Julia Roberts won the award for Best Actress.
Fame and Consumer Advocacy
The
success of the film made Brockovich famous, and in the years since its release
she has used that fame to various ends. In 2001 she published the book Take
It from Me: Life’s a Struggle But You Can Win, which became a New York
Times best seller, and was also the host of a Lifetime series called Final
Justice with Erin Brockovich as well as the ABC special Challenge
America with Erin Brockovich. She has also become an in-demand speaker,
frequently traveling the international lecture circuit, and was one of the
primary contributors to the 2012 documentary Last Call at the Oasis, an
investigation into the impact of the depletion of the world’s water supply.
In the time since the Hinkley lawsuit that made her famous,
Brockovich has continued to work as a consumer advocate and environmental
activist. She has been involved in numerous successful lawsuits against
environmental polluters as well as ongoing lawsuits involving automobiles,
pharmaceuticals and medical devices. She is the president of Brockovich
Research & Consulting and in partnership with Google curates a
crowd-sourced map intended to track possible environmental health hazards around
the world.
Clancy's comment: Always have time for an activist who is prepared to go out on a limb for justice.
I'm ...
No comments:
Post a Comment