Robert Bilott


Robert Bilott is an American environmental attorney from Cincinnati, Ohio. Bilott is known for the lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of plaintiffs from West Virginia.
Bilott has spent more than twenty years litigating hazardous dumping of the chemicals Perfluorooctanoic acid and Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid.

Early life

Bilott was born on August 2, 1965. Bilott's father served in the United States Air Force, and Bilott spent his childhood on several air force bases. Because the family moved frequently, Bilott attended eight different schools before graduating from Fairborn High School in Fairborn, Ohio. He then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and urban studies from the New College of Florida. He then earned a Juris Doctor from the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law in 1990.

Career

Bilott was admitted to the Bar in 1990 and began his law practice at Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP in Cincinnati, Ohio For eight years he worked almost exclusively for large corporate clients and his specialty was defending chemical companies. He became a partner at the firm in 1998.
Bilott represented Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, West Virginia whose cattle were dying. The farm was downstream from a landfill where DuPont had been dumping hundreds of tons of Perfluorooctanoic acid. In the summer of 1999, Bilott filed a federal suit against DuPont in the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia. In response, DuPont advised that DuPont and the United States Environmental Protection Agency would commission a study of the farmer's property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the Environmental Protection Agency. When the report was released, it blamed the Tennants for the dying cattle claiming that poor husbandry was responsible: ‘‘poor nutrition, inadequate veterinary care and lack of fly control.’’
After Bilott discovered that thousands of tons of DuPont's PFOA had been dumped into the landfill next to the Tennants' property and that DuPont's PFOA was contaminating the surrounding community's water supply, DuPont settled the Tenants' case. In August 2001, Bilott filed a class action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of the approximately 70,000 people in West Virginia and Ohio with PFOA-contaminated drinking water, which was settled in September 2004, with class benefits valued at over $300 million, including DuPont agreeing to install filtration plants in the six affected water districts and dozens of impacted private wells, a cash award of $70 million, and provisions for future medical monitoring to be paid by DuPont up to $235 million, if an independent science panel confirmed "probable links" between PFOA in the drinking water and human disease. After the independent scientific panel jointly selected by the parties found that there was a probable link between drinking PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia, and ulcerative colitis, Bilott began opening individual personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of affected users of the Ohio and West Virginia water supplies, which by 2015 numbered over 3,500. After winning the first three for $19.7 million, in 2017 DuPont agreed to settle the remainder of the then-pending cases for $671.7 million. Dozens more cases have been filed since the 2017 settlement.
In 2018, Bilott filed a new case seeking new studies and testing of the larger group of PFAS chemicals on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of everyone in the United States who has PFAS chemicals in their blood, against several PFAS manufacturers, including 3M, DuPont, and Chemours. This new litigation is ongoing as of 2020.
In 2016, Bilott's story was the focus of a featured cover story by Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times Magazine, entitled, "." Bilott's work was also featured in extensive articles in The Huffington Post and The Intercept.
Robert Bilott is the author of the acclaimed memoir , published in 2019 by Atria Books. The is narrated by Jeremy Bobb with the first chapter narrated by Mark Ruffalo. Bilott's story also became the basis for Dark Waters, a 2019 film starring Mark Ruffalo as Bilott, and as Bilott's wife, Sarah Barlage. The story is also featured in the feature-length documentary; ; was the subject of the poem, Watershed by U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith; is the subject of the "" episode of the multi-part feature documentary, "Parched," which aired on the National Geographic TV channel in 2017; and is the subject for the song and video by The Gary Douglas Band.
In 2017, Bilott received the international , also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize," for his decades of work on PFAS chemical contamination issues, and was featured on a stamp issued in Austria, commemorating the award.

Awards and Recognition

In 1996, Bilott married Sarah Barlage. They have three children.