Such a storied history can certainly breed greatness, but it can also breed arrogance. They were one of the biggest corporations in the world, nearly 200 years old and highly respected, a company widely considered an industry leader.” DuPont was not some fly-by-night company operating under the radar of regulators. You might say I'm professionally skeptical. In his 2019 memoir about the incident, Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont, he writes of Tennant’s visit, “I was skeptical. How dare you suggest that we're not interpreting this correctly.’”Įven Bilott couldn’t believe what he was hearing when Earl Tennant first walked into his office. ‘We're not going to have anybody questioning. “To have folks questioning the conclusions that their scientists were making, or that their people interpreting their scientists were making was just something that would not be accepted at all. DuPont obviously was around many years before the EPA even existed,” says Bilott. And in fact, had kind of invented a lot of the scientific processes that the regulatory agencies used. “This is a company that had prided itself on being the science company. In the view of many-least of all DuPont executives-they were practically untouchable. At the time DuPont was one of the most respected corporations in the U.S., maybe even the world, and they were known for employing some of the brightest scientists on the planet. With the benefit of hindsight, the company’s unwillingness to admit responsibility perhaps wasn’t so unexpected. If it seems too bad to be true, it just might be. or they disagreed with the results, or that frankly it never happened. Yet then we saw folks standing up and saying that either this process was somehow. “It just was remarkable to me that even after we set up this very scientific process with independent scientists who analyzed all the data, all of it, and to reach these decisions that we all agreed, this was the way it would be done. He naively assumed that “if people see the facts, if everybody could just look at the facts, they'll get it, they'll understand it.” That was the way he saw the world, and he couldn’t comprehend others not doing the same. Bilott admits that he never would have predicted DuPont’s incredible resistance to owning up to their behavior.
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