1. Robert Bilott was born on August 2,1965 and is an American environmental attorney from Cincinnati, Ohio.
29 Facts About Robert Bilott
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Robert Bilott has spent more than twenty years litigating hazardous dumping of the chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid.
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Robert Bilott's litigation was the foundation for his memoir titled Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont.
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Robert Bilott was born on August 2,1965, in Albany, New York.
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Robert Bilott's father served in the United States Air Force, and Robert Bilott spent his childhood on several air force bases.
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Robert Bilott earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and urban studies from the New College of Florida.
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Robert Bilott earned a Juris Doctor from the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law in 1990.
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Robert Bilott became a partner at the firm in 1998.
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Robert Bilott represented Wilbur Tennant of Parkersburg, West Virginia, whose cattle were dying.
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Robert Bilott began opening individual personal-injury lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of affected users of the Ohio and West Virginia water supplies, who by 2015 numbered more than 3,500 individuals.
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In 2018, Robert 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.
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Robert Bilott was part of the legal team that settled PFAS claims by the State of Ohio against DuPont- related companies for $110 million in 2024.
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In 2016, Robert Bilott's story was the focus of a featured cover story by Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times Magazine, entitled, "The Lawyer Who Became DuPont's Worst Nightmare".
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Robert Bilott's work was featured in extensive articles in The Huffington Post and The Intercept.
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Robert Bilott wrote the memoir Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, first published in English in 2019 by Atria Books.
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Robert Bilott played Bilott in Dark Waters, the film adapted from Rich's article.
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Robert Bilott appears in Devil Put The Coal In The Ground, a documentary about the suffering and environmental devastation that resulted from the coal industry and its decline.
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Additionally, Robert Bilott appears in the Belgian documentary, Solvay, the Invisible Pollution, about chemical giants and the widespread pollution of PFAS.
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Robert Bilott is interviewed in Toxic Bodies, a French documentary about industry use and knowledge of PFAS.
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Robert Bilott appears in the 2023 documentary, Burned: Protecting the Protectors, which focuses on PFAS exposures among firefighters and the Japanese documentary, Water is Treasure: PFAS - Fight for Life, addressing the impacts of PFAS in Okinawa.
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Robert Bilott is in the 2024 Australian documentary, Revealed: How to Poison a Planet, with Mark Ruffalo.
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In 2017, Robert Bilott received the international Right Livelihood Award, known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize", for his decades of work on PFAS chemical contamination issues.
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Robert Bilott was featured on a stamp issued in Austria, which commemorated the award.
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In 2020, Robert Bilott was part of a "Fight Forever Chemicals" social media and outreach campaign that was a Winner in Entertainment and a Finalist in Global Campaign, Media Partnership for the social media Shorty Awards.
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Robert Bilott serves on the board of directors for Less Cancer, the board of trustees for Green Umbrella, and the board of directors of the New College Foundation.
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Robert Bilott had served on the alumni board for New College of Florida from 2018 to 2021.
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In 2021, Robert Bilott received an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree from New College of Florida and an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree from The Ohio State University's Environmental Science Graduate Program.
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In 2023, Robert Bilott received an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree from Thomas More University and received the Humanitarian Impact Award from the National PFAS Contamination Coalition in 2024.
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Robert Bilott is a fellow in the Right Livelihood College, an Honorary Professor at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina, and a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, Department of Environmental Health Sciences.