Erin Brockovich-Ellis: A Warrior, A Mom, A Woman
By Huijuan Jia
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22, 2004-“If anything I could think of can go behind my name, it’s going to be: Erin Brockovich, 36 DD.”
Erin Brockovich-Ellis, who became world-famous practically overnight through a hit movie named after her, was describing her title to hundreds of public health professionals, most with Ph.D.s or M.D.s after their names, at a conference in Washington’s Convention Center.
The audience laughed. She waited for nearly a minute for the laughter to quiet down. With short blonde hair, a red, deep, v-neck, slim-fitting sweater, an ivory multiple stone-chained necklace with an egg-sized pendant, a black knee-length waist-belted leather coat and black high-heeled boots, Brockovich-Ellis, now 44, is no longer the sassy and flashy law firm clerk featured in the movie. But she still looks sexy and cool.
And she is definitely not short of titles behind her name. No longer a file clerk, she now serves as director of research at Masry & Vititoe, the law firm featured in the movie, where she famously brought a lawsuit against the utility giant Pacific Gas and Electric Company and won a $333 million settlement for more than 600 residents in Hinkley, Calif.
The 2000 movie, which starred Julia Roberts, not only won the actress an Oscar award, but also made Brockovich-Ellis a public figure and won her numerous awards and titles including “Presidential Award of Merit” from the Consumer Attorneys of California, “Special Citizen Award” from the Children’s Health Environmental Coalition, “Lifesaver Award” from the Lymphoma Research Foundation of America, “Woman of the Year” from the Israel Cancer Research Fund and the “Environmental Excellence” award from the National Jewish Fund.
Brockovich-Ellis never expected these honors. “I have always been the underdog,” she said, adding that in school she was once voted “the girl least likely to succeed.”
A native of Lawrence, Kan., Erin is the youngest of four children in her family. Her father was an industrial engineer and her mother was a journalist. After graduating from Lawrence High School in 1978, Erin spent one year at Kansas State University, and then transferred to Miss Wade’s Fashion Merchandising College in Dallas, Texas, where she earned an associate degree.
She had worked for K-Mart and an engineering company in California for a few months. While at the latter job, she attended a beauty pageant and won the title of Miss Pacific Coast. (The movie called it Miss Wichita as director Steven Soderbergh thought “it would be cute” since she was from Kansas.)
The next year she married restaurant manager Shawn Brown, with whom she had two children, Matthew and Katie, and the family moved to Reno, Nev. Erin and Brown divorced in 1987. While working at a Reno brokerage as a secretary, she met her second husband, stockbroker Steven Brockovich, whom she married in 1989. Not long after she had her third child, Elizabeth, her second marriage ended in 1990.
After being seriously injured in a traffic accident in Reno, she moved back to Southern California with her children. She hired Jim Vititoe of Masry & Vititoe to handle her car accident case, but when the $17,000 settlement she received couldn’t cover all her debts, she begged the firm to hire her as a $1,200 a month clerk. While organizing papers in a pro bono real estate case, she found medical records in the file that piqued her curiosity. She began to research the matter.
Her investigation eventually found that Hinkley’s residents had been exposed to Chromium 6, a toxic chemical leaked into the groundwater from the nearby Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s compressor station. In 1996, as a result of the largest direct action lawsuit of its kind, the giant utility paid the largest toxic tort injury settlement in U.S. history: $333 million in damages to more than 600 Hinkley residents.
As in the movie, Erin Brockovich was rewarded with a $2 million bonus from the law firm and promoted to her current position.
Her biker boyfriend George in the movie was a real person but in real life things did not work out between Erin a nd George. Remarried in 1999 to actor Eric Ellis, she now lives in Agoura Hills, Calif., with her husband and children.
The movie brought Brockovich both fame and attacks. Journalist and attorney Michael Fumento published a series of articles in newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, blasting Brockovich and her law firm as acting “like fat rats by exploiting both the system and their clients.” He argued that there is no significant evidence to prove that Chromium-6 was the cause of the disease suffered by Hinkley residents.
“Often times I see headlines: Erin Brockovich and her junk science. Oh, shut up,” Brockovich-Ellis said.
“First of all, it is not my science. We work with world renowned experts,” she said. She doesn’t need a Ph.D. to know what is harming people’s health, she said, adding all she requires is “common sense.”
“We didn’t expect the money. We didn’t expect the movie. We didn’t expect Julia Roberts,” she said, “We simply cared. We chose to do the right thing for the right reason.”
Brockovich-Ellis said she is not a politician, not an attorney, not a scientist. “I’m an ordinary person who isn’t afraid to speak out not only what’s in my mind, but to speak what’s in my heart,” she said.
While the movie portrays her as a warrior against a giant company in the name of justice, she said it is not her favorite film. “My favorite movie is ‘Pay it Forward’,” she said.
“Pay It Forward” tells the fictional story of 12-year-old Trevor McKinney, who comes home from school with an extra-credit assignment for his Social Studies class: Think of an idea for world change and put it into action. Trevor’s idea was “paying it forward,” where one does another a favor and then requests that a favor be paid forward to three more people. This is what Erin Brockovich-Ellis said she hopes she can do.
She attributed her persistence in finding the truth to her father, calling him “a very strong, committed and firm father.” She said one thing she learned from him is honesty and she “learned it in a hard way.”
While in high school, Erin once skipped school for a day. “I got caught and I told him a lie,” she recalled. As a punishment, she was grounded for the whole semester and was not allowed to make phone calls or date. He even took away a planned trip to Chicago.
“I was furious,” she said.
Her father wrote her a letter when he went out of town, she said. He told her there would be many trips in the future and most of them would be more fun than the one to Chicago. He told her to accept the punishment as an adult. “Remember your mom and I love you very much, and we expect you to develop into an honest and respected woman,” her father wrote.
Now Erin Brockovich-Ellis, whom others predicted would be an “underachiever,” has matched her parents’ expectations. And she now has a family of her own: Her eldest son Matthew is 21, Katie 20, and Elizabeth 13. She said none of her children pays any attention to the movie.
“No ‘Erin Brockovich’ at home. I am Mom,” she said.
