Erin Brockovich

• IDENTIFICATION: Legal clerk and environmental activist

Erin Brockovich helped construct a legal case against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company for its role in polluting the drinking water of Hinkley, California, with chromium 6. The clients in the case received the largest settlement ever awarded in the United States in a direct-action lawsuit.

Erin Brockovich was born Erin Pattee; her mother, Betty Jo O’Neal-Pattee, was a journalist, and her father, Frank Pattee, was an industrial engineer. She graduated from Lawrence High School in 1978 and earned an associate in applied arts degree from Wade Business College in Dallas, Texas, in 1980. She then became a management trainee for the Kmart retail chain and moved to California. After a period in which she married and divorced twice (Steve Brockovich was her second husband), had three children, and held a variety of jobs, she became a secretary for the law firm of Masry & Vititoe of Northridge, California, in 1991.

Brockovich was assigned to work on a pro bono case for a homeowner in Hinkley, California, and quickly developed a rapport with the client who was bringing a lawsuit that alleged contamination of the town’s drinking water with chromium 6. Residents of the area, it was alleged, were experiencing above-average numbers of miscarriages and cancers. Brockovich discovered that from 1952 to 1966, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) used chromium 6 to fight corrosion in the cooling tower of its natural gas pumping station in Hinkley. Wastewater containing chromium 6 was then pumped into unlined ponds, from which it leached into the aquifer that supplied Hinkley’s drinking water. Brockovich pursued the case tenaciously and signed up more than 600 additional persons to participate in the lawsuit. In 1996, after winning an initial round in court, the clients agreed to PG&E’s offer to settle all their claims against the company for $333 million—a record high settlement for a direct-action lawsuit in the United States.

The film Erin Brockovich was released in 2000 and starred Julia Roberts as Brockovich. It chronicled Brockovich's fight against PG&E. Throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Brockovich remained an environmental activist and educator. She started her own consulting company in 2005 and worked on several other environmental pollution cases, including a 2016 methane gas leak in California and a 2023 train accident in Ohio in which more than thirty cars carrying toxic chemicals derailed. In March 2025, she became a global ambassador for Made By Dyslexia, which teaches the world about dyslexic thinking. Brockovich has also written several books and was an executive producer on the 2021 ABC television series, Rebel, which was loosely based on her life.

Bibliography

Bamberger, M., and R. E. Oswald. "Unconventional Oil and Gas Extraction and Animal Health." Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts, vol. 16, no. 8, 2014, pp. 1860–65.

Dorian, Marc, et al. "Erin Brockovich: The Real Story of the Town Three Decades Later." ABC News, 10 June 2021, abcnews.go.com/US/erin-brockovich-real-story-town-decades/story?id=78180219. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.

Gates, Alexander E., and Robert P. Blauvelt. Encyclopedia of Pollution. Facts on File, 2011.

Goodman, Michael, et al. "Cancer Clusters in the USA: What Do the Last Twenty Years of State and Federal Investigations Tell Us?" Critical Reviews in Toxicology, vol. 42, no. 6, 2012, pp. 474–90.

Morgan, John W., and Mark E. Reeves. "Abstract A78: Cancer in Hinkley: What Was the Real Problem?" Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention, vol. 20, no. 10, 2011, p. A78.

Murphy, Patrick D. "Putting the Earth into Global Media Studies." Communication Theory, vol. 21, no. 3, 2011, pp. 217–38.

Sager, Jessica. "Where Is Erin Brockovich Now? All About the Former Paralegal's Life 25 Years After Julia Roberts Brought Her Story to Life On-Screen." People, 25 Mar. 2025, people.com/where-is-erin-brockovich-now-8703310. Accessed 19 Sept. 2025.