Robert Bilott
American environmental lawyer · United States · On the map · Lawyers · Born 1965 · age 61
He was a corporate defense attorney until a cattle farmer from West Virginia called about poisoned cows - and the case led him into two decades of litigation against DuPont over chemicals the company knew were toxic but never disclosed.
Robert Bilott is read about 354 times a day, in 23 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 8 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 107 days, one point a day.
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About this person
Robert Bilott was born August 2, 1965, and built a career in Cincinnati as an environmental attorney, typically working on the corporate side. That changed when he took a call about dying livestock in rural West Virginia and began tracing the problem to DuPont's dumping of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) - chemicals the industry had studied internally and knew to be hazardous but had never flagged publicly or seen regulated. The litigation stretched across more than twenty years, became the basis for his 2019 memoir Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, and drew wider attention through the 2018 documentary The Devil We Know and the 2019 feature film Dark Waters. He received the international Right Livelihood Award among other honors. In 2024, President Joe Biden announced the first federal standards for regulating PFAS in U.S. drinking water, along with $1 billion in funding to help districts and cities protect their supplies.
