There’s a good chance you’ve seen the movie. Julia Roberts, glamourous, dogged, beautiful, goes up against the Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), eventually winning a lawsuit for groundwater contamination in 1993 for the town of Hinkley, California.
We’re talking about Erin Brockovich, by the way, both the person and the award-winning film. The real Brockovich, with a little more miles on her these days, is still out there fighting the good fight, even after all of these years. So what’s she been up to?
Erin Brockovich was born Erin Pattee on June 22, 1960. She was the daughter of a journalist and an industrial engineer. While managing her dyslexia, she earned an Associate in Applied Arts Degree from Wade College in Texas. She moved around a bit before deciding to settle in California. Pattee got a job as a management trainee in KMart, and while it helped train her people skills it didn’t tickle her interests enough.
There was always more she wanted to do, so she started studying electrical engineering. She also entered the Miss Pacific Coast beauty pageant and wouldn’t you know, she won! The wild called her though, and she moved with two kids and a husband to the quiet little hamlet of Reno, Nevada. Sometimes seen as the consummate single mother, she divorced and got a new job at a brokerage firm. There, she met husband number two and had another child, but alas it wasn’t meant to be and she divorced again.
That twisty path led her to Ed Masry, who she met after being critically injured in a car accident. He represented her and won her a small settlement, but she still had three kids to feed, so she took a job at his law firm organizing files for a real estate case. While perusing those records, she found explosive medical records that would change the course of her life for good, and make her (for a time) one of the most famous women on the planet.
She started researching and discovered that PG&E had been poisoning the groundwater of Hinkley, California, for more than three decades. The company used a carcinogenic chemical called chromium 6 as a rust suppressor in natural gas pipelines, and it had seeped into the ground and contaminated the groundwater, something the company wasn’t exactly upfront about.
Due to her tenacity and investigation, including talking to many people in Hinkley who suffered from chromium poisoning, they won the lawsuit and PG&E was compelled to pay out $333 million to more than 600 people in the town. The story eventually made its way to a woman named Carla Shamberg, whose husband was partners with Danny DeVito. Shamberg was fascinated by a “loud-mouth chick is running around, collecting dead frogs” and trying to find out the truth about groundwater. Eventually, Brockovich met with DeVito and things took off from there.
The movie was a smash. It made $28.1 million in its first weekend, more than half of its $52 million budget. It would go on to make upwards of $255 million. Julia Roberts would make history as the first actress to win an Oscar, BAFTA, Critic’s Choice Award, Golden Globe, National Board of Review Award, and a SAG award . It was also nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Screenplay.
It made the real Erin Brockovich a household name. So what happened to her?
What happened to Erin Brockovich after the movie came out?
For starters, some things in the movie were changed and the ending was tweaked a little. One thing that the movie left out is that Brockovich got chromium poisoning herself. Director Steven Soderbergh left that out of the film because he didn’t want it to “turn into one of those movies” where the main star gets sick. Also, Donna Jensen, who’s a big part of the case in the movie, is actually a conglomeration of several people who were involved with the case.
Another thing, the law firm got the lion’s share of the $333 million judgement, and many townspeople didn’t even receive enough to cover medical bills. Brockovich received about $2 million plus, and while the movie highlighted the cancer angle, the cancer rates in Hinkley actually weren’t that much higher than everywhere else. Other stuff: Her boyfriend in the movie was actually her nanny, and she never used her boobs to seduce and get info.
After the success of the movie, Brockovich became world famous. At first, she didn’t like the attention and definitely wasn’t ready for the negative side of it. She said, “You’re out there for people to take their potshots at you. And they did it: sexist comments, or your boobs are too big, or when’s the last time you’ve had your roots done, or you shouldn’t be blonde, your hair is too bulky, you look like a slut. Your skirt is too short, go change. Your heels are too high. You have no business doing this. Why should we listen to you? You’re a joke. All that was very overwhelming for me.”
On the other side, it enhanced her work as an activist because it would get national attention when she was involved with something. She hosted a Lifetime Channel series called Final Justice With Erin Brockovich, which ran for two seasons and saw Brockovich work with women who risked it all to save their communities. She also starred in Challenge America With Erin Brockovich, where she got activists together to rebuild a park in downtown Manhattan. Then she wrote a book called Take It From Me. Life’s A Struggle, But You Can Win and it became a New York Times Business bestseller.
She’s the President of Brockovich Research & Consulting and she travels on the lecture circuit regularly. Even now, twenty-something years after the movie, she’s still fighting the good fight, as she told Today in 2020.
“I think the past 20 years in many ways have been baffling to me because if we go back to the town of Hinkley, California, in the movie, that was just the tip of the iceberg. And I don’t think I realized what was to come, and to have this conversation with you 20 years into the future to say that it’s not just as bad, it’s far worse. And so little has been done. I couldn’t really see then that it would be everywhere.”
She also said water contamination is still a global issue, and she’s doing what she can to help anyone who needs it. She’s written three more books and still gets recognized at the bank or a doctor’s appointment, when people see her ID card and ask if she’s the woman from that movie with Julia Roberts.
