Egilman was sufficiently clever to discern that if his “method” led to a conclusion that silicone gel breast implants cause autoimmune disease, but the Institute of Medicine, along with court-appointed experts, found no basis for a causal conclusion, then by modus tollens Egilman’s “method” was suspect and must be rejected.[1] This awareness likely explains the extent to which he went to cover up his involvement in the plaintiffs’ causation case in the silicone litigation.
Egilman’s selective leaking of Eli Lilly documents was also a sore point. Egilman’s participation in an unlawful conspiracy was carefully detailed in an opinion by the presiding judge, Hon. Jack Weinstein.[2] His shenanigans were also widely covered in the media,[3] and in the scholarly law journals.[4] When Egilman was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and conspiring to distribute confidential Zyprexa documents to the press, he pleaded the fifth amendment. The proceedings did not go well, and Egilman ultimately stipulated to his responsibility for violating a court order, and agreed to pay a monetary penalty of $100,000. Egilman’s settlement was prudent. The Court of Appeals affirmed sanctions against Egilman’s co-conspirator, for what the court described as “brazen” conduct.[5]
Despite being a confessed contemnor, Egilman managed to attract a fair amount of hagiographic commentary.[6] An article in Science, described Egilman as “the scourge of companies he accuses of harming public health and corrupting science,”[7] and quoted fawning praise from his lawsuit industry employers: “[h]e’s a bloodhound who can sniff out corporate misconduct better than security dogs at an airport,”[8] In 2009, a screen writer, Patrick Coppola, announced that he was developing a script for a “Doctor David Egilman Project”. A webpage (still available on the Way-Back machine)[9] described the proposed movie as Erin Brockovich meets The Verdict. Perhaps it would have been more like King Kong meets Lenin in October.
After I started my blog, Tortini, in 2010, I occasionally commented upon David Egilman. As a result, I received occasional emails from various correpondents about him. Most were lawyers aggrieved by his behavior at deposition or in trial, or physicians libeled by him. I generally discounted those partisan and emotive accounts, although I tried to help by sharing transcripts from Egilman’s many testimonial adventures.
One email correspondent was Dennis Nichols, a well-respected journalist from Cincinnati, Ohio. Nichols had known Egilman in the early 1980s, when he was at NIOSH, in Cincinnait. Nichols had some interests in common with Egilman, and had socialized with him 40 years ago. Dennis wondered what had become of Egilman, and one day, googled Egilman, and found my post “David Egilman’s Methodology for Divining Causation.” Nichols found my description of Egilman’s m.o. consistent with what he remembered from the early 1980s. In the course of our correspondence, Dennis Nichols shared his recollections of his interactions with the very young David Egilman. Dennis Nichols died in February 2022,[10] and I am taking the liberty of sharing his first-hand account with a broader audience.
“I met David Egilman only two or three times, and that was more than 30 years ago, when he was an epidemiologist at NIOSH. When I remarked on the content of conversation with him in about 1990, he and a lawyer representing him threatened to sue me for libel, to which I picked up the gauntlet. I had a ‘blood from the turnip’ defense to accompany my primary defense of truth, and besides, Egilman was widely known as a Communist.
I had lunch with Egilman in a Cincinnati restaurant in 1982 after someone suggested that he might be interested in supporting an arts and entertainment publishing venture that I was involved with, called The Outlook; notwithstanding that I was a conservative, The Outlook leaned left, and its key staff were Catholic pacifists and socialists. Over lunch, Egilman explained to me that he considered himself a Marxist-Leninist, his term, and that the day would come when people like him would have to kill people like me, again his language.
He subsequently invited me and the editor of The Outlook to a reception he had at his house on Mt. Adams, a Cincinnati upscale and Bohemian neighborhood, or at least as close as Cincinnati gets to Bohemian, where he served caviar that he had brought back from his most recent trip to Moscow and displayed poster-size photographs of Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Luxemburg, Gorky and other heroes of the Soviet Union and Scientific Socialism. I do not recall that Egilman admired Mao; the USSR had considerable tension in those years with China, and Egilman was clearly in the USSR camp in those days of Brezhnev, and he said so. Egilman said he traveled often to the Soviet Union, I think in the course of his work, which probably was not common in 1982.
The Outlook editor had met Egilman in the course of his advocacy journalism in reporting on the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center, now closed, which processed fuel cores for nuclear weapons.
Probably none of this matters a generation later, but is just nostalgia about an old communist and his predations before he got into exploiting medical mal. May he rot.”[11]
The account from Mr. Nichols certainly rings true. From years of combing over Egilman’s website (before he added password protection), anyone could see that he viewed litigation as class warfare that would advance his political goals. Litigation has the advantage of being lucrative, and bloodless, too – perfect for fair-weather Marxists.
Did Egilman remain a Marxist into the 1990s and the 21st century? Does it matter?
If Egilman was as committed to Marxist doctrine as Mr. Nichols suggests, he would have recognized that, as an expert witness, he needed to tone down his public rhetoric. Around the time I corresponded with Mr. Nichols, I saw that Egilman was presenting to the Socialist Caucus of the American Public Health Association (2012-13). Egilman always struck me as a bit too pudgy and comfortable really to yearn for a Spartan workers’ paradise. In any event, Egilman was probably not committed to the violent overthrow of the United States government because he had found a better way to destabilize our society by allying himself with the lawsuit industry. The larger point, however, is that political commitments and ideological biases are just as likely to lead to motivated reasoning, if not more so.
Although Egilman’s voice needed no amplification, he managed to turn up the wattage of his propaganda by taking over the reins, as editor in chief, of a biomedical journal. The International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health (IJOEH) was founded and paid for by Joseph LaDou, in 1995. By 2007, Egilman had taken over as chief editor. He ran the journal out of his office, and the journal’s domain was registered in his name. Egilman published frequently in the journal, which became a vanity press for his anti-manufacturer, pro-lawsuit industry views. His editorial board included such testifying luminaries as Arthur Frank, Barry S. Levy, and David Madigan.
Douglas Starr, in an article in Science, described IJOEH as having had a reputation for opposing “mercenary science,” which is interesting given that Egilman, many on his editorial board, and many of the authors who published in IJOEH were retained, paid expert witnesses in litigation. The journal itself could not have been a better exemplar[12] of mercenary science, in support of the lawsuit industry.
In 2015, IJOEH was acquired by the Taylor & Francis publishing group, which, in short order, declined to renew Egilman’s contract to serve as editor. The new publisher also withdrew one of Egilman’s peer-reviewed papers that had been slated for publication. Taylor & Francis reported to the blog Retraction Watch that Egilman’s article had been “published inadvertently, before the review process was completed,” and was later deemed “unsuitable for publication.”[13] Egilman and his minions revolted, but Taylor & Francis held the line and retired the journal.[14]
Egilman recovered from the indignity foisted upon him by Taylor & Francis, by finding yet another journal, the Journal of Scientific Practice and Integrity (JOSPI).[15] Egilman probably said all that was needed to describe the goals of this new journal by announcing that the
Journal’s “partner” was the Collegium Ramazzini. Egilman of course was the editor in chief, with an editorial board made up of many well-known, high-volume testifiers for the lawsuit industry: Adriane Fugh-Berman, Barry Castleman, Michael R. Harbut, Peter Infante, William E. Longo, David Madigan, Gerald Markowitz, and David Rosner.
Some say that David Egilman was a force of nature, but so are hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, and pestilences. You might think I have nothing good to say about David Egilman, but that is not true. The Lawsuit Industry has often organized and funded mass radiographic and other medical screenings to cull plaintiffs from the population of workers.[16] Some of these screenings led to the massive filing of fraudulent claims.[17] Although he was blind to many of the excesses of the lawsuit industry, Egilman spoke out against attorney-sponsored and funded medico-legal screenings. He published his criticisms in medical journals,[18] and he commented freely in lay media. He told one reporter that “all too often these medical screenings are little more than rackets perpetrated by money-hungry lawyers. Most workers usually don’t know what they’re getting involved in.”[19] Among the Collegium Ramazzini crowd, Egilman was pretty much a lone voice of criticism.
[1] See “David Egilman’s Methodology for Divining Causation,” Tortini (Sept. 6, 2012).
[2] In re Zyprexa Injunction, 474 F.Supp. 2d 385 (E.D.N.Y. 2007). The Zyprexa case was not the first instance of Egilman’s involvement in a controversy over a protective order. Ballinger v. BrushWellman, Inc., 2001 WL 36034524 (Colo. Dist. June 22, 2001), aff’d in part and rev’d in part, 2002 WL 2027530 (Colo. App. Sept. 5, 2002) (unpublished).
[3] “Doctor Who Leaked Documents Will Pay $100,000 to Lilly,” N. Y. Times (Sept. 8, 2007).
[4] William G. Childs, “When the Bell Can’t Be Unrung: Document Leaks and Protective Orders in Mass Tort Litigation,” 27 Rev. Litig. 565 (2008).
[5] Eli Lilly & Co. v. Gottstein, 617 F.3d 186, 188 (2d Cir. 2010).
[6] Michelle Dally, “The Hero Who Wound Up On the Wrong Side of the Law,” Rhode Island Monthly 37 (Nov. 2001).
[7] Douglas Starr, “Bearing Witness,” 363 Science 334 (2019).
[8] Id. at 335 (quoting Mark Lanier, who fired Egilman for his malfeasance in the Zyprexa litigation).
[9] Doctor David Egilman Project, at <https://web.archive.org/web/20130902035225/http://coppolaentertainment.com/ddep.htm>.
[10] Bill Steigerwald, “The death of a great Ohio newspaperman,” (Feb. 08, 2022) (“Dennis Nichols of Cincinnati’s eastern suburbs was a dogged, brilliant and principled journalist who ran his family’s two community papers and gave the local authorities all the trouble they deserved.); John Thebout, Village of Batavia Mayor, “Batavia Mayor remembers Dennis Nichols,” Clermont Sun (Feb. 9, 2022).
[11] Dennis Nichols email to Nathan Schachtman, re David Egilman (Mar. 9, 2013)
[12] Douglas Starr, “Bearing Witness,” 363 Science 334, 337 (2019).
[13] See “Public health journal’s editorial board tells publisher they have ‘grave concerns’ over new editor,” Retraction Watch (April 27, 2017).
[14] “David Egilman and Friends Circle the Wagon at the IJOEH,” Tortini (May 4, 2017).
[15] See “A New Egilman Bully Pulpit,” Tortini (Feb. 19, 2020).
[16] Schachtman, “State Regulators Impose Sanction Unlawful Screenings 05-25-07,” Washington Legal Foundation Legal Opinion Letter, vol. 17, no. 13 (May 2007); Schachtman, “Silica Litigation – Screening, Scheming, and Suing,” Washington Legal Foundation Critical Legal Issues Working Paper (December 2005); Schachtman & Rhodes, “Medico-Legal Issues in Occupational Lung Disease Litigation,” 27 Seminars in Roentgenology 140 (1992).
[17] In re Silica Prods. Liab. Litig., 398 F. Supp. 2d 563 (S.D. Tex. 2005) (Jack, J.).
[18] See David Egilman and Susanna Rankin Bohme, “Attorney-directed screenings can be hazardous,” 45 Am. J. Indus. Med. 305 (2004); David Egilman, “Asbestos screenings,” 42 Am. J. Indus. Med. 163 (2002).
[19] Andrew Schneider, “Asbestos Lawsuits Anger Critics,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Feb. 11, 2003).
