Robert Bilott
American environmental lawyer
Robert Bilott (born August 2, 1965) is an American environmental attorney from Cincinnati, Ohio. Bilott is known for the lawsuits against DuPont on behalf of plaintiffs injured by chemical waste dumped in rural communities in West Virginia. Bilott has spent more than twenty years litigating hazardous dumping of the chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). They were unregulated as industry had never publicly identified them as having known hazardous effects, despite internal studies showing these results.
Bilott's litigation was the foundation for his memoir titled Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer's Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont (2019). As a result of his work, he became the subject of increasing media attention in the late 2010s. The 2018 documentary The Devil We Know and the 2019 feature film Dark Waters drew attention to his legal battles with Dupont and the hazards of these chemicals. This public attention resulted in his receiving numerous awards, including the international Right Livelihood Award.
In 2024, President Joe Biden announced the first standards for regulating PFAS in drinking water in the United States, as well as $1 billion in funding to aid districts and cities to protect their water supplies.
Early life
Bilott was born on August 2, 1965, in Albany, New York.
“Robert Bilott” enters the record as american environmental lawyer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Robert, Bilott and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q42393850. VIAF identifies the subject as 11157098423572551939. The Library of Congress control number is no2019146500. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965, 2019, 2018 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Bilott” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.