“This is not a publicity stunt,” Erin Brockovich-Ellis informs the crowd gathered at the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel. “This is not about making another movie.” It’s March, and the famous environmental crusader is speaking before hundreds of Beverly Hills High School parents and alumni crammed into the hotel’s Crystal Ballroom. It’s a strange confluence of Hollywood story lines: The heroine of the 2000 film Erin Brockovich–whom Julia Roberts won an Oscar portraying–is here to warn that current and former students at the school on which “Beverly Hills 90210” was based are being poisoned by toxic emissions from nearby oil wells.
As just about anybody who has set foot in a multiplex knows, in the mid-’90s Brockovich and her boss, lawyer Ed Masry, helped uncover groundwater contamination in the central California town of Hinkley and as a result won a massive settlement from Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). (As the film’s promo line put it, “She brought a small town to its feet and a huge company to its knees.”) In the decade since the Hinkley case, Masry and Brockovich-Ellis (she changed her name after remarrying four years ago) have led several more class-action suits against alleged corporate polluters, with mixed results. Tonight, their crusade has brought them to Beverly Hills.
Read Eric Umansky’s two-part article Toxic from The New Republic Online.