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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
The American economy is like a great kite, flying high in a marvelous sky, spreading sunshine to 160 million people. The first 30 years of Robert S. Kerr's life reads like a script to the most uneventful John Wayne movie ever imagined. Bob was born in 1896 in a log cabin on Native American lands in rural Oklahoma.
He grew up big and healthy and strong. Joined the military during World War I but never saw any combat. So he returned home, got married, started practicing law, never missed a day of church, and never had a sip of alcohol. It was the next 30 years of Bob Kerr's life where things started to get interesting. Failed businesses led to suffocating debts, followed by tragic personal losses.
The turning point happened in 1924, when Bob's wife Reba died giving birth to twin daughters, neither of which survived. Experiences like that are enough to drive any normal man to drink, but Bob Kerr was not a normal man. Bob Kerr exemplified grit. He could get knocked down a thousand times and get up a thousand in one. So, like every great American hero of years past,
Bob Kerr pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and he remarried into a wealthy family who loaned him the money to purchase an oil company, the kind of good old-fashioned hard work that millennials will just never understand. Kerr eventually partnered with Dean McGee, one of the oil industry's most talented geologists, to form the Kerr-McGee Corporation. The company focused on petroleum and natural gas exploration with a specialization in offshore drilling. As time passed and his net worth ballooned into the millions,
Kerr became less hands-on with the company and set his sights on higher aspirations. In 1942, Bob Kerr was elected governor of Oklahoma on his first attempt. He had spent the entire 1930s brushing shoulders and building influence with the leaders of the state's Democratic Party. With Kerr as governor, Oklahoma thrived. He recruited industry and created jobs during the Second World War and pushed hard for the post-war development of the state.
The results of his efforts garnered Bob Kerr recognition at the national level. He delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 1944 and was even considered a potential running mate with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Ultimately, Harry Truman was given that honor, but Bob Kerr used the notoriety to his advantage four years later when he was elected to represent Oklahoma as a U.S. Senator. This is Washington. Here every day decisions are made that affect your country, your state, your community, affect you and your family.
Although his political career hit a speed bump when he lost the Democratic nomination for president in 1952,
Bob Kerr refocused on his duties as senator and became one of the most powerful congressmen in American history. During his time in office, almost every piece of important legislation needed Bob Kerr's blessing or it was dead on arrival. In fact, Kerr arranged for the defeat of the Medicare bill championed by his own party's president, John F. Kennedy. It was no secret that Bob Kerr disliked JFK and his socially liberal Ivy League agenda.
Senator Kerr was a pro-business and pro-Jesus Democrat, back when both worldviews could coexist under the roof of a singular political party, back before things were so black and white, red and blue. Kennedy needed Bob Kerr on his side. He knew that it was Senator Kerr's way or the highway. Speaking of highways, Kennedy even took time out of his busy schedule to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony or some isolated stretch of road near Oklahoma's Kiamichi Mountains.
When JFK was asked why he would bother making an appearance at such an unremarkable event, the president responded, quote, I'm coming to Oklahoma to kiss Bob Kerr's ass. When Senator Kerr died suddenly from a heart attack on New Year's Day in 1963, the uncrowned king of the Senate, as he had become known, was remembered for being the best ambassador for Oklahoma that the state had ever seen.
but after he was dead and buried and his possessions were sorted, it became apparent that Bob Kerr was also quite the ambassador for himself and his bank account. When political advisor and Democratic Party organizer Bobby Baker was indicted by a federal grand jury in 1966 for tax evasion, he revealed that Senator Kerr had instructed him to collect a $100,000 bribe from executives in the savings and loans industry in exchange for passing a weak banking tax bill.
$41,000 of that $100,000 bribe was found in a safety deposit box that belonged to Bob Kerr. It was also discovered that Senator Kerr had secretly purchased hundreds of properties along the Arkansas River and that he had used his position as chairman of the Senate Rivers and Harbors Subcommittee to steer more than $300 million a year in public funds towards that river to improve it. As a result, the value of Senator Kerr's investments would increase immeasurably.
Finally, and not so secretly, the Kerr-McGee Corporation had started purchasing uranium mines in 1952. Around the same time, the United States Congress, with Senator Kerr's blessing, created the Atomic Energy Commission, which then awarded Kerr-McGee a $400 million contract, giving the corporation an effective monopoly over uranium production. And it wasn't a coincidence.
When the Saturday Evening Post magazine questioned Senator Kerr about the optics of a possible conflict of interest problem, Kerr responded, "Problem? I'm proud of it. I founded my company, and I wear this badge right out in the open for everyone to see." And he pointed to the diamond studded Kerr-McGee pin that was attached to his suit jacket. And that was it. Nothing happened. Blatant crony capitalism with zero consequences. American politics in a nutshell.
But Oklahomans, like most Americans, are either very forgiving or blissfully unaware. They choose to remember Bob Kerr as a civic-minded philanthropist who donated lands for parks and endowed a research center for eye disease. Today, you can take a walk down Robert S. Kerr Avenue in downtown Oklahoma City, or you can visit the Kerr Historical Center in Poteau, located inside of the mansion where he and his family resided. The legacy of Robert S. Kerr lives on, and so does the legacy of his corporation.
But his corporation's legacy will forever be tainted and haunted by a woman named Karen Silkwood. A lab technician at a Kern-McGee plant in Oklahoma uncovers numerous health and safety violations and attempts to blow the whistle on this episode of Swindled.
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The corners of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah is located the Navajo Indian Reservation. An area of 16 million acres filled with traditions of a people whose ancestors roamed the rolling terrain long before the white man. Recently, vast deposits of uranium have been discovered in the Navajo Hills. This rare natural resource is becoming increasingly important in the development of atomic power.
Karen Silkwood was ready to live again. The 26-year-old had put her entire life on hold when she fell in love with William Meadows seven years earlier in 1965. Against her parents' wishes, Karen dropped out of college after one year and gave up her scholarship to run away with Bill on the back of his motorcycle.
Karen's parents, Merle and William Silkwood, were disappointed but not surprised. Karen had always been the rebellious type. But those carefree days seemed like so long ago. It was now 1972, and the former straight-A student who had dreamed of becoming a medical researcher found herself in a loveless marriage with three kids. Buried under a mountain of debt somewhere in bumfuck Oklahoma, Karen was tired of being harassed by creditors because her husband chose to blow all of their money on his stupid bike.
She was tired of his lies and gaslighting. She was tired of the pitiful stares from the other townspeople, as if she was the only one who wasn't aware that Bill was cheating on her. Karen knew. In fact, she had even asked Bill for a divorce when she found out about the affair, but he refused unless he was given full custody of the children. So Karen tried to stick it out and make things work for the kids' sake, but it just wasn't a healthy situation. She thought maybe it would be better for everyone involved if she removed herself from the picture entirely.
One evening, after she tucked the kids into bed, Karen told her five-year-old daughter Christy to watch her younger brother and sister while she ran to the store to buy cigarettes, but their mother never returned home. Karen kept driving until she reached Oklahoma City, about 80 miles away, leaving her life as a wife and a mother in the rearview mirror. What better way to describe Oklahoma City than a city on the march? People on the move.
People with a pleasant purpose in life, helping the community and the state march forward. Did we say people on the move? Well, here's a new family just moving in. Now sure, it may feel a little strange moving into a new town, but no one's a stranger long in Oklahoma City.
Karen Silkwood began her new life in Oklahoma City with a brief stint as a hospital transcriptionist, before she landed a job as a chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Plant near Crescent, Oklahoma. For Karen, the new career was a dream come true. She had always wanted to work in some kind of scientific field, and Kerr-McGee was on the forefront of nuclear technology. The Cimarron facility where Karen would work was brand new.
It had opened two years earlier with the sole purpose of producing plutonium fuel rods, which were about 8 foot long and as thin as a pencil. The plutonium rods would be used to fuel nuclear reactors around the country and would hopefully replace the conventionally used uranium reactors, which would ease the fears of running out of a rapidly diminishing natural resource.
For $4 an hour, it was Karen's job to inspect rod samples for faults by handling the radioactive materials in a vacuum-sealed contamination-proof box that had built-in rubber gloves. If there were cracks in the welds or any other abnormalities, the batch of rods would be rejected. And not just to comply with the rigid specifications from the Atomic Energy Commission, who had an exclusive contract with Kerr-McGee that paid the company $9.6 million to produce the plutonium rods.
but also because a faulty fuel rod could spell nuclear disaster. Within the first month of working at Kerr-McGee, Drew Stevenson, a co-worker four years Karen's junior and also recently divorced, had approached the new girl in town and commented on her beauty. It was an act that Karen found extra flattering, considering she was wearing a white figureless jumpsuit with her hair hidden in a net. It made Karen feel good that she could still attract the interest of a younger man.
Over the next couple of years, Karen and Drew would spend a lot of time together. They shared pictures of beer at a bar after work, passed joints back and forth while staring at the stars, raced cars on the weekends, and embraced spontaneity. The couple were enjoying their newfound freedoms and making up for lost time, but Karen's children were never far from her mind. It was Karen's boyfriend Drew Stevenson who introduced her to the local chapter of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union.
Karen joined not knowing that she would be participating in a strike at Kerr-McGee less than three months after she started working there. The workers' contract was coming up for renewal and they were demanding better wages and safer working conditions, but Kerr-McGee had no intention of making any concessions. The picket line lasted 10 weeks before the strikers put down their signs in January 1973 and went back to work. It was a humiliating defeat for the union who had not gained any ground.
By the time the strike was over, only 20 employees, about 15% of the Cimarron plant's workforce, remained in the union, including Karen Silkwood, who had been one of the last members to abandon their post. Karen's eyes had been opened, and she didn't like what she had seen. During and after the strike, union officials and other members recognized the passion in which Karen would stick up for what was right. They saw a woman who was adamant about doing things the right way, and they saw a woman who could be very vocal when that wasn't happening.
As a result, Karen was eventually elected to the union's three-person bargaining committee to assist in negotiations. Karen Silkwood was the first woman at the Kerr-McGee plant to ever serve in that thankless position. The committee instructed Karen to investigate health and safety issues at the facility, which she soon discovered were aplenty. She noted that the respiratory equipment and protective gear the workers were issued was defective or ill-fitting, including her own.
She found that the samples in the lab where she worked were stored improperly, oftentimes just piled together hastily inside of a metal drawer. But most concerning was how often workers at the plant were exposed to contamination. Plutonium spills were a common occurrence at the Cimarron plant, but production never slowed down.
In fact, quite the opposite was happening. Kerr-McGee had fallen behind on their contract with the AEC, so employees were being pushed to their limits, sometimes working 12-hour days, 7 days a week, resulting in a turnover rate that was extreme. Transients and teenagers were hired with minimal training just to fill the shoes on the factory line, shoes which were sometimes standing in radioactive plutonium that was oozing out of leaky pipes.
According to former plant supervisor Jim Smith, after one such plutonium spill, Kerr-McGee officials sent him to the store to purchase hundreds of gallons of white paint to simply paint over the plutonium and uranium flakes that wouldn't wash off the walls. Well, like I say, anywhere you wanted to look, you could see uranium laying on the floor. Worse than a dirty, anything dirty, I mean, just uranium everywhere. And people, it didn't seem to bother them. They just waited in it and...
Karen Silkwood herself had tested positive for radioactive contamination during a routine self-check after a shift in July 1974. The health supervisors at the plant reassured her that it wasn't serious, but still required her to submit urine and fecal samples on a weekly basis.
Contamination might have been common, but Karen started to wonder if she had been targeted due to her union association. Because despite looking out for their best interest, some of Karen's non-union co-workers had noticed and resented the fact that she had been carrying around a notebook and documenting every safety violation she witnessed. They would call her a bitch or a hippie and accuse her of being a troublemaker who was endangering their livelihoods. But Karen wasn't going to let a little abuse stop her from completing her assignment. Besides, she had been through worse.
Karen knew how to stand up for herself and she was determined to improve the working conditions at the plant for everybody. She just didn't know at the time that it would cost her everything. Support for Swindled comes from Rocket Money. Most Americans think they spend about $62 per month on subscriptions. That's very specific, but get this, the real number is closer to $300. That is literally thousands of dollars a year, half of which we've probably forgotten about.
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Karen Silkwood arrived in Washington, D.C. on September 26, 1974. She carried with her a list of safety violations that had occurred at the Kerr-McGee facility in Oklahoma, which she planned to present to Tony Mazzocchi, the union's national legislative director. Karen told Mazzocchi about the inadequate protective gear and the leaking pipes. She also explained how contaminations had become almost a daily occurrence, and that by her account, there had been at least 70 contaminations since she started keeping track.
A fact that made Mizaki's jaw drop to the floor. Didn't they tell you? Tony asked. Plutonium causes cancer. No, actually. Kermagee had not told Karen or anyone else that worked at the plant that plutonium could cause cancer. The company had convinced the workers that the problem was solved as soon as the body underwent a decontamination scrub. But what Karen learned from Tony Mizaki is that the contact to the skin was only part of the problem.
breathing the contaminated air, which Karen and her co-workers have been doing for months, some of them years, was also a major hazard. The revelation shocked Karen Silkwood. She felt completely betrayed by Kerr-McGee. Cancer? How? Better yet, why would the company keep this a secret? What Karen would learn later was that even the smallest speck of plutonium, if ingested, could eventually lead to cancer.
According to Time magazine, it only takes a softball-sized amount of plutonium to manufacture an atomic bomb. Karen also brought up the fact that she had suspicions that someone at the plant had been tampering with quality control data so that fuel rods with substandard welds would pass inspection. She told the union officials that it looked as if someone was using a black felt-tip pen on x-rays of the rods to hide hairline fractures. Tony Mazzocchi's jaw hit the floor again. This was major news.
If one of those cracked fuel rods malfunctioned, it could cause a major nuclear catastrophe the likes of which the world had never seen. At least not for another few years. Mazzocchi wanted proof, and Karen Silkwood volunteered to collect it for him. Back in Oklahoma, Karen started gathering as much information as she could.
She stole confidential company documents, eavesdropped on private conversations, silently took notes on her surroundings, and made regular phone calls to Steve Wodka, a union official in Washington, D.C., to report back on what she had found. "Steve, this shit is going on every day, so it attenuates, doesn't it?" "Sure as hell does." "If you breathe it once a week, for every week for five years that you're out there,
In the lavatory, we've got...
One of the most disturbing things that Karen Silkwood uncovered about the Kerr-McGee plant is that over 40 pounds of plutonium, worth tens of millions of dollars, had simply vanished. There was enough plutonium to produce four of the bombs that wiped out Hiroshima.
A year later, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would receive an anonymous tip that the Moe Dallitz Mafia family in Cleveland was selling stolen Carnegie plutonium on the international black market. According to Rolling Stone, a private investigator hired by the NRC found enough evidence to render those suspicions valid.
The union officials in DC and Karen Silkwood decided that they had to go to the press. They contacted investigative journalist David Burnham at the New York Times and invited him to a private meeting to be held in Oklahoma City on November 13th, 1974. At the meeting, Karen would hand over a folder of internal documents that would expose all the horrific things that were happening at Kerr-McGee. Until then, Karen Silkwood would have to watch her back. She continued working at the plant but started planning her exit strategy.
She called her parents in Nederland, Texas and asked them to start collecting job applications for her to fill out later. Karen's parents weren't exactly sure what their daughter had planned, but they trusted her to do the right thing. But the sneaking around was stressing Karen out. In less than two months of playing detective, she had lost nearly 20 pounds. She wasn't eating regularly, wasn't sleeping well. So Karen went to a doctor, described her symptoms, and was given a prescription for Quaaludes, a sedative that was often used to treat insomnia.
The Quaaludes were a nice escape from the hellish existence at Kerr-McGee. A hellish existence that only worsened in the oncoming days. On November 5th, 1974, 6:30 PM, Karen's shift at the plant had just ended and she began the routine self-check for radiation contamination just like any other day. But this day was different. Not only did the radiation meter alert that Karen had been contaminated yet again, this time, the meter read that Karen had been contaminated almost 400 times the legal limit.
She was immediately taken to the decontamination shower and scrubbed with a wire brush and bleach, a scrubbing so thorough that the surface layer of skin on her entire body had been essentially removed. An investigation revealed that the rubber gloves Karen had been using that day had been contaminated and that there were no holes or punctures in the gloves that would have exposed her to the radiation inside of the box. Someone had to have placed plutonium into Karen's gloves on the worker's side of the facility
Karen Silkwood's contamination levels tested even higher the following day, an odd occurrence considering she had spent most of her morning at a union meeting before arriving at the plant to complete some paperwork. Karen had not handled plutonium at all that day, yet there she was again, getting scrubbed raw like a dirty barbecue pit. The next day, on November 7th, as soon as Karen Silkwood entered the Kerr-McGee facility, she was discovered to be more contaminated than ever.
Even the air she exhaled out of her lungs was registering on the meter. None of it made sense. How had Karen become contaminated before even arriving to the facility? A decontamination team descended upon the house where Karen lived with her 21-year-old rodeo champion roommate, Dusty Ellis. Karen's bathroom and refrigerator were found to be the most contaminated spots in the house, especially the package of bologna and cheese that Karen had eaten from at least three times that week. Her house was stripped.
Most of her belongings were destroyed. Karen stood in her front yard sobbing, as if she was watching her home burn to the ground in a nuclear fire.
This is her boyfriend, Drew Stevenson. She showed up down here and she was shaking like a leaf. She was hysterical. She was incoherent. She kept saying over and over again that I'm gonna die. To find out if Karen was, in fact, going to die, Kerr-McGee sent her, as well as Drew and Dusty, the people who spent a significant amount of time in the house, to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for testing. Drew and Dusty came back with mostly clean results.
Karen, on the other hand, was found to have contamination in her lungs. But according to Dr. Vo Els at the Los Alamos lab, Karen's contamination wasn't severe enough to worry about. But Karen sent belated birthday cards to all three of her children just in case. It was the first communication they had received from their mother in over eight months. By now, Kermagee was losing patience with the girl who cried radiation poisoning.
Officials at the company were convinced that Karen Silkwood had poisoned herself in an effort to publicly embarrass the company. They suggested that maybe she was emotionally unstable and had become too deeply involved in the union's fight. But it was a fight that Karen Silkwood knew she had to finish. The day Karen had circled on the calendar finally arrived. November 13th, 1974. Journalist David Burnham was en route to Oklahoma City and Karen had the folder full of secret documents ready for delivery.
Drew remembers how excited Karen was on that day. He told People Magazine, "She was standing astride the heat register on the floor of my house with the Bloody Mary in her hand, and she said, 'We've got the motherfuckers now.'" Not only was November 13th the day Karen was supposed to meet the New York Times reporter, but it was also her first day back at work after her contamination. She returned to Kerr-McGee to find out that she was now restricted from working with plutonium in any way and was denied access from certain areas of the plant where she had been collecting information.
That's fine, Karen thought. She would be quitting in a few weeks anyway. And if things go according to plan, there might not be a plant to work at anyhow. After a union meeting at the Hub Cafe in Crescent, Oklahoma, at about 7 p.m., Karen Silkwood got back into her car and headed towards Oklahoma City. The documents she was set to deliver were sitting in the front passenger seat. Journalist David Burnham, union official Steve Wodka, and Karen's boyfriend Drew Stevenson were already at the motel room waiting for her to arrive.
Karen was eager but nervous. In less than an hour, she would hand over information to the New York Times that would potentially ruin Kerr-McGee. Information that would expose the dangers of nuclear energy to the entire country. But it was important that everyone know the truth. That the plant workers in Oklahoma had been lied to. That the plant workers in Oklahoma had essentially been given death sentences without their consent. And that Kerr-McGee knew about the safety issues but ignored them for the sake of profits.
That's not something that Karen Silkwood could allow to happen on her watch. The drive from Crescent to Oklahoma City took about 30 minutes down a stretch of State Highway 74. It was a drive that Karen Silkwood had made a million times before. But on that evening, about seven miles outside of Crescent, Karen's 1974 Honda Civic veered left into oncoming traffic and onto the shoulder of the east side of the road.
At full speed, her car ramped over a culvert, launched into the air, and collided head-on with the concrete wall of an underground ditch. Karen Silkwood died on impact. When Drew Stevenson, Steve Wodka, and journalist David Burnham arrived at the scene of the crash a little after 10 p.m., there was little evidence to suggest that Karen Silkwood had ever been there. Her car had been towed to a local garage, and her body had been transported to a local morgue.
The only trace of Karen's silkwood that the three men could find was a paperback novel lying in the grass, its pages stained with her blood. The following morning, after receiving permission from Karen's parents, Drew Stevenson, along with Wodka the union rep and Burnham the journalist, went to the garage to collect Karen's personal belongings from her totaled car. The mechanic handed the men a cardboard box which they quickly shuffled through on the spot and immediately noticed that something very important was missing. The folder with the documents. It was gone.
There wasn't a single piece of paper to be found that included the Kerr-McGee letterhead. When asked, the mechanic informed the three men that officials from the Atomic Energy Commission and Kerr-McGee had beaten them to the punch. They had searched Karen's car the night before. Karen Silkwood's death was officially ruled an accident. The state trooper who first responded to the scene said he found two Quaalude tablets in her possession and cannabis in her purse. His report indicated that Karen had simply and tragically fallen asleep at the wheel. I wouldn't.
That state trooper also reported finding Kerr-McGee documents scattered near Karen's car. He said he gathered what he could and placed them back inside before the car was towed away. And somehow, not so mysteriously, those documents had vanished into thin air.
Needless to say, not everyone was buying the official story, including Karen's father, Bill Silkwood, who suggested that there might be foul play involved. Well, I know that she was run off the road, and that somebody contaminated her. She didn't contaminate herself. Kurt McGee controls Oklahoma City, and they own so many things there that they do what they want to. Well, nobody's above the law, surely. Sometimes they are the law.
The union had doubts of their own and hired a private investigator and accident expert to analyze the scene. The PI found that the steering wheel of Karen's car was bent in half as if she had been wide awake, gripping her hands tight, bracing for impact. Furthermore, there were fresh dents on the rear fender of her Honda that contained microscopic paint chips from another car and there were skid marks on the side of the highway that suggested that Karen had been forced off the road and prevented from correcting course.
There's no circumstantial evidence there to indicate that somebody may, another vehicle may have hit the car in the rear. There were also tales of Karen receiving threatening phone calls from anonymous persons in the weeks leading up to her death. An assistant police chief from the Oklahoma City Police Department even came forward claiming that he had heard rumors that off-duty policemen had been eavesdropping on Karen Silkwood's conversations and keeping track of her movements. But none of these theories or rumors were ever substantiated. The official story stuck.
Karen Silkwood had drugs in her system, which was confirmed by the coroner, and she fell asleep and crashed. The fresh stints on the body of her car could have happened when the wrecker pulled it out of the culvert, and that culvert, one of only a few in the entirety of Oklahoma, had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even the New York Times reporter David Burnham had to admit that someone would have had to pull off some extremely precise maneuvering and timing if Karen Silkwood's death was a planned murder.
Burnham doesn't deny the possibility that someone could have been out to scare her, but planned murder? Highly unlikely. "She was contaminated for three days in a row, and her home was contaminated. And in the face of that fear, she continued to collect the documents that she was going to deliver to the New York Times."
And on her way, something happened right here. But the publicity from activists and environmentalists forced the Atomic Energy Commission to conduct their own investigation. An investigation that revealed that up to 60 pounds of plutonium had indeed gone missing from the Kerr-McGee-Cimarron plant, just as Karen Silkwood had alleged. And it confirmed that it wasn't possible for Karen to have contaminated herself since the plutonium she had ingested had come from a restricted area of the plant.
However, the 20-page report published by the AEC after it concluded its investigation was more good news for Kerr-McGee than bad. Only three of the union's 39 allegations were found to be in violation of the commission's standards, while 17 of the allegations were found to have "substance or partial substance." This report was a huge win for Kerr-McGee, who, as activists were quick to point out, the AEC were relying upon to produce the fuel rods for its nuclear initiative.
In other words, Kerr-McGee and the AEC were in bed together and had been for a long time. Despite the victory, the Kerr-McGee Cimarron facility in Crescent, Oklahoma was shut down when the AEC was abolished in 1975, less than a year after the Silkwood incident, and Kerr-McGee shuttered its entire nuclear fuels division of the company in 1986, but not before an accident at its facility in Gore, Oklahoma earlier that year that killed one worker and injured another 82.
By the year 2000, there wasn't a single nuclear facility left in Oklahoma, and on the way out, the federal government offered money to some Native American tribes to let them store nuclear waste on their lands. Not a single tribe accepted the offer. The Kerr-McGee nuclear business was dead and gone, but the ghost of Karen Silkwood remained.
When Bill Silkwood announced that he would be suing Kerr-McGee in 1976, over $500,000 was contributed to the legal fund by individuals and foundations around the country. Karen Silkwood had become the national symbol for opponents of the nuclear industry, the brave whistleblower who paid the ultimate price for her convictions. And since the activists couldn't think Karen in person, the least they could do was help out the children she had left behind. Because that's who the lawsuit was for, Karen's children.
Bill wanted his grandchildren to have something to remember their mother by, and physical possessions weren't a possibility. All of Karen's belongings had been destroyed. Bill even had to buy a new dress for Karen, just so she could be buried in something that wasn't contaminated. And that's what the lawsuit was about. Contamination. Bill Silkwood wasn't trying to answer the question of who killed his daughter. Besides, in his heart, he already knew, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to prove it.
This lawsuit was about proving that Kerr-McGee was willfully negligent in letting Karen get contaminated in the first place, and as a result, were responsible for all of the physical and property damage that she had endured. The trial, which lasted 10 months, began in 1979, the same year that the country watched the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster unfold in Pennsylvania. The Silkwood trial would become the ultimate test of the nuclear industry's accountability.
The plaintiffs set out to prove that Kerr-McGee not only knew that radiation was dangerous, but that they also knowingly and purposely failed to inform their workers about the hazardous nature of their jobs. During the trial, it was revealed that the Kerr-McGee workers' safety manual actually read, in big bold letters, quote, "Radiation is safe." Karen Silkwood had reason to be frightened. The seriousness of her contamination was outlined at the Oklahoma trial by Dr. Carl Morgan. Had Karen Silkwood lived,
Another doctor that testified, Dr. John Goffman, agreed that Karen, had she lived, would be facing numbered days. On the stand, Dr. Goffman stated, quote,
and Karen Silkwood wasn't alone. According to a congressional report, between 1970 and 1975, there were 574 exposures to plutonium at the Kerr-McGee plant in Crescent, and those are just the ones that were reported. Kerr-McGee stuck with the story that Karen Silkwood was nothing more than a troublemaker who had poisoned herself, and they proposed that, according to Dr. Voiles at the Los Alamos laboratory, Karen's contamination had not reached dangerous levels anyway.
This is Kerr-McGee spokesman William Teague. This young lady had gotten involved in a big league game of labor union intrigue. She had a chance at the sun. She was asked to be an undercover agent for the union. Tape recordings made by Stephen Wodka of the union indicates that he put pressure on her to bring to him information that would justify his bringing a New York Times reporter to the Oklahoma City area. He hoped by doing this,
to generate a cause celebre which would benefit the union at a time of sensitive negotiations. The jury disagreed.
The Silkwood family was awarded a total of $10.5 million.
$5,000 for the destruction of Karen's household goods, $500,000 for her physical injuries, and $10 million in punitive damages. These are the lawyers that represented the Silkwood family in the lawsuit, Jerry Spence and Daniel Sheehan, respectively. The verdict stands for the right of American people to speak out against government, the right of an American jury, six people from the heart of this country,
right from the middle of Oklahoma to speak out to the whole nation and say as a jury, we don't believe in the government standards, we don't believe in the gobbledygook and the numbers games and the numbers crunching, we don't believe in all of the things that have caused the truth to be hidden from America.
But the battle wasn't over. Kerr-McGee appealed the decision and had the damages successfully reversed down to $5,000, just enough to cover the property damage.
The federal appeals court ruled that all of Karen's exposures were job-related injuries, therefore any bodily harm inflicted should be covered exclusively by workers' compensation. And it was ruled that since nuclear safety was exclusively regulated by the federal government, the states lacked the ability to punish companies for bad practices. Workers were contaminated over and over and over again, and nobody told them about cancer. As a matter of fact, when they took the stand...
They said they didn't know about cancer until they read about it in the newspaper during the trial. There's no question about the fact that they're going to die. One man said that he thought he was contaminated on an average of twice a week for four years while he worked there. Nineteen-year-old people who came in were contaminated within one or two days after they started work. They painted over the contamination. They didn't decontaminate desks, walls, floors. They just painted it over with white paint in order to hurry up and get the production back online.
In 1984, the United States Supreme Court restored the original verdict and Kerr-McGee ultimately settled out of court with the Silkwood family for $1.38 million. But the corporation never admitted any liability. It sends a message to the government and to the nuclear industry that they have to tell the truth. And that if they don't tell the truth, they have to be prepared to pay the fiddler.
That fiddler came knocking on Kerr-McGee's door again in 2014. We're here to announce a $5,150,000,000 settlement with the Kerr-McGee Corporation and its parent, Anadarko.
This settlement is the largest recovery for cleanup of environmental contamination in the history of the Department of Justice. In the largest recovery for cleanup of environmental contamination in the history of the Department of Justice, it was announced that Anadarko Petroleum, who had purchased Kermagee in 2006, would be responsible for cleaning up what U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara referred to as the toxic legacy left behind by its latest acquisition.
The EPA announced that at least $4.4 billion of the settlement would be used to clean up sites from, quote, the Navajo Nation to low-income neighborhoods across America. Maybe Karen Silkwood didn't die in vain after all. I feel that Karen has been vindicated and what she was saying was true and I think the American public believes her now. Do you know the stakes of comfort?
Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard. Special thanks to Jess Williamson for letting us use the song that you're hearing right now. It's called Snake Song and it reminds me a lot of Karen Silkwood.
Jess is an old friend and an incredibly talented artist. There's a link to her music and her website in the show notes. Go check it out and go see her play live when she comes to your town. She's awesome. Thanks again, Jess. For more information about Swindled, visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at swindledpodcast. You can support the show by going to patreon.com slash swindled and joining the Valued Listener Rewards Program.
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Finally, last call for the meetup in Los Angeles. It's happening on Saturday, September 7th at 6th and La Brea Brewery and Restaurant. You can RSVP for free at swindledpodcast.com slash events. Trevor and I are really looking forward to meeting you all. The Boston meetup at Winter Hill Brewing on October 4th is officially sold out. Can't wait. That's it. Thanks for listening and enjoy the song. So by and by, dear to rest.
And feel your father's first kiss. And know everywhere you go. And as long as I am alive. As long as I am alive.
Thanks to SimpliSafe for sponsoring the show. Protect your home this summer with 20% off any new SimpliSafe system when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitoring. Just visit simplisafe.com slash swindled. That's simplisafe.com slash swindled. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.