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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.
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The Thin Holloway is a beautiful river.
It is a black water stream originating in the San Pedro Bay wetlands running 36 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. The river is important to us because it feeds into the Gulf of Mexico and it has a direct impact on our fish and on the sea grasses that are very vital to that area. The Fenn Holloway was a beautiful river once upon a time according to the natives of Taylor County, Florida, but not anymore.
The algae blooms and the seagrass had disappeared. The water had turned black as motor oil. The insects were deformed, and almost all of the marine life had been wiped out, except the female mosquito fish, which scientists observed had begun developing male genitalia. As far as water quality, I can't think of anything worse in Florida. A researcher with the Environmental Protection Agency told the St. Petersburg Times in March of 1991,
It was no wonder why. The Buckeye Cellulose Plant, which opened in Perry, Florida in 1954, had been pumping 50 million gallons of wastewater into the Fin Holloway River every day for decades. The mill's effluent, which included chlorine used to bleach the paper pulp the plant produced for use in products like disposable diapers and coffee filters, was simply discharged and forgotten.
and it was all perfectly legal. Back in 1947, local leaders in Taylor County, in an effort to attract big business, persuaded the Florida State Legislature to classify the Fenn-Holloway River as an industrial river.
The law, in part, stated that any industrial operation in Taylor County "shall have, and is hereby granted the right, and is hereby empowered, to discharge and deposit sewage, industrial and chemical wastes, and effluents, or any of them, into the waters of the thin Holloway River and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico into which said river flows." The devastation that occurred as a result of the new law was breathtaking.
In the late 80s, scientists had also discovered that, during droughts, the bug-eye plants' discarded waste seeped into aquifers and drinking wells instead of flowing into the Gulf as intended. This revelation helped explain the dead dogs, stomach issues, and blistering scalps common among the residents who lived on the riverbanks. This revelation also proved to be the breaking point for many of those residents. More than 40 years after the Fen Holloway's industrial classification, people demanded change.
One of those people was 38-year-old Stephanie McGuire. Stephanie, a lifelong native of the area, owned and operated a fishing camp on the Finn Holloway River with her cousin, Linda Rowland. In 1991, after witnessing the environmental catastrophe caused by the pulp mill firsthand, Stephanie and Linda joined a local activist group called Hope Help Our Polluted Environment. The group petitioned Buckeye to reduce its waste and threatened a lawsuit against the plant.
Unsurprisingly, those actions proved unpopular with some of the townspeople whose livelihoods depended on it. On April 7th, 1992, Stephanie McGuire was washing dishes when she heard a commotion outside. Linda Rowland had driven Stephanie's son into town to purchase a Game Boy, so she knew it wasn't them. "It's probably just a boat docking at the camp," Stephanie thought to herself. The dogs were barking. She went outside to investigate.
There was a man in a small boat trying to get her attention. "Do you know who owns the cows just down the dirt road?" he yelled to her. "I think I might have shot one of them, accidentally." Perplexed, Stephanie Maguire walked outside towards the man and locked the gate behind her. As she moved closer to the water's edge, she was struck by a rock to the back of the head. Stephanie fell to the ground. She looked up to see two other men standing over her. They were wearing camouflage and hunting masks.
Soon the driver of the boat joined them and tried to pin her down, but Stephanie struggled to her feet, reared back and landed a satisfying punch. The unlucky recipient of that haymaker lifted his mask to collect a dislodged tooth which he tucked away in a pocket. Then he pushed McGuire back to the ground and stomped on her hand.
"We're going to teach a lesson to all you crazy people that are going to cause us to lose our jobs," as the maskless boat driver inched toward Stephanie with the razor blade in hand. "I'm going to do this as slow as I can, so it'll be as painful as possible," he told her. "This is the last face you'll see." The man slashed Stephanie's shirt open and carved a wound from her right ear toward her mouth. They used a cigar to burn a hole into the flesh above her left breast.
Stephanie McGuire said she thought she was going to die that day. The men had a shotgun with them but were scared off when her dog Boo Boo escaped his enclosure and bit one of the assailants in the face. Stephanie lay on the ground bleeding as she watched her attacker scurry onto the boat and speed away.
Local law enforcement was skeptical of Stephanie McGuire's story, but Stephanie knew they would be. The Buckeye Cellulose Plant, which was owned by megacorporation Procter & Gamble, was the largest employer in Taylor County. By itself, the company accounted for half of the property tax base. At times, four of the five county commissioners were on P&G's payroll. Needless to say, the powers that be were not in tune with the activists' crusade.
Regardless, a year-long investigation into the attack followed. Proctor and Gamble even offered a $5,000 reward for information that never came. According to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, all of the available evidence conflicted with Ms. McGuire's claims. There was no blood at the crime scene, no footprints, no evidence of a scuffle at all. In addition, forensic experts determined that the bite mark on Stephanie McGuire's body was not actually a bite mark.
and the cigar burn on Stephanie's chest featured a remarkable resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, as if the mark had been self-inflicted with a hot copper penny. Stephanie McGuire stopped cooperating with authorities. She refused to be photographed the day of the attack. She refused to take a polygraph test. Stephanie was convinced that the Sheriff's Department was in the pocket of Proctor and Gamble, like everyone else. She claimed the investigation would never be fair.
Without any new leads, the Taylor County Sheriff's Office closed Stephanie McGuire's case. At one point, they even considered filing charges against her for perjury, but those charges never stuck, and McGuire maintained that her story was true. The scars on her face and the miscarriage she had suffered six weeks after the attack were proof enough for most.
Stephanie McGuire and her cousin Linda Rowland left Taylor County during the investigation, but the harassment followed when their new whereabouts were published in the local newspaper. The threatening phone calls resumed. One of their dogs was poisoned with antifreeze. Stephanie McGuire and Linda Rowland continued to live in fear.
Stephanie said she kept a gun by her side at all times and would wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Her cousin Linda, a former Buckeye employee who was battling for disability payments, told the media, Stephanie's outside scars will heal. It's her inside scars I'm worried about. She added, We have not been violent. We have said time and again, we do not want the mill to shut down.
Procter & Gamble didn't care. The McGuire case had attracted national media interest. PR and goodwill are the names of the game. P&G was feeling the heat. So after spending millions of dollars trying and failing to mitigate the ongoing environmental disaster, the company announced it was putting the Buckeye factory up for sale.
It wasn't worth the trouble anymore. The class action lawsuit filed against the plant had been dismissed because the homeowners could not prove enough financial damage. P&G was off the hook, and they were packing their bags. The company made sure to wrap their environmental awards with extra care. Procter & Gamble's strategy is to move its consumer products division into other parts of the world. Globalization, P&G's site manager told the St. Petersburg Times.
The environment had nothing to do with it. It only seems like bad timing here. Bad timing or not, Buckeye was not a factory that Taylor County could afford to lose. In the early 90s, the unemployment rate was already out of control. Maryland Assemblies, the county's treasured gunpowder plant, was forced to shut down after federal fraud indictments, and the boat sales had dried up with the economy. New suitors wouldn't be lining up to take their places anytime soon.
A polluted river doesn't exactly smell like money. Things were looking bleak. Until 1993, the Buckeye plant was sold to Buckeye Technologies, an investor group of former Procter & Gamble executives, who would then eventually sell it to Georgia Pacific, the pulp and paper company owned by Koch Industries.
Later in 1993, P&G cut 12% of its workforce, closed one of every five factories it owned, and awarded its stockholders a higher dividend. The company also remained the biggest customer of the Buckeye Cellulose Plant. In 1994, Taylor County's commissioners voted to strip the Finn Holloway River of its industrial status. In 1997, a $39 million effort to restore the polluted waterway was underway.
Georgia Pacific also pledged up to $100 million for the cause. In December 2020, the company installed a 15-mile pipeline that rerouted all the buckeye waste out past the river to instead dump it directly into the Gulf of Mexico. There, problem solved. For those in Taylor County, Florida, the Finn Holloway is symbolic. It's a resurrection, a rebirth, a revitalization.
for the company responsible for polluting it, one of the largest corporations in the United States of America. The Fenn Holloway River was merely a blip on the radar. Another day at the office, a passing afternoon, the Fenn Holloway River was just another line item on a list of scandals for Procter & Gamble who seem rather frequently embroiled in controversy.
Whether it's designing a killer tampon, marketing a potato chip that makes you shit yourself, or just plain old-fashioned Satan worship, the Cincinnati-based company has seen it all. And let's not forget the elaborate test performed on animals to research pet food. Don't say I didn't warn you. A multinational corporation's squeaky clean image conceals a history of good luck, bad luck, triumph, and tragedy on this episode of Swindled.
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Procter & Gamble was founded with humble roots in 1837 in Cincinnati, Ohio. During the American Civil War, the company won government contracts to provide candles and soap to the Union Army.
Their products were introduced to new customers around the country and profits rose steadily year after year. The company went multinational in 1915, expanding to Canada. 15 years later in 1930 they crossed an ocean and started selling products in the UK. P&G's rise from that point has been meteoric. Today Procter & Gamble products touch approximately 5 billion people every day with markets in over 180 countries.
The company dominates the beauty, grooming, healthcare, home, and baby product markets, earning $70 billion in revenue in 2020, with $10 billion of that coming through a lucrative partnership with Walmart, a classic American power couple.
Thanks to their brands Tide, Aerial, and Downy, Procter & Gamble accounts for 30% of global fabric and laundry sales. Through Gillette, they deliver a staggering 65% of the world's market for razors and blades, but none of those is P&G's biggest brand. That distinction goes to Pampers, worn by 25 million babies in 100 countries every day.
Pampers generates $10 billion in sales annually. In fact, 21 different brands earned more than $1 billion for P&G in 2019. Procter & Gamble spent at least $7 of those billion on advertising in 2020. And the budget increases every year. As a result, the corporation has the reach and influence to force an agenda, rewrite history, or sell a story.
As a matter of fact, one of PG's earliest signature products was marketed on a lie. Ivory soap. The first soap to ever float in water. It was more than just a gimmick. It meant that people no longer needed to reach blindly on the bathtub floors to retrieve their lost bars. P&G had a hit on its hands. Ivory became one of the best-selling brands of soap in the world.
For years, P&G gleefully told the tale of Ivory's invention. How an unnamed employee left a batch of soap mixing during his especially long lunch break. Extra air was whipped into the soap and voila, Ivory was born. A happy accident. Lucky us. Except none of that actually happened. The story was invented. Just a fun little branding exercise. In reality, floating soap was created on purpose through a series of tests and trials.
That unnamed employee who accomplished such a feat. Why that was James Gamble Jr. Son of, you guessed it, James Gamble Sr. The Gamble and Proctor and Gamble. James Jr. was a P&G chemist and in 1863 he wrote in a notebook, I made floating soap today. I think we'll make all of our stock that way.
A lie, sure, but mostly harmless. Everyone expects tall tales from a salesman, do they not? However, marketing mistruths would land Procter & Gamble in a bit of hot water more than a hundred years later. In November 1991, the attorneys general of ten states put a stop to a P&G advertising campaign for Love's brand diapers.
A magazine advertisement for the brand depicted a hand holding a pile of soil under a banner that read, "90 days ago, this was a disposable diaper." Clearly, the ad implied that the diapers were biodegradable. But in reality, the diapers were only partially compostable, which, according to the attorneys general of those 10 states, would have been nice to know before people started burying them in their yards.
At the time, only 10 American cities had the solid waste facilities to properly process the diapers in the way they were advertised. Procter & Gamble was fined $50,000, but never admitted to any wrongdoing. Introducing Aleve, a non-prescription strength of Anaprox. Only Aleve has 8-12 hour dosing. It lasts longer than extra strength Tylenol. Advil isn't stronger, yet Aleve is gentler to your stomach lining than aspirin. New Aleve.
In 1994, Procter & Gamble was back in court for obfuscating the truth about its new anti-inflammatory drug, Aleve. Commercials for Aleve claimed that one or two pills provided 8 to 12 hours of relief, far more effective than the competition, which only lasted 4 to 8. According to the official-looking bar graph that was plastered all over television screens as part of P&G's $100 million marketing campaign,
The competition, specifically American Home Products Corporation, maker of Advil, took issue with the claim and pointed out that the two products were virtually identical. It was basic ibuprofen, for which the Food and Drug Administration recommends no more than one dose in an eight-hour period because of potential side effects. It did not mean, how P&G had boasted, that the medicine was effective for a longer period of time.
Procter & Gamble had twisted a disadvantage into an advantage, but won the lawsuit anyway. The judge rejected the claim that Procter & Gamble had deliberately intended to mislead customers, but said that the mountains of conflicting claims presented about the painkillers had left him with a quote, "monumental headache." In addition to misleading marketing for profit, Procter & Gamble is also known for its socially progressive marketing campaigns that promote brand awareness.
In recent years, the company has produced traditional and digital ad spots such as The Talk, which addresses racism in America, as well as The Best Men Can Be, Gillette's attack on toxic masculinity. All noble causes, obviously, but why?
It's hard to believe that the corporation embraces social progress from the goodness of its heart. Because a corporation has no heart. It has products that it wants to sell to consumers, and it conducts research on those consumers. They understand which way the wind is blowing. In 1993, a Procter & Gamble spokesman admitted as much:
Jim Schwartz told the New York Times that the company became interested in the topic of racial harmony after the results of a survey communicated how important the issue was to teenagers at the time. "If it's important to teens, then it's important to Clearasil," he said.
Despite being probably the first company to post a rainbow version of their corporate logo on social media, it's hard to imagine Procter & Gamble championing any progressive social causes, considering how conservative the company has been internally, traditionally. Former employees have described the culture at P&G as being, quote, "...a cross between the Marines and the Mormon Church."
In the 70s and 80s, at least, the company coached its employees how to dress and where to live. They would tell them when to cut their hair. Proctoids, as the employees lovingly referred to themselves, couldn't even hang artwork in their office unless it was from the company's pre-approved collection. One year, the company even filmed the lunchroom, monitored bathroom use, and analyzed the handwriting on anonymous morale surveys to issue reprimands.
Being a proctoid meant that your phone calls would be monitored on and off site. It meant that security would be trailing you on every business trip. And it meant that if you were a woman, you'd probably be sexually harassed at some point in your career. Proctoids say that kind of behavior was tolerated in the offices and the plants for far too long.
Employees have also claimed that they were expected to go to a traditional church and encouraged to vote Republican. They were told how to manage their spouses into behaving like a proper proctoid wife. And if all of those boxes weren't checked, good luck on getting a promotion. Merit means nothing unless the suit looks good. Surprisingly, diversity was not a high priority for Procter & Gamble during this era.
In 1977, Judge Cerity Hughes in Texas found that a P&G plant in Dallas gave black people, quote, the least desirable jobs. Judge Hughes ordered the company to install an affirmative action plan to mitigate the inequity. Instead, P&G restructured the business and closed the plant for good. But don't tell anybody.
The company preferred to keep everything classified. Organizational fascism is how one former employee described the company's obsession with secrecy. Executives at Procter & Gamble had gone to great lengths to conceal the company's future plans from its competitors. They'd dress up as hunters carrying guns while scouting locations in the woods. At one time, they even set up a sting of their own to arrest a manager who tried to sell a Crest budget book to a rival brand.
Procter & Gamble tried to keep a lid on everything, which makes what happened in 1980 all the more hilarious. It is one of this nation's best known and respected companies and it produces some of the most familiar items in American commerce: toothpaste, soap, detergents. But ridiculous as it may seem, now again there are people who insist this company supports something called the Church of Satan.
Rumors began circulating in church-going communities across America that family-friendly company Procter & Gamble, a pioneer of soap and soap operas, had ties to Satanism. Leaflets and flyers distributed by pious folk claimed the proof was in the company's logo. P&G's logo, which dated back to 1930, featured a man in the moon with 13 stars in the sky.
Curls in the moon man's beard and hair created the number 6, alarmed consumers would demonstrate. People saw the same number in the stars too. Supposedly clear patterns creating a series of sixes, the mark of the beast. But nothing was mentioned about the imagery used for P&G's product Mr. Clean, an obvious neo-Nazi if I ever saw one. We're not in the business of selling products like Procter & Gamble, but we are in the business, hopefully, of selling truth.
P&G's links to Satanism was such a silly rumor, but it spread like hellfire. The scandal was a product of its time. Early 80s conservative America in the throes of Satanic panic. In their minds, caravans of Satan worshippers were on their way to every small town grocery store in the heartland to stock the shelves full of personal care and cleaning products. Oh, the humanity. Procter & Gamble had no choice but to address the folklore.
The company responded by mailing what it called "truth packets" to areas in which the rumor had infected. The packet contained a history of the company's trademark and letters from trustworthy religious leaders like Reverends Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham. Eventually the rumor sputtered out, for a couple years at least, until 1982.
That summer, Procter & Gamble received 15,000 phone calls and letters from concerned citizens. This time, the company took an aggressive stance, filing lawsuits against anyone they could find spreading the gossip. P&G was losing its patience. Well, we find it incredible that we have to deal with this rumor in the first place, and that it has grown to this magnitude. The lawsuits worked. The rumors died down once again. But good luck keeping the dark lord subdued.
In 1985, the New York Times reported that leaflets were circulating in New York City about Procter & Gamble's deal with the devil.
P&G received so many angry phone calls that they set up a toll-free line, denying any connection to satanic churches and organizations. Again, the company sued several ministers and others who had shared the story. They continued to distribute truth packets, but nothing seemed to work.
See what they were up against. Fake news is powerful.
Even more concerning was the real news of people slashing the car tires of P&G salesmen and painting 666 on their lawns. Tensions were rising, so the company eventually threw in the towel.
probably a disposable one. In April 1985, Procter & Gamble begrudgingly changed its logo,
After five years of what they considered nonsense, this was an easy way to avoid future allegations of Satanism. "We're making this decision out of frustration," a spokesman for P&G told the Chicago Tribune. "We're hoping that by removing the logo from consumer packaging, we will remove some part of the innuendos and false stories that keep hindering us."
Unfortunately for Procter & Gamble, news of the logo change only served to spread those innuendos and false stories to a larger audience. And now more consumers than ever were convinced that Procter & Gamble was in bed with Satan and enjoying it. Business owners and public officials were asked about P&G regularly. The Attorney General of South Dakota issued a press release to state that no Procter & Gamble executives had sold their souls to the devil.
believe it or not the south dakota attorney general didn't convince anyone procter and gamble needed to squash the rumors and that meant finding their source they brought in the big guns hiring two companies pinkerton and whackenhut who specialized in exactly this kind of work but not even this super group of corporate villains could come up with an answer they found evidence of the rumor everywhere they turned but nobody could locate its new origins
Meanwhile, the general public was growing more wary of the company. Customers replaced their household P&G products with competitors' brands. Reverend Jay Hurley of the Greenbrier Baptist Church in Boonesboro, Maryland, said he bought Cottonelle toilet paper instead of White Cloud toilet paper to avoid being involved in devil worship while wiping his ass. He bragged, "'I didn't buy Folgers coffee either. I'm going to replace that brand with Nestle.'"
Reverend Hurley encouraged his congregation to do the same. Procter & Gamble was losing a morality battle to Nestle. How could it get any worse? Well, on March 1st, 1991, people across America watched as the president of Procter & Gamble appeared on the Phil Donahue show. Sitting across from Donahue, he made a stunning announcement. He was a Satanist, he said, and proud of it.
He admitted to the horrified studio audience that a large portion of P&G's profits were donated to the Church of Satan every year. When Donahue asked whether he worried about his Satanic affiliation hurting company profits, the P&G president laughed it off. He said, quote, Sorry, I couldn't find a clip from that show because it never actually happened.
But thousands were convinced they saw it with their own eyes, on their own televisions, sitting in their living rooms with a TV dinner. Some saw it on that day in 1991. Others were sure it was 1982. Some claimed to see the broadcast in 1985. Even more said it was 1989. The deacon at Greenbrier Baptist Church, George Snyder, told a reporter that it hurt him to pick out a new brand of soap.
I was born and raised on ivory soap, he said. I have sensitive skin, and it's a good product. But it was a slap on the face when that gentleman was preaching devil worship and said there weren't enough Christians to make a difference. We are Christians, and we can make a difference. When a reporter told Mr. Snyder that nobody from P&G had ever appeared on the Donahue show, Snyder replied, Our pastor presented it to us, and if a person of trust presents something to you, you believe it.
Even today, people still believe it. Reddit threads and YouTube comments are full of those who remember watching the broadcast. To them and thousands of others, the lack of video evidence is further confirmation of their worst fears. It must be the devil at work. The invented link to Satanism hounded Procter & Gamble for years. The Phil Donahue show received constant phone calls and letters about it. And as the rumor evolved, other daytime talk shows were roped into it too.
A 1999 article in Tulsa World reported on the legend, saying some thought the interview occurred on the Oprah Winfrey Show, while others were sure they saw it on Sally Jessie Raphael. The inquiries piled up, and eventually, Sally Jessie Raphael devoted a section on her website's frequently asked questions to address the rumors. Part of it read, quote,
Frankly, this thing has gotten out of hand. If we had this man on our show, and he had said what it's alleged he said, we would have scored a broadcasting scoop and would have trumpeted it to all the newspapers. It would have been to the show's advantage. But there was no scoop. And there were no headlines. In essence, Sally Jessie Raphael said, if it existed, we would have cashed in on it. But not even SJR could convince people that the rumors were untrue.
Procter & Gamble couldn't shake their ties to Satanism. After inventing fantasies about ivory soap and creating worlds with the guiding light, this was a reality that they could not control. Not even a multi-billion dollar advertising budget could convince the public of the truth.
In 1991, Procter & Gamble decided to change its logo. The curls in the moon man's beard were eliminated, no more sixes, and the company also adopted two additional corporate logos to complement the symbol. Procter & Gamble written in script, and the initials P&G that you're more likely to see today. By 1995, Procter & Gamble had settled 14 libel lawsuits against individuals accused of spreading the satanic story.
One of the defendants was an Atlanta weatherman and four others were distributors for Amway, the multi-level marketing company owned by the DeVos family. Later that year, P&G filed a lawsuit against another Amway distributor in Salt Lake City named Randy Haugen. The company accused him of reviving the rumors using a voicemail system that delivered a message to thousands of consumers.
The case dragged on for more than a decade, until finally, in 2007, a U.S. district court in Cincinnati, where Procter & Gamble was headquartered, found in favor of the company and awarded P&G more than $19 million. The defendant, Randy Haugen, told reporters, It's hard to imagine they'd pursue it this long, especially after all the retractions we put out. We are stunned. All of us. For Procter & Gamble, it was business as usual.
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If you've never read a package in your life, read this one. It tells all about a fantastic tampon called Rely from Procter & Gamble. It's totally different from any other tampon. See, Rely is made of two materials. Each has advantages of its own, but combined, they're even better. Rely's shape is unique, too. But read the package, and I bet you never go back to what you buy now. Remember, they named it Rely. ♪
In 1975, Procter & Gamble introduced its first feminine hygiene product, Rely tampons, a different kind of tampon. In a competitive field, P&G had the cash to flood the market with its new creation. An estimated 26 million women received free Rely samples. Many went on to become loyal customers.
Unfortunately, in this case Procter & Gamble's marketing dribble turned out to be true. The Super Absorbent's Rely tampons were totally different from its competitors because Rely tampons contained synthetic chips of polyester and carboxymethylcellulose, which is a derivative of wood pulp. Rely tampons were also shaped like a tea bag and featured a net that contained the synthetic chips that absorbed the menstrual blood.
Rely could absorb an entire menstrual flow in one tampon, its users claimed. No women were involved in the development of this product, by the way. Another unique feature of Rely tampons was the ulcerations that would form in the vaginal wall of its users, which created a breeding ground for bacteria. Soon after the product launched, women who had switched to Rely reported infection, diarrhea, vomiting, swelling, and pain.
A report by the National Center for Biotechnology Information includes horrifying testimonials. One woman claimed her Rely tampon swelled so much that she likened it to, quote, "...trying to remove an open umbrella from her body."
Another described a night in 1980 when she tried Rely tampons for the first time. She went to a Styx concert in Oakland, and when she returned home and removed the tampon hours later, her vagina had swollen so much that she wondered if she had lost her virginity. Not an uncommon occurrence at a Styx concert, but the scare resulted in that woman, and many others, never using Rely tampons ever again.
Patricia Kim, an Iowa woman, never used Rely tampons ever again either because Rely tampons killed her. On her sister's advice, Pat began using Procter & Gamble's revolutionary new tampon the day after Labor Day in 1980.
Three days later, she developed flu-like symptoms. By Friday, Pat's blood pressure was non-existent and her body had turned black and blue. That Saturday, September 6th, Patricia Kim's heart stopped beating. She was only 25 years old. Pat's family agreed to donate her organs, but only her eyes were salvageable. The rest of her organs had been too damaged by the disease.
An autopsy revealed that Pat Kim died from toxic shock syndrome. It strikes about 30 out of every million women of menstrual age. About 1 in 12 cases is fatal. Its symptoms are fever, vomiting, and a sunburn-like rash.
Toxic shock syndrome is a cluster of symptoms caused by a Staphylococcus aureus bacterial infection. Both men and women are vulnerable to the disease which is characterized by high fever, vomiting, and a sunburn-like rash. Serious cases can lead to skin peeling off the victim's hands and feet. The worst cases lead to total organ failure.
Toxic shock syndrome wasn't given a name until 1978, and now that doctors could recognize the symptoms, they could determine a cause. In the spring of 1980, the Centers for Disease Control released a report that listed 55 known cases of TSS since October 1979. The CDC found that most of the cases had occurred in young menstruating women, and among those menstruating women, a certain brand of tampon was a common denominator.
Remember, they named it Rely. The Center for Disease Control said today that more than 400 cases of toxic shock syndrome, TSS, have been reported this year, and 40 of the cases ended in death. Just recently, the disease was linked to Procter & Gamble's new brand of tampon called Rely.
Procter & Gamble had been aware of the potential dangers of Rely for years. An internal memo dated February 28, 1975 outlines the "possible areas of attack" on the brand. It noted that some might claim that the tampon's synthetic components such as polyurethane were cancer-causing agents. The memo also noted that Rely tampons affected the natural microorganisms and bacteria found in the vagina. Very interesting.
The company had also been receiving hundreds of complaints every month describing symptoms of toxic shock. However, consumers were assured by P&G salesmen that it was nothing more than allergies and that the product was still in the testing phase. The formula would be adjusted, those customers were promised. But it never was. Procter & Gamble had invested too much to turn back now. The national rollout of Verlis proceeded right on schedule, with the planned deodorant version hot on its heels.
60 million sample packs of the tampons had been sent to 80% of U.S. households, one of the biggest marketing campaigns of all time. It cost the company more than $10 million, but it paid off. Procter & Gamble had claimed almost 15% of the tampon market instantaneously, and their share was growing every day. Rely tampons were the tampon of the future.
and to secure that future, P&G had also sent millions of free samples to high schools across the country. In fact, the company planned to send out millions more until they heard about Robin Lynn Spooner, the Reli tampon user in St. Louis who died in a hospital from toxic shock syndrome on her 16th birthday. Another Procter & Gamble memo, this one dated August 18, 1980, featured the subject line, "Reli, Toxic Shock Syndrome, Effect on Future Marketing Plans."
Paragraph 3 of the memo asks, quote, The answer was also included. It reads, quote,
Don't worry, I don't understand that math either, but that's what the memo says. And it also says, quote, As a public service, we could communicate the symptoms of toxic shock syndrome so that women would know that they should go to the hospital quickly if they have these symptoms. This option should be considered, but it is probably premature to do this at this time.
Procter & Gamble never issued that warning or any other kind of warning. And less than a month later, the CDC publicly reported that 70% of the women who had been inflicted with toxic shock syndrome were using Rely tampons at the time. P&G contested the findings. The company claimed Rely was falsely linked because of all the free samples it had distributed.
It was the first brand that should come to mind when women were asked what kind of tampon they used. They'd spent $10 million to occupy that brain space, and now they were being unfairly blamed. The company claimed it had fallen victim to its own success. Women who use Relai tampons should stop using them and return any unused product to Procter & Gamble for a refund.
and after an unsuccessful attempt at lobbying Congress to support the company, in September 1980, Procter & Gamble reluctantly began removing relied tampons from supermarket shelves. The Food and Drug Administration forced the company to launch a massive advertising campaign to warn women about the dangers of using the tampon and to buy back any unused product.
Procter & Gamble only agreed to the recall after signing a consent agreement stating that Rely was not defective nor had the company violated any laws.
Meanwhile, back at the P&G headquarters in Cincinnati, every document with the word Rely typed on it was shredded. The company never admitted fault. Procter & Gamble, which makes the tampon, says the recall does not imply fault. In a statement, the company said it was being done despite the fact that we know of no defect in the Rely tampon, and despite evidence that the withdrawal of Rely will not eliminate the occurrence of TSS, even if Rely's use is completely discontinued.
The relied tampon recall was one of the largest recalls in U.S. business history. Procter & Gamble lost $75 million by discontinuing the product. Another $75 million was set aside as potential settlements for the hundreds of lawsuits that followed. Dalitha Dawn Lampshire's case was the first to go to court. The 18-year-old said she had spent five days in the hospital battling the physical ailments after contracting toxic shock syndrome.
Dalitha said the emotional trauma had forever altered her personality. After getting sick, she worried that, quote, no man would want to marry me.
This case is expected to set a precedent for the more than 200 other lawsuits that have been filed against Procter & Gamble. The company has set aside $75 million for losses. But Procter & Gamble still says its Rely tampons are safe. And the only reason they were pulled off supermarket shelves was to wait for the scientific community to reach the same conclusion.
A federal jury in Colorado found Proctor & Gamble guilty of negligence and sale of a defective product in the Deletha Dawn Lampshire case. The company settled with Ms. Lampshire out of court for an undisclosed amount.
Procter & Gamble settled most of the Rely cases out of court for undisclosed amounts, with confidentiality agreements attached, of course. The company did not want anyone speaking out. The PR was already bad enough. However, there was one plaintiff who refused to settle. Mike Kim, the widow of Pat Kim, wanted to go to trial.
So naturally, Proctor and Gamble proceeded to publicly humiliate the man. The company's lawyers grilled Mr. Kim about his wife's sexual history and whether the couple engaged in oral sex. They asked him if Pat had been faithful in their marriage and also pointed to her IUD as the potential source of the infection that killed her.
Before the trial, P&G offered hefty research grants to every doctor that had studied toxic shock syndrome. The prosecution had trouble finding expert witnesses willing to testify that relied tampons were the culprit, even though the CDC had reported that seven deaths were linked to the brand. By the way, seven deaths was a modest estimate because of the reporting criteria. The true number will never be known.
During the trial, Proctor and Gamble also distributed millions of free products in the Cedar Rapids area as a way to generate goodwill and hopefully influence the jury. Free toilet paper is always appreciated, but it didn't work, or did it?
On April 22nd, 1982, a jury awarded $300,000 to the family of Patricia Kim, a far cry from the $30 million that was being sought.
The jury reportedly had decided not to award the plaintiff punitive damages because they were afraid it would bankrupt the company by setting a precedent for future lawsuits. Who says empathy is dead?
Two years after these settlements and trials, in 1984, Procter & Gamble purchased a patent for another tampon they named Always, but they never quite achieved their market goals. So in 1997, the company bought the manufacturer of Tampax. P&G is currently the largest tampon producer in the world.
and the company never could let go of that super absorbent technology found in Rely, of which it was so proud. Carboxymethylcellulose was discovered in P&G's new Ultra Pampers diapers that were introduced in 1986. Parents began complaining of rashes, oozing blood, fever, vomiting, and staph infections affecting their children while using the product.
After switching their babies to a non-chemical diaper, parents report that all symptoms disappear. Judy Bayman wrote in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Procter & Gamble quickly and quietly reformulated their diapers. Nice try. Also in 1986, the company suffered another massive product failure, though this one was no fault of their own. When arthritis pain says you can't, remember. And Capra lets you say, I can.
After enduring the worst quarter in Procter & Gamble history, thanks to the Rely debacle, the company introduced several new products to recoup the millions they had lost. One of those new products was a time-release aspirin called Encaparin. It was the company's predecessor to Aleve, a can't-miss venture.
P&G launched Encaparin as part of a $400 million promotional campaign in 1984. For two years, the product performed admirably. But fate, or karma, intervened on March 29th, 1986. An anonymous caller to Procter & Gamble's toll-free consumer hotline said he had placed cyanide-filled capsules inside five bottles of Encaparin at Walgreens and Kroger stores in Detroit and Chicago.
P&G immediately notified those companies' headquarters and, within 24 hours, Encaparin was removed from 3,000 stores. Within a week, all of the Encaparin in the nation had been recalled. The swift response was a result of the Tylenol murders three years earlier, where seven people died after ingesting cyanide-laced medication that had been purchased.
Law enforcement all over the country had been dealing with copycat crimes ever since. Every threat was taken seriously. They did not want history to repeat itself, and it wouldn't, at least not this time. The call to Procter & Gamble was determined to be a hoax. Investigators said the caller provided phony code numbers for the packages he allegedly contaminated, and at the time, there were no Walgreens drugstores in Detroit.
but the damage had been done, and Capron returned, but consumer confidence in the product never did. Cells tanked and never recovered. Five months after the recall, and Capron was forever removed from store shelves.
and it wasn't the only product from Procter & Gamble's big push that struggled. The company's new orange juice venture, Citrus Hill, was also not meeting expectations. That's according to an unidentified company insider who reported that information to Alicia Swayze at the Wall Street Journal in 1991. The informant claimed that the entire food division at P&G was underperforming. Parts of it might even be sold off, the source had tipped, and the executive vice president overseeing that division was being pressured to resign.
On June 10, 1991, Alicia Swayze published an article based on that information. That same day, the executive vice president of P&G's food division did resign, and the company launched an internal investigation to find the source of the leak. They were unsuccessful, but Procter & Gamble's vengeful CEO at the time, Ed Arts, wouldn't let it go. He contacted the Hamilton County Prosecutor's Office, who quickly opened a grand jury investigation into the matter.
Judge Arthur New, who had received thousands of campaign donations from P&G executives, pushed the case through, and a man named Gary Armstrong at the Cincinnati Police Department was assigned as lead investigator. Gary Armstrong was also a part-time security officer for Procter & Gamble. Police in Cincinnati are trying to find out who inside the giant Procter & Gamble company may have committed a crime by talking with a reporter.
The telephone company, Cincinnati Bell, had no problem turning over phone records either. The chairman of the company was a personal friend of Ed Arts, and that's what friends are for. Records for more than 800,000 homes in the Cincinnati area were analyzed. Every outgoing call to Pittsburgh where journalist Alicia Swayze was stationed, all to satisfy a corporation's lust for revenge and secrecy. Still, they found nothing.
Soon after, Procter & Gamble discontinued their orange juice brand because it was underperforming. Nothing Alicia Swayze had published turned out to be untrue. Yet P&G trampled on the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people and apologized for nothing. The company said it was merely trying to protect its trade secrets.
Critics rejected P&G's explanation. The information that leaked would not have given anybody a competitive advantage. As Alicia Swayze herself described it, it's not like she had published the Tide formula. P&G disagreed. I see this as a very simple issue. First, the press has a right to talk to our people. We have a right to take action to protect the company's most valuable assets, its trade secrets.
The company did eventually acknowledge that they might have gone overboard with the privacy invasion, but only because they were caught. CEO Ed Arts told the New York Times, quote,
But it did happen, and as the decade wore on, leaks would continue to haunt Procter & Gamble, though in the late 90s and early 2000s, it would be a leak of a different kind.
Some people call it a healthy lifestyle. My family calls it having fun. We exercise, we eat right. You know, a balanced diet, including fruits and vegetables like these. And when it's snack time, boy, am I glad there's Olean. I feel good about Olean because it's a cooking oil made starting from soybeans or cottonseed that's processed in a special way, so it adds zero fat or calories to snacks. Best of all, they've got crunch and taste we love. Olean!
They had finally done it. After 25 years and $250 million of research and development, Proctor and Gamble had developed a fat substitute that the human body could not absorb. It tasted like fat. It cooked like fat, but contained zero fat and calories. O'Lean was ready for market. O'Lean was ready to change the world.
By replacing the fat in snacks, Olean can help millions of Americans cut excess fat and move closer to achieving an important dietary health goal, P&G Chairman John Pepper proudly announced.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Olean, or Olestra as it had been renamed, on January 25th, 1996. Procter & Gamble began testing Olestra versions of its own Pringles potato chips and started selling the chemical to Frito-Lay, who began making what they called "wow" versions of their popular brands. P&G confidently projected a billion dollars in sales by the end of 1998. So we put these chips to the test.
But, like most diet foods, it was too good to be true. Consumer advocates like Michael Jacobson at the Center for Science in the Public Interest urged Americans to avoid Alestra.
Researchers warn that the sucrose polyester acts as a laxative. If ingested, olestra would cause diarrhea, cramps, gastrointestinal problems, maybe even cancer.
There were also concerns that essential vitamins were sticking to the elastra molecules and were inadvertently being flushed out of the body. Most nutritional researchers agreed that there was cause for concern. This pain was so sharp and of such a magnitude that I would say it was almost like the beginning of a labor. The very onset of labor feels very much like a very sharp gas-type pain. And that's what I was having, and I did have those for hours.
Olestra's initial splash into the market was less than impressive, and the warning that the FDA required products containing the chemical to bear wasn't helping matters. It read, Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools. Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and nutrients. Vitamins A, D, E, and K have been added.
However, notable health experts, such as Rush Limbaugh, rushed to the company's defense. Olestra is this magnificent new product from Procter & Gamble. And it is a fake fat that you can use at any temperature to prepare any food. It is a fat substitute and it is engineered in such a way that it is not digested by the body. Therefore, it has no calories and it has no fat.
it is marvelous it is tremendous it is great so wouldn't you know that these mattering name bob nerds these little pencil neck geek people
These wiry little busybodies who are so concerned that somebody in America might actually be enjoying themselves at the Center for Science in the Public Interest is now trying to get the stuff banned and we have the FDA to stop making it legal. Only Rush Limbaugh could eat Olestra chips and remain full of shit. Don't let us ruin your fun.
Anyway, why would a radio personality completely beholden to his advertisers defend one of the world's largest advertisers? I guess we'll never know. But what we do know is that Olestra was a disaster for Procter & Gamble. The product never overcame its image problems, and by 2002, the company had completely washed its hands of the idea. The consumer had spoken. The consumer was not a fan of every bowel movement becoming an emergency.
Nor was the consumer a fan of Procter & Gamble testing its products on animals, which the company had been doing for decades. In 1999, around the time Olestra was making waves, P&G announced that it would scale down its use of animal tests for many of its beauty, fabric, home care, and paper products.
The company had drawn the ire of animal rights groups in the late 80s for performing tests on dogs, rabbits, ferrets, hamsters, guinea pigs, mice, and rats. The tests usually involved forcing chemicals into the animals' eyes and throats or rubbing them on their shaved and abraded skin. There was no escaping the pain. The animals were trapped in restraining devices. Some of them would reportedly break their own backs trying to get away. It was horrific and pointless.
The animal rights groups alleged that animal testing was not accurate. The data cannot be extrapolated for human use because of the enormous differences in metabolism and physiology. Plus, plenty of non-animal alternative testing methods had already become available
Yet Procter & Gamble carried on for another decade. And even after the company announced it would end animal testing on most of its existing consumer goods in 1999, P&G retained the right to test future products on animals. It was a right that the company would exercise in the not-so-distant future. Who's dog? One of the dogs we did surgery on yesterday. Oh, really? It's an old dog.
In 2001, the United Kingdom's Sunday Express ran a front page story exposing how Procter & Gamble's new pet food brand IOMS had funded experiments on cats, dogs, and other animals. Details of the gruesome tests were buried in obscure scientific papers uncovered by an animal rights group called Uncaged Campaigns.
In one study, 24 young adult mixed breed dogs had a kidney surgically removed to induce rapid onset renal failure. After seven months of examination, all 24 dogs had either died or been killed. In another test, the stomachs of 28 cats were exposed so scientists could analyze the effects of feeding them fiber. None of them survived. Other cats were kept alive, force-fed to obesity, and then starved.
The research was investigating the link between weight loss and liver disease. IOMS also sponsored a study in which 14 husky puppies were repeatedly injected with live virus vaccines and allergy-causing proteins during the first 12 weeks of their lives. Researchers were trying to determine just how severely allergic dogs could become.
There were other tests too, but you get the point. Iams had gone too far in its quest to understand animal nutrition. Pet food producers are only required to reveal the nutritional content of their products. There was no reason to behave so inhumanely. In response to the article, Iams accused the Sunday Express of printing "inaccurate and misleading information." The pet food company claimed the smears were a desperate attempt to deflect public outrage.
The Sunday Express replied that if the allegations were untrue, Iams would be entitled to sue them for libel. After all, Procter & Gamble never turned down a legal opportunity to silence a critic. But no libel lawsuit ever came, and neither did reforms at the laboratories in question. For nine months in 2002 and early 2003, a spy working for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals got a job at an Iams-sponsored laboratory.
The PETA observer documented her experience on video, and it's hard to watch. There are stir-crazy animals pacing back and forth in their tiny empty cages. Many of them lived that way for up to six years before being put down or killed in some other cruel and unusual way.
The PETA investigator also reported seeing dazed dogs with muscle chunks severed from their thighs. She talked to a worker who had witnessed a live kitten flush down a drain. The laboratory director had allegedly ordered the vocal cords of some dogs to be cut out because he or she couldn't stand the whining.
After PETA's investigation was published, Procter & Gamble withdrew its funding from the laboratory and eventually sold its pet food division, including Iams, to the Mars Company, which PETA had already boycotted in 2007 for feeding candy ingredients to mice.
Even though P&G was no longer in the pet food business, they still found a way to cause irreparable harm to the animal kingdom. In 2014, Greenpeace published the results of a year-long investigation accusing Procter & Gamble of sourcing palm oil from companies connected to widespread deforestation.
Wilma, as the world's largest trader, is supplying virtually every big company you can think of. So we traced the palm oil from the plantations that we investigated to nine big household name companies, which include companies like Unilever, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg's, Colgate-Palmolive. Palm oil is a key ingredient in products across the beauty, home and personal care industries. This means palm oil is an essential part of Procter & Gamble's success.
As consumers continue to shy away from chemically laced products and demand more all-natural ingredients, the battle over palm oil has intensified. As a result, palm oil producers around the world, especially in Indonesia, have cut down large swaths of tropical forests at a pace of, according to Greenpeace, 140 Olympic-sized swimming pools every hour.
Naturally, this widespread deforestation has had a devastating effect on the native wildlife. The Sumatran tiger and the Indonesian orangutan are on the verge of extinction and getting closer every day, all to manufacturer head and shoulders. One of the most disturbing findings of the Greenpeace report was the orangutan mass grave that was discovered just outside the land owned by two major palm oil suppliers.
Several orangutan heads and shoulders were found buried deep in the ground. As others have noted, it's unlikely that these orangutans died from natural causes. Not only are humans the only species to bury their dead, we are willing to bury other dead species too.
Indonesian palm oil plantations also had issues with the way they treated people. In fact, Wilmar, one of P&G's main suppliers, admitted fault on itself at the end of 2015. The company publicly stated that it fell short of its own no-exploitation policy. If Procter & Gamble didn't know about Wilmar's abusive and exploitative labor practices, as they had claimed, it was just willful ignorance.
Amnesty International had been reporting on these practices extensively. This eight-year-old boy was among those interviewed by Amnesty. All interviewees asked to hide their identity. He said he helped his father pick the palm kernels after school. He doesn't get any money, he says, and the sacks of kernels are very heavy.
Even by P&G's own ethical standards, they were falling short. The company released a report in 2014 that said only 13% of its palm oil consumption measured up to environmental standards. And though the company claimed it was doing all it could to buy the product from suppliers who didn't abuse the environment or its workforce, critics said little had changed.
At P&G, we are unequivocally committed to the responsible sourcing of palm, and we are using our innovation strength to drive positive change in the industry. We are members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, RSPO, and support their standards to drive responsible palm practices across the industry. At least the company was saying all the right things. Procter & Gamble is good at that, you know. They've certainly left their mark on this earth, satanic or not.
Actually, maybe the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he wasn't tied to a company that kills with tampons and mutilates animals and uses child labor to make your armpits smell good, all the while polluting the planet and running advertisements about sustainability and how you, the individual, can make a difference. All we have to do is work as a team. Oh, I understand. You'd love to be there, but you gotta wash your hair.
Yeah, yeah. We've heard it all before. No one's buying their stories, but we're all buying their products. I guess we've only ourselves to blame. Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, a.k.a. the former, a.k.a. Trevillestra. Additional writing and research for this episode was performed by Jordan Rosansky.
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