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The attorney whose career became famous in the movie Erin Brockovich is currently “not eligible to practice law,” the State Bar of California decided on Tuesday.

Aug 01, 2021 Erin Ostman works for Harry Norman, REALTORS® with a focus on real estate in Atlanta. Call Erin Ostman at (770) 606-7916 for more information. Amid scrutiny and controversy over the co-founder of Black Lives Matter reportedly having purchased four homes for $3.2 million — including a $1.4 million property in overwhelmingly white Topanga Canyon, California — 'trained Marxist' Patrisse Khan-Cullors said in an interview that she's investing her money in her 'family members.' What are the deta. Mar 13, 2013 Erin Brockovich: The Real-Life Unhappy Ending. Science Mar 13, 2013 2:00 PM EDT. – We all love a neat, tidy Hollywood ending to a David and Goliath story. Sadly, in the real.

According to online records, attorney Thomas Vincent Girardi of the Los Angeles firm Girardi & Keese was ordered to assume inactive status as of March 9th. He was admitted to practice law in California on January 13, 1965.

An attorney who is “not eligible to practice law” may have been so ordered because of “suspension, involuntary transfer to inactive status and failure to pay mandatory State Bar fees,” the bar’s website says.

“Involuntary inactive enrollment is not discipline, but rather a regulatory procedure,” the website continues. “An attorney may also be voluntarily placed on inactive status but will not be entitled to practice law during that time. Attorneys on voluntary inactive status may switch to active status at any time provided that the proper fees are paid and any other requirements are met.”

No official record of discipline currently exists.

According to Hollywood website The Wrap, the move was “the apparent result of an ongoing conservatorship case” involving the 81-year-old high-profile lawyer. Documents obtained by the site indicate that Girardi “has Alzheimer’s disease and is unable to participate in court proceedings,” the site reported in summary.

“His emotional distress is directly related to his dementia and exacerbated by his confusion,” a psychiatrist said of Girardi, according to The Wrap.

Girardi’s brother is serving as his conservator.

The Los Angeles Timescontains a more thorough assessment of the matter:

Dr. Nathan Lavid, a Long Beach forensic and clinical psychiatrist, met with Girardi on Feb. 26 as part of the conservatorship case initiated in January by his brother Robert. Lavid found “major impairment” in Girardi’s short-term memory, logical reasoning and recognition of familiar objects and people, according to a sworn declaration. The psychiatrist indicated that Girardi was experiencing delusions and “severely disorganized thinking.”

Girardi’s troubles involve more than just his health. As Law&Crime previously noted, a federal judge froze the lawyer’s assets in January after ruling that Girardi took $2 million from clients whose relatives died in a plane crash. In that case, federal judge Thomas M. Durkin referred Girardi’s conduct to federal prosecutors for investigation.

“No matter what your personal financial situation is, no matter what kind of pressures you are under, if you touch client money, you are going to be disbarred and quite possibly charged criminally,” Durkin said at the time, according to the L.A. Times. A lawyer representing Girardi in that case said his law firm was struggling financially and was “unable to make payroll.” Several lawyers also said that they were “unsure” Girardi “understands either the nature or the gravity of the current situation” and asked that he be evaluated by a mental health professional.

The victims of the plane crash, whom Girardi owes millions, called his mental health matters “a sham,” the Timessaid.

The $2 million lawsuit was brought by a separate law firm which worked with Girardi’s firm to litigate the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 off the coast of Indonesia. All 189 people on board died.

The separate law firm which worked with Girardi, Edelson PC, is also suing Girardi’s firm, Girardi personally, Girardi’s estranged wife, and other former attorneys at Girardi’s firm, according to Bloomberg Law. Both Girardi and his now-defunct law firm are embroiled in bankruptcy proceedings, Bloomberg Law further reported in early March.

Girardi is married to Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Jayne, though she filed for divorce in late 2020. US Weekly reported that Edelson PC called the divorce a fake attempt to “fraudulently protect” the couple’s money.

The Los Angeles Timesreported extensively just five days ago on Girardi’s use of “cash and clout to forge powerful political connections” all the way back to the ’70s.

[image via Bravo TV/YouTube]

The post Real-Life ‘Erin Brockovich’ Lawyer Tom Girardi Loses His Law License first appeared on Law & Crime.

by Brian Dunning

Filed under Health

Skeptoid Podcast #743
September 1, 2020
Podcast transcript | Subscribe

Listen:
https://skeptoid.com/audio/skeptoid-4743.mp3

In the year 2000, the movie Erin Brockovich told the world the true story of a heroic whistleblower, in the person of a humble paralegal, who successfully challenged an evil mega-corporation that had thoughtlessly poisoned the residents of a small California town for many years. The real-life Erin Brockovich used that seminal victory as a springboard to a career as a high-profile media personality and consumer advocate. Today we're going to look at the controversial case that made her famous, as you may have heard that its underlying science has been either debunked or confirmed. As in so many stories, the truth is often not so simple.

Hinkley, CA probably wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for the nearby city of Barstow, which itself probably wouldn't exist but for the intersection of railroads and highways. It is far from anywhere in the stark and inhospitable Mojave Desert, and when a few roads and railways first popped up to serve its nascent and short-lived mining industry, those corridors soon became its only real reason to be. Even today, Barstow survives mainly on servicing locomotives and selling gas and fast food to highway travelers. And Hinkley was only there to grow a few crops for Barstow and as a compressor station for the local natural gas utility, Pacific Gas & Electric.

PG&E operated a large pipeline network to deliver natural gas to its customers throughout California, and Hinkley was the site of one of the stations that compressed the gas to get it through the pipes. Compressing it heats it, so that hot gas would first be routed into a cooling tower before going into the pipes. Inside these evaporative coolers, water was drizzled through the gas to cool it. But this addition of water would rust the equipment, so to prevent that, the cooling water included an efficient and inexpensive corrosion inhibitor called chromium 6 (hexavalent chromium). This took place between the years 1952 and 1966, and it was the common and normal industry practice. In the 1950s very little thought was being given yet to environmental toxins, and so the standard practice was to dump the used cooling water in outdoor ponds. This was the remote and unused Mojave Desert, so big ponds were simply bulldozed into the desert floor, filled with water laced with chromium 6, and left to percolate into the ground. Some 750,000 gallons per month were disposed of in this way. Nobody at the time suspected there might be any problem with this, so there was nothing secret or hidden about it. It's just the way things were done in those days. The only thing that stopped the practice in 1966 was that the ponds were finally lined, stopping the chromium 6 from getting into the groundwater.

21 years later, in 1987, PG&E reported to the authorities (the California Regional Water Quality Control Board and the San Bernardino County Department of Environmental Health Services) that a groundwater monitoring station had recorded a level of .58 ppm of chromium 6, some 11 times the drinking water standard