Robert Bilott’s PFAS fight pits him against DuPont again

A New Jersey settlement with Chemours, DuPont and Corteva worth about $500 million put Robert A. Bilott back at the center of the PFAS fight that made his name. Taft describes the deal, announced on Aug. 4, 2025, as the largest obtained by a single state for PFAS contamination claims, and it reaches back to the same corporate contamination battle that began more than a quarter-century ago.

Bilott was a corporate and environmental lawyer who spent years handling compliance and transaction work before becoming best known for lawsuits against DuPont over PFOA and PFOS contamination. The case started in 1998, when West Virginia farmer Wilbur Tennant approached him with concerns that pollution linked to DuPont had poisoned local water. What followed was a decades-long fight over contaminated drinking water and the class of compounds now known as forever chemicals.

That arc is what gives the film's story its grip. The drama centers on a lawyer whose past ties pull him into conflict with a company he usually assists, turning a legal dispute over a polluted stream into a broader account of how industrial contamination reaches homes, farms and public water systems. Bilott later told that story in Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont, a book that helped widen public attention to the PFAS crisis and the question of who pays when contamination spreads through a community.

The public-health stakes have only grown. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized national drinking-water limits for several PFAS on April 10, 2024, and public water systems are required to meet those limits by April 2029. In 2025, the agency said it was proposing an option that would give some systems two additional years, until 2031, to comply with PFOA and PFOS limits. The rules make the debate over PFAS less about old litigation and more about what happens when systems that serve millions of people have to clean up water already contaminated.

The litigation history shows how far the financial fallout has spread. In January 2021, DuPont, Corteva and Chemours announced an $83 million agreement to resolve dozens of personal-injury cases in Ohio multidistrict litigation. In June 2023, the same companies said they had reached an agreement in principle to resolve PFAS-related drinking-water claims for public water systems serving the vast majority of the U.S. population. Taft says Bilott has secured billions of dollars for clients harmed by PFAS contamination, a measure of how one farmer’s complaint in West Virginia became a national reckoning over corporate accountability and drinking-water safety.