The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice

By Carey Gillam

Lee Johnson was a man with simple dreams. All he wanted was a steady job and a nice home for his wife and children, something better than the hard life he knew growing up. He never imagined that he would become the face of a David-and-Goliath showdown against one of the world’s most powerful corporate giants. But a workplace accident left Lee doused in a toxic chemical and facing a deadly cancer that turned his life upside down. In 2018, the world watched as Lee was thrust to the forefront of one the most dramatic legal battles in recent history.
 
The Monsanto Papers is the inside story of Lee Johnson’s landmark lawsuit against Monsanto. For Lee, the case was a race against the clock, with doctors predicting he wouldn’t survive long enough to take the witness stand. For the eclectic band of young, ambitious lawyers representing him, it was a matter of professional pride and personal risk, with millions of dollars and hard-earned reputations on the line. For the public at large, the lawsuit presented a question of corporate accountability. With enough money and influence, could a company endanger its customers, hide evidence, manipulate regulators, and get away with it all—for decades?
 
Readers will be astounded by the depth of corruption uncovered, captivated by the shocking twists, and moved by Lee’s quiet determination to see justice served. With gripping narrative force that reads like fiction, The Monsanto Papers takes readers behind the scenes of a grueling legal battle, pulling back the curtain on the frailties of the American court system and the lengths to which lawyers will go to fight corporate wrongdoing.    
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642830576

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Index

INTRODUCTION

Creve Coeur

But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

—Rachel Carson

In English, the French phrase crève coeur translates as broken heart. Legend has it that Creve Coeur Lake, near St. Louis, Missouri, was named in honor of a young Indian princess who fell in love with a French fur trapper. Despite her best efforts, she failed to win his affection, and, as the story goes, the grieving princess killed herself by leaping from a ledge into the lake. Legend says the body of water was filled with so much sadness that it formed itself into the shape of a heart split in two.

That fabled heartbreak proved to be a dark precursor to the saga of real suffering that came to be attached to the area as a company called Monsanto made the city of Creve Coeur its home base. Monsanto Company’s growth into a global purveyor of questionable chemicals and altered seeds would lead many to blame it for decades of death and despair.

When Creve Coeur was incorporated in December of 1949, it was a quiet community of fewer than two thousand residents. But by the turn of the century, the city was a hub for innovation and business, with median home prices double the national average. Young professionals and retirees alike were drawn to the suburb for its abundance of parks, restaurants, and highly rated public schools, its low crime rate, and its moderate political views.

The community grew alongside Monsanto, which moved from downtown St. Louis to Creve Coeur in 1957. The company made its home on a sprawling property with sleek black office buildings, glasstopped greenhouses where plant experiments were conducted, and an assortment of high-tech laboratories where teams of scientists labored. Dense groves of trees and guard gates kept curious outsiders at bay.

Monsanto employed more than five thousand full-time staff in the St. Louis area and many more thousands around the state of Missouri and the world. The company was known as a generous benefactor, funneling millions of dollars into community and education programs and research grants at universities. Its name would come to adorn the buildings of many prominent local institutions, such as the Missouri Botanical Garden’s research facility, the Saint Louis Zoo’s Insectarium and Education Gallery, and various facilities at the area’s universities. Washington University, a private research university in St. Louis named for President George Washington, received more than $100 million in research gifts; the Monsanto Laboratory of the Life Sciences was the first building on its St. Louis campus to be named after a corporation. Monsanto’s rich donations to biological sciences research at the university sparked fear in the 1980s and 1990s that the integrity of academic research might be compromised. But company and university officials claimed the research remained free of undue corporate influence.

Founded in 1901 by John F. Queeny, whose wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto, was the company’s namesake, Monsanto began as a maker of the artificial sweetener saccharin. The company later expanded into manufacturing such things as sulfuric acid, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), plastics, and an insecticide called dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT. In the 1960s, Monsanto was a supplier of Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant used during the Vietnam War by US troops to kill vegetation that provided hiding places for enemy soldiers. Agent Orange was eventually found to be linked to cancers, birth defects, and a range of human health problems. Many of the company’s other products and practices would later prove dangerous as well. The city of Anniston, Alabama, became so polluted from a Monsanto PCB plant that residents won a $700 million settlement in 2003. Residents said the company knew about the toxic effects of PCBs for decades but did nothing to protect their health or to protect the area’s water and soil from contamination.

Monsanto may be best known for its introduction in the 1970s of a weed-killing chemical called glyphosate. Company chemists combined glyphosate with water and other ingredients designed to help the chemical be absorbed into plant tissue, where it would quickly kill the plant. One ingredient, a surfactant called polyethoxylated tallow amine (POEA), was combined with glyphosate in a product Monsanto dubbed Roundup. The formulation poisoned plants so effectively that it became a hot seller not just in the United States but also in many other countries.

Roundup was heralded as much safer than other, older herbicides, and one that people could spray in their own yards with little concern. The company said glyphosate interacted with plants in ways that were not possible with mammals, meaning that people and pets would not be injured by exposure to the chemical. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), charged with regulating pesticides such as Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides, also said the product was safe and allowed the company to market it for a wide range of uses, including use on farm fields growing food. Regulatory agencies in other countries echoed the EPA’s stamp of approval.

With a green light from regulators, Monsanto was soon marketing Roundup and related products for everything from knocking out pesky weeds in a residential backyard to spraying entire fields of wheat, oats, and other crops to dry them out just before farmers harvested. The herbicide could be sprayed from planes and helicopters, pumped from truckmounted tanks, or squeezed out of handheld plastic bottles. School districts around the United States sprayed the weed killer on playgrounds and other areas frequented by children. No use was too large or too small for Monsanto’s remarkably safe weed killer, it seemed.

By the 2000s, Monsanto was becoming deeply embedded in the big business of agriculture, in large part because of its Roundup products. The company had figured out how to genetically alter different types of widely grown crops, such as corn and soybeans and cotton, so that farmers worried about weeds could spray directly over the crops without drying them out and killing off their growth. These genetically engineered soybeans and corn were impervious to the weed killer. Farmers could spray their fields with Roundup multiple times if needed, and the crops would continue to grow. Use of Roundup and other glyphosate-based products exploded with adoption of these genetically altered crops, making glyphosate the world’s most widely used weed-killing chemical.

Monsanto’s footprint expanded to include operations in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Israel, Australia, Europe, and numerous locations throughout Africa and Asia. As Monsanto extended its reach into agriculture, it eventually became the world’s largest seed company. At one point, Monsanto’s seed portfolio included not just row crops used as ingredients in finished foods but also fruits and vegetables such as tomatoes, melons, onions, carrots, broccoli, and lettuce. Despite Monsanto’s global growth, Creve Coeur remained its home base.

But as the company’s business grew, so did public distrust. Monsanto became commonly known as Monsatan to critics and activists who believed the company was dangerously tinkering with Mother Nature’s food supply and polluting the environment with its Roundup herbicides and other chemicals.

So many protests were held outside Monsanto’s headquarters that the Creve Coeur city council passed an ordinance prohibiting protesters from standing on the median outside the entrance to the Monsanto campus.

The beginning of the end for Monsanto came in 2015, when the company’s assurances about the safety of its herbicides started to unravel. The unwinding revealed numerous corporate secrets, including covert strategies to alter both the scientific record and regulatory assessments of a chemical that by then touched millions of people around the world. Thousands of people suffering from debilitating and deadly cancers came to learn that decades of research linking the weed killer to cancer had been largely discredited and dismissed as a result of actions by Monsanto. And they discovered that the EPA and other regulators worked closely with Monsanto in ways that protected the company’s profits much more than public health.

Many hoped lawmakers and regulators would ride to the rescue. But in the end, the victims found that the only way to hold Monsanto accountable was through the courts. An eclectic group of lawyers teamed up to take on the $15 billion corporation and expose its most deeply buried corporate secrets. They spent millions of dollars of their own money building a case; some lost spouses, their health, and large chunks of their personal lives over the years spent gathering evidence. Detractors called them ambulance chasers and accused them of exploiting cancer victims for profit. But no one can deny that without their work, many of Monsanto’s distortions would likely never have come to light.

Monsanto is no more—in 2018, the 117-year-old company was absorbed by German conglomerate Bayer AG. But its legacy lives on in lawsuits winding their way through courts in multiple countries.

This is a story about one cancer victim’s search for justice in the face of so much injustice, a story of both suffering and determination, and a story about what it took to uncover decades of corporate deception.

CHAPTER 1

Getting Dirty

Before

Sunlight had not yet started to streak its way across the Northern California landscape as forty-one-year-old Lee Johnson pushed himself up out of bed. In the darkness, he pulled on a pair of jeans and a hooded shirt bearing a patch from the Benicia Unified School District. Down the hall, Lee’s wife, Araceli, prodded their two young sons into wakefulness. There was no hint that Lee’s life was about to take a tragic turn.

Rising early was not just a habit; it was a requirement of Lee’s job as a groundskeeper for the school district, which rotated roughly five thousand students through its mix of elementary, middle, and high schools. Lee had been in his current position for only a year but enjoyed a broad job description and a five-figure salary that helped his family claw its way out of near homelessness and into a middle-class lifestyle. They had recently moved into a split-level two-bedroom house in what the young family considered an affluent neighborhood in the city of Vallejo. The beige stucco was not really theirs—just a rental—but it felt like home. The kitchen boasted black marble countertops and maple wood floors, and a small children’s park was just a few paces from the front door. Lee loved the tall, leafy trees that lined the streets and the grassy backyard, where a family of squirrels cackled as they chased each other through the branches.

More than anything, Lee treasured the feeling of success he had found and the stability it brought. His youth had been tumultuous—his mother had been young, poor, and often unable to care for Lee. His father had been largely absent, leaving Lee struggling to find his footing. Lee had failed to graduate from high school, instead obtaining a General Educational Development (GED) certificate. Efforts at college classes didn’t work out, and Lee seemed to find trouble wherever he turned. He notched multiple arrests, fathered his first son when he was in his early twenties, and bounced from one low-paying job to another, working as a janitor and a roofer and trying to launch a landscaping business. He also attempted, like many in his neighborhood, to make it as a rapper and music producer.

But now all that was in the past, and life was good, solid. Lee’s income, combined with what Araceli earned from various part-time jobs, provided enough for an occasional vacation with the kids and a sense of contentment that Lee had long craved. He still wrote music and dreamed of selling and performing his songs, but his focus was on his family, specifically on being as present and engaged with his sons as possible. He did not want them to grow up feeling his absence, the way he had with his own father. Lee had a tattoo inscribed on his forearm reading Blessings for the righteous. The blessings for his family had finally started to flow, Lee believed.

The work for the school district wasn’t easy, but Lee knew that as long as he kept working hard, he could count on a long career with a growing income. He didn’t mind starting before dawn or working outside in rain or shine, cold or heat. He found the work satisfying, knowing that every day he made the school surroundings a little cleaner, neater, or safer. Whether it was trapping rats and raccoons, painting walls, installing irrigation pipe, or applying insecticides to wipe out armies of ants and herbicides to kill off invasive plants, Lee was one of the school district’s go-to guys for getting dirty work done. Supervisors had just recently lauded his performance in a written review, highlighting Lee’s positive successful approach and his remarkable ability to grasp all aspects of his responsibilities.

On this day—a day he would later be forced to repeatedly recount to doctors and lawyers and to a courtroom full of spectators—Lee’s task was supposed to be fairly simple. He would mix up a fifty-gallon drum of weed killer and then spray the concoction over a hilly area between two schools that held baseball and soccer fields. The Benicia district, like many in the United States, did not want its school grounds to appear unkempt, and doing his job right meant Lee needed to stay one step ahead of common California weeds, such as cheeseweed, which could grow more than two feet tall if left alone.

He did this often, mixing and applying products with macho-sounding brand names such as Roundup and Ranger Pro. Developed by the giant chemical corporation Monsanto Company, the brands were top sellers, largely because the company advertised them as being much safer than rival products, nontoxic to people even though the chemicals were deadly to plants. Some marketers even advised that the Monsanto herbicides were safe enough to drink. Despite the safety slogans, Lee was wary of these and other chemicals, and he always made sure to arrive at work early enough to don heavy protective gear before beginning a morning of spraying. He also liked to get the wet mixtures on the grounds well before the children would be out playing sports or enjoying recess.

Lee didn’t expect the work that day to be too taxing for him. Even as he moved into middle age, Lee considered himself in excellent health. He had grown up playing sports, spending countless summer days and nights at the baseball field just a few blocks from his grandmother’s house, where he lived during most of his childhood. As an adult, he was still athletic. He stood five feet nine, with a lean, muscled frame of 165 pounds, and he was blessed with smooth caramel-colored skin that rarely failed to attract admiring attention from women. His mother had named him Dewayne Anthony, but he went by Lee. He frequently dressed all in black, and when he spoke, his voice was low and warm, like a long, lazy slow dance.

His easy ability as a charmer would sometimes spark angry battles with Araceli, who was a decade younger than Lee and fiercely possessive of her husband’s attention. Theirs had been a fast and passionate courtship that led to a surprise pregnancy and the birth of their first son, Ali, and then to marriage and another boy, Kahli. Their relationship ran hot and cold, but Lee loved what he called Araceli’s spicy personality, her shiny dark hair, and her hazel eyes, which made him think of light brown sugar. He also valued the fact that she worked as hard as he did to support the family financially.

For Araceli, Lee was the love of her life. She wanted nothing more than to raise a family with him. Early in their marriage, when their boys were just babies, Lee couldn’t find work, leaving the young family unable to afford rent, so they lived for a while with Lee’s mother in her one-bedroom apartment in a complex reserved for senior citizens. They had to sneak in and out of the rent-controlled facility so they would not get caught. But even in the humiliation and struggle to stay out of poverty, Araceli believed in Lee, in what the future could hold for them.

Now her faith in her husband had paid off. But as happy as she was with Lee’s solid income, Araceli was often harried by a busy daily routine. Breakfast was a quick bowl of cold cereal or premade pancakes spread with Nutella; then Araceli would load the family into her aging Nissan Altima sedan, drive the roughly fifteen minutes to drop Lee off at his work site, and then make a thirty-minute commute to Napa, where the boys attended elementary school. Born in Mexico, Araceli had moved to the United States with her parents at a young age and spent her teenage years in Napa, where her family worked in the area’s famed vineyards. Araceli felt the schools were better and outside influences healthier in Napa than they were in Vallejo, a town long ranked as one of the most dangerous in the state, with a high murder rate and several criminal gangs. As a young man growing up in Vallejo, Lee had sometimes carried a pistol to protect himself. Araceli wanted better for her boys.

On this morning, the couple spoke few words during their predawn commute, and Araceli let Lee out at the highway exit closest to the district offices rather than making the extra turn. She did this often; it was only a short twenty-minute walk for Lee, and he didn’t mind. It was better than riding his bike to catch a bus to work, as he did on days when she couldn’t or wouldn’t drive him.

Lee hopped out of the car, told his boys a quick goodbye, and started the mile-and-a-half walk to his work site at a brisk pace, eager to get the day going. He fast-walked past an aging automotive shop, a liquor store, and a Chinese restaurant and then cut behind a community center to reach the school district office. Although the front of the property had an air of elegance, boasting pink flowering shrubs and an arched entryway, Lee’s destination was around back in the district maintenance yard, a grimy lot that no one would describe as anything close to elegant.

Several white district pickup trucks waited there, their beds filled with green hoses, brooms, rubber trash containers, plastic buckets, and other tools of the trade. A rectangular metal building stored the supplies the school district’s maintenance workers needed. And across the parking lot was a low metal trailer where workers clocked in and out and ate their lunches. One small storage shed stood apart from the rest of the buildings. A sign hanging on the door read Danger, Hazardous Chemicals.

Lee was responsible for supervising two coworkers who helped him spray pesticides on school grounds, assigning areas for the guys to treat and making sure they wore their protective equipment. The gear was extensive and included white coveralls with elastic cuffs, chemical-resistant rubber gloves and boots, and heavy goggles. Sometimes the guys tried to get away with skipping the full outfit. Lee got it; the getups made them look a bit like misfit astronauts or some sort of space aliens. But Lee insisted: they had to wear the gear if they were going to be spraying. Despite the full bodysuit, Lee’s face was only partly protected by a mask that covered his mouth and nose but left his cheeks exposed. Sometimes, if the wind was blowing, Lee could feel a fine mist of the pesticide drifting onto his face.

Once they had their jumpsuits on, Lee and his team mixed up their weed-killing chemicals for the day. Pulling from large drums of Ranger Pro, Lee and his team mixed the concentrate with water and antifoaming agents before transferring what they called the juice into spray tanks. The men would carry the tanks on their bodies like backpacks, using long wands with spray heads to disperse the weed treatment. On this morning, Lee also mixed up enough to fill a 50-gallon tank that was mounted in the back of his work truck. The tank had a motorized engine and was connected to a long hose and a three-foot spray wand that could push the chemicals over a bigger area faster than could a man carrying a backpack sprayer. The truck-mounted sprayer was so heavy that Lee had to use a forklift to get it onto the back of the district vehicle. Using the tank from the truck allowed Lee to cover a lot of ground, and sometimes he would go through 150 gallons in a morning and cover multiple fields. This morning, he wouldn’t get that far.

The assignment was to spray weeds around an elementary school, including on a hilly area lying between that school and an adjacent high school. Lee loaded the full tank onto the district truck and drove the ten minutes from the maintenance shed to the school, tuning the truck radio to his favorite jazz station as he drove. When he arrived, he decided to start at the top of the hill and work his way down. Hopping out of the cab, he grabbed the hose reel and proceeded to unwind the 250-foot hose, sweeping the spray wand back and forth as he walked down the hillside. As the sun rose, the day grew warm, but there was little wind, meaning less spray would drift onto Lee’s face. It was a good day to spray, he thought. When he was about halfway down the hill, the hose was nearly fully extended, meaning Lee would have to move his truck if he was going to finish the job. He got back into the truck and drove slowly down the slope, not bothering to reel in the hose. He figured that once he was parked at the bottom, he could simply walk back up to the point where he’d left off and spray his way down the last half of the hill.

But just as Lee was slowing to a stop, he heard and felt a jolt from the bed of the truck where the tank full of weed killer rested. He threw open the door and saw that the hose, which had been dragging behind the truck, had somehow become caught in a wide crack in the asphalt. The tension had yanked the hose from its connection to the tank, and a fountain of amber-colored chemical was spewing into the air.

Oh, shit! Lee exclaimed, stricken with a fear that briefly froze him in place. He told himself he couldn’t panic; the situation could get serious very fast if he didn’t stop the toxic flow. He raced around to the back of the truck and clambered into the bed, propelling himself directly into the foul-smelling spray so that he could flip the red switch that shut down the tank motor. His mind was on the pump, but he was vaguely aware of being wet—soaked, in fact. His face, neck, and back felt as if a bucket of water had been poured over him. There wasn’t time to worry about that. Even without the motor to drive the pump, the fluid continued running out of the truck bed and onto the ground, making small streams down the hill and toward the property’s wastewater drain, which led into a nearby bay where people fished and children sometimes swam. Lee often spent lunch hours there, feeding the gulls and watching sailboats glide by. Letting toxic chemicals flow into the waterway could get him in trouble, Lee knew.

Grabbing a shovel he kept in the truck bed, Lee started piling dirt into a makeshift dam to sop up the wet mess, praying he could stop the flow before it escaped into the drains. The dirt worked like a charm, slowing and soaking up the leak. Lee then carefully reeled the hose back in before stripping off the now-drenched jumpsuit, which was designed to protect the wearer from the light drift of a normal spray job but was not much help for the dousing he had just experienced. Even the shirt he wore underneath the protective suit had become coated in the spray, so he shrugged that off too. He hurried back to the district maintenance shop, where he turned his attention to trying to scrub the chemicals off his body.

There was no shower, but there was a sink in a small bathroom where the guys would wash their hands and faces after particularly dirty jobs. Lee filled up the small sink with hot water and soap and worked to wash the chemicals from his face, neck, and hands. He wouldn’t feel fully clean until he could get home and take a long, hot shower, but he did have a spare clean shirt to wear, which he pulled on after drying himself with a handful of paper towels.

Lee spent the afternoon tending to other district chores and trying not to worry about the spray accident. He didn’t feel sick, and his smooth dark skin seemed unscathed by the errant chemical bath. Getting dirty was just part of the job, nothing to worry about, he told himself. That night, at home with Araceli and the kids, he didn’t even mention the accident. He knew in the back of his mind the chemicals were toxic, but he had also been told repeatedly that Monsanto’s products were the safest out there. He pushed the fears to the back of his mind and resolved not to let the incident upset him.

After

Lee wouldn’t think about the sprayer accident again until many months later, when an odd-looking scaly lesion popped up just above his right knee. It itched and cracked and oozed. As time passed, the patch near his knee was matched by another on his arm. And another on his torso. Small bumps the size of BB pellets sprouted out of his skin. Lee changed the laundry soap and dryer sheets his family used and tried an assortment of creams, but nothing helped. Dread grew with every new spot that erupted. Eventually, nearly Lee’s entire body, including his face and scalp, was covered in painful sores. Some became infected, including one on his head.

As his condition progressed, Lee’s once unmarred skin broke open at the slightest touch in some places, and wearing clothing became almost unbearably painful. A lesion even developed on one of his eyelids, making it impossible for him to open the eye without grimacing in pain. The softer the skin where the lesions sprouted, the more searing the pain, Lee learned.

Strangers started to stare when Lee went out. His sons’ friends asked if he’d been burned in a fire or suffered from some disfiguring disease. What’s wrong with your dad? became a common question for Ali when Lee attended a football practice. He took to wearing long sleeves, long pants, and large sunglasses in public, hoping to avoid the pitying glances from