A federal court in North Carolina has dealt a significant setback to the government in the ongoing Camp Lejeune toxic water litigation, striking reports by an expert witness – a witness advocates call a “rented white coat.”
A federal judge in North Carolina struck the expert reports of Dr. Julie Goodman, a key witness for the Department of Justice. She is a Principal at Gradient, an environmental and risk science consulting firm, who was retained as an expert witness by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to analyze the health risks and toxicological evidence.
The ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Jones, Jr. comes after Dr. Goodman submitted what she called “corrections” to her findings—updates that included nearly 300 changes to her analysis of dozens of medical studies.
Longtime advocate Mike Partain, who himself was sickened by the water contamination at the base, said the corrections weren't just typos, but a last-minute attempt to fix unreliable science. “Number one, she's a hired hack,” he said. “Number two, all the work she's doing is not being peer reviewed by anyone else. She's just doing this for a mission, which is to help the government unwind an expert that's contrary to them.”
Retired Marine Jerry Ensminger has been advocating for victims of the toxic water for nearly 30 years, after his young daughter died from leukemia tied to the contamination. He said the revisions were another example of federal lawyers trying to undermine the effort to compensate those it had a hand in sickening. “These people are literally spending millions of taxpayers dollars to refute or counter the peer reviewed health studies and reports conducted by a fellow, a fellow federal agency within our Centers for Disease Control,” Ensminger said.
Partain said, “The conclusion in Dr. Goodman's report is pretty simple. Nobody at Lejeune was exposed to enough chemicals or over enough time to cause any health effects or link any health effects. I mean, that's what they want to say and that's what they paid her to do.”
Dr. Goodman’s testimony—which claimed insufficient evidence exists to link the base’s water to diseases like Parkinson’s and kidney cancer—directly contradicts the VA’s own findings.
Read more about the victims of the toxic water aboard Camp Lejeune: Camp Lejeune Justice Act Series
The judge agreed that the reports should be stricken from the record, noting the changes were far too substantive to be permitted under court rules – which generally only allows for minor corrections, like typos.
From 1953 to 1987, nearly one million veterans, family members, and civilian workers at the base in eastern North Carolina were exposed to drinking water contaminated with toxic chemicals. This exposure has been linked to numerous serious illnesses, including various cancers and Parkinson’s disease.
Although the Marine Corps began testing the drinking water in October 1980 and received "highly contaminated" warnings from an Army lab by 1981, they did not start closing the most polluted wells until late 1984. Most people who lived or worked on base – including Ensminger -- did not learn of the contamination until a 1997 public health assessment made the news—years after the last contaminated wells were closed.
