Erin Pattee was born in Lawrence, Kansas. After graduating high school, she attended Kansas State University for a year before transferring to Wade College, earning an associate’s degree in applied arts. At the age of 20, she moved to Newport Beach, California, where she worked as a management trainee at Kmart, but left shortly to participate in the Miss Pacific Coast beauty pageant, winning the title. At the time, she met her first husband, and the couple moved from one place to another until they settled in Reno, Nevada. Not long after, they got divorced, and she began to work as a secretary at a brokerage firm, where she met her second husband, Steve Brockovich. The marriage lasted a year, and at 29, pregnant with two children, Brockovich moved to San Fernando Valley, California.
After been severely injured in a car accident, Brockovich hired Masry & Vititoe law firm to represent her in the case. The lawyer felt sympathetic to her and recognized her abilities, so he offered her a job as a clerk in his firm. In 1993, while filing documents on a real estate case, Brockovich found suspicious medical records. In her investigation, she uncovered that for more than 30 years, the power company Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) had contaminated the groundwater of Hinkley’s town with the toxic chemical hexavalent chromium, caused severe illnesses in almost every household in Hinkley. More than 600 residents of Hinkley filed a lawsuit against the company, and in 1996 PG&E was forced to pay a settlement of $333 million – the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in the US. Brockovich herself received a $2 million bonus for her work on the case.
In 2005, Brockovich left Masry & Vititoe to open her own company – Erin Brockovich Research & Consulting. There, she is assisting people with cases of environmental-contamination issues. She was involved in various successful lawsuits against environmental polluters in the US and abroad and has given lectures about consumer advocation worldwide.
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