Church of Scientology key driver of glyphosate class action suits

Credit: Getty Images
Credit: Getty Images

If it is now established that there would never have been a “glyphosate” case without the decisive impetus given by some large American law firms, we know much less, on the other hand, of the involvement of certain members of the Church of Scientology in this matter.

However, as the Genetic Literacy Project news site revealed in an article published last June, one of the firms most involved in the Roundup lawsuits – Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman – was founded by lawyers who are members of the Church of Scientology. Michael L. Baum, its founder, and one of its partners, Brent Wisner, have in fact been active members of the sect, for fifty years for the first and thirty for the second.

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Troubling, when we know that his office played an essential role in the staging of the famous “Monsanto Papers.” In particular by disseminating on its website documents supposed to demonstrate that the herbicide would “have an impact on the public health of people.”

Thanks to the massive publication of these documents, in California as in Europe, the couple Alva and Alberta Pilliod, defended by Wisner, obtained from a Californian court, which considered that there was a link between the use of this herbicide and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from which the two septuagenarians are affected, the conviction of Bayer to 2 billion dollars “as a punitive.”

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in French and has been translated and edited for clarity.]

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here.

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