Episode 34 — The Asbestos Papers

January 1978. Under oath, former plant manager Wilbur Ruff confirmed his company had a policy not to tell workers what their chest X-rays showed. They had a name for it: the “hush hush policy.”

In 1977, in a New Jersey federal court, attorney Karl Asch obtained a discovery order that produced a box of some 6,000 internal documents from Raybestos-Manhattan, spanning the 1920s through the 1940s. A second cache of about 600 more was found in an old safe at the company’s North Charleston, SC plant in 1979. Named for company president Sumner Simpson, the collection became known as the Simpson Papers — “a series of smoking guns,” in one scholar’s words.

Key Takeaways

• Three documents stood out: an October 1, 1935 letter from Simpson to Johns-Manville counsel Vandiver Brown on suppressing asbestosis information; a 1941 memo instructing executives to “conceal” sponsored dust research; and the record of a November 1948 Johns-Manville boardroom meeting where the sponsors of Saranac Laboratory research — research that produced alarming tumor findings in mice — voted unanimously to delete all references to cancer and tumors from the published report.
• Gordon Barnett’s reopened case. A South Carolina insulation worker who died of mesothelioma and lost his case. After the Simpson Papers surfaced, a South Carolina court took the extremely unusual step of granting a new trial. The reviewing judge described “a pattern of denial and disease and attempts at suppression of information... a conscious effort by the industry in the 1930s to downplay, or arguably suppress, the dissemination of information.”
• IARC — 1977. IARC Monographs Volume 14 concluded there was sufficient evidence that all commercial forms of asbestos cause cancer in humans — later formalized as Group 1.
• The scale that followed. By 2002: 730,000+ claimants, ~8,400 defendants, $70B+ spent (RAND). Eventual total cost estimated at $200–265 billion. The longest-running mass tort in American history.

Featured — Dave Foster. Executive Director of patient advocacy at Danziger & De Llano. His father, a dentist who did masonry on the side, died of an asbestos-related cancer in 1999. Dave’s book Beating the Odds: Surviving Mesothelioma is free to any family facing a new diagnosis. Free consultation at dandell.com.

Resources

• Episode notes and sources: mesotheliomalawyersnearme.com/podcast/episode-34-the-asbestos-papers/
• Full transcript: wikimesothelioma.com/wiki/Asbestos_Podcast_Transcripts
• Previous: EP33 — Project 100,000

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — 52 episodes tracing asbestos from ancient pottery to the 2024 EPA ban. Produced by Danziger & De Llano.

Next — Episode 35: Borel v. Fibreboard. Stepping back four years to the Fifth Circuit decision that created the duty-to-warn doctrine.

Trust timelines and outcomes vary by case. Past results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is sponsored by Danziger & De Llano Mesothelioma Law Firm, a nationwide practice with over 30 years of experience and nearly $2 billion recovered for asbestos victims. If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, the exposure happened somewhere—and Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano know how to trace it back. For a free consultation, visit https://dandell.com.

Resources:

→ Mesothelioma legal rights: https://dandell.com/mesothelioma/

→ Asbestos exposure sources: https://dandell.com/asbestos-exposure/

→ Asbestos trust funds ($30B+ available): https://dandell.com/asbestos-trust-funds/

→ Free case evaluation: https://dandell.com/contact/

Sister Podcast - MESO: The Mesothelioma Podcast:

http://mesotheliomapodcast.com/