Asbestos Podcast EP35 Transcript

Episode 35: Borel v. Fibreboard

Full transcript from Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — a 52-episode documentary podcast produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP.

Episode Information
Series	Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making
Season	1
Episode	35
Title	Borel v. Fibreboard
Arc	Arc 7 — The Truth Emerges (Chapter 6 of Arc, finale)
Era Covered	1918–1973 (Frederick Hoffman's Prudential insurance record through the Fifth Circuit's affirmance), centered on the September 1971 Beaumont, Texas trial
Produced by	Charles Fletcher
Research and writing	Charles Fletcher with Claude AI
Listen	Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube

Episode Summary

On September 10, 1973, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Co., 493 F.2d 1076 — the decision that established, for the first time, that asbestos manufacturers bear a strict-liability duty to warn workers of foreseeable dangers. The opinion, written by Judge John Minor Wisdom, held that manufacturers are held to the knowledge of an expert in their field regardless of what they claimed to know, that warnings must reach the workers themselves rather than just their employers, and that Section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts — strict liability — defeats a manufacturer's assumption-of-risk defense. The case's namesake, Clarence Borel, was a Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast industrial insulation worker of 33 years who filed suit in October 1969 — months before any asbestos worker had ever won a case like his — and died of mesothelioma on June 3, 1970, without seeing the verdict.

The attorney who built the case, Ward Stephenson of Orange, Texas, had lost his first asbestos case — Claude Tomplait's, filed December 10, 1966 — in a one-week trial in May 1969. After that loss, Stephenson spent roughly two years assembling 86 medical journal articles on asbestosis published before 1938, introducing them at the Borel trial in Beaumont in September 1971 to prove the defendant manufacturers knew, or should have known, the risks decades before Borel's diagnosis. Stephenson himself was diagnosed with bone cancer in early 1971 and tried the case regardless. He died September 7, 1973 — three days before the Fifth Circuit's opinion was officially published — after someone at the federal courthouse called to tell him the judgment had been affirmed. The jury's verdict, $79,436.24, came after finding Clarence Borel himself contributorily negligent on the negligence count — a finding that would have wiped out that recovery under Texas law at the time — leaving strict liability as the theory that survived and reshaped American product liability law. Underlying all of it: in 1918, Prudential Insurance statistician Frederick Hoffman had already documented that U.S. and Canadian life insurers generally declined to write policies on asbestos workers because of the trade's known health hazards — 55 years before the Borel verdict.

Key Takeaways

Borel v. Fibreboard established manufacturers' strict-liability duty to warn. The Fifth Circuit's September 10, 1973 opinion, 493 F.2d 1076, written by Judge John Minor Wisdom, is the foundational asbestos product-liability decision. Clarence Borel died without knowing whether his case would matter. A 33-year insulation worker on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast, he filed in October 1969 — before any asbestos worker had won a similar case — and died of mesothelioma on June 3, 1970. His attorney had lost the first attempt. Ward Stephenson's 1966 case for Claude Tomplait went to trial in May 1969 and lost in a week; Stephenson spent the following two years building the medical-literature record that would win Borel. The jury's verdict survived a contributory-negligence finding only because of strict liability. Jurors found Borel contributorily negligent on the negligence count but held every defendant liable under strict liability, awarding $79,436.24. The Fifth Circuit's four holdings reshaped the law. Duty to warn, expert-knowledge standard, warnings must reach workers directly, and Section 402A strict liability applies — all affirmed in the 1973 opinion. Both men behind the case died before seeing its full outcome. Borel died not knowing a verdict would come; Stephenson died three days before the printed opinion, having only learned by phone that he'd won. The insurance industry had already priced the risk in 1918. Prudential statistician Frederick Hoffman documented that life insurers were declining policies to asbestos workers decades before the Borel verdict.

Key Concepts

Clarence Borel: The Worker Behind the Case

Clarence Borel worked as an industrial insulator for 33 years in the Golden Triangle of the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast — Beaumont, Orange, and Port Arthur. He was diagnosed with asbestosis on January 19, 1969, and filed suit that October, before any asbestos worker had won a comparable case. In February 1970 his diagnosis changed to mesothelioma, and he died June 3, 1970 — roughly seven months after filing and long before the case reached a jury. His widow, Thelma Borel, substituted in as plaintiff and carried the case to trial and verdict.

Ward Stephenson and the Tomplait Predecessor

Ward Stephenson, an Orange, Texas attorney and former insulator, filed the first asbestos products lawsuit of the modern era on December 10, 1966, on behalf of Claude Tomplait, an insulator diagnosed with asbestosis that July. That case went to trial on May 12, 1969, and the jury returned a defense verdict a week later. Stephenson spent the following two years assembling a library of 86 medical journal articles on asbestosis published before 1938 — evidence that manufacturers knew, or should have known, the risks of asbestos dust decades before workers like Borel were diagnosed. He introduced this record at Borel's trial in September 1971, after his own diagnosis with bone cancer earlier that year.

The Trial and the Jury's Verdict

The case was tried before Judge Joe J. Fisher of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Beaumont over four days in September 1971. Eleven defendants sat at the counsel table, including Fibreboard Paper Products, Johns-Manville, Owens-Corning Fiberglas, Combustion Engineering, Philip Carey, Ruberoid, Pittsburgh Corning, and Armstrong; four settled before trial for a combined $20,902.20. The jury found Clarence Borel contributorily negligent on the negligence count — a finding that would have eliminated that recovery under Texas law at the time — but found every remaining defendant liable under strict liability, awarding $79,436.24. After settlement credits, the remaining defendants were held jointly and severally liable for $58,534.04.

The Fifth Circuit's Holdings

The defendants appealed, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed on September 10, 1973, in an opinion authored by Judge John Minor Wisdom for a panel that included Judges Tuttle and Simpson. The court held: manufacturers have an affirmative duty to warn users of foreseeable dangers; manufacturers are held to the knowledge of an expert in their field, regardless of what they claimed to know; warnings must reach the end users — the workers themselves, not just their employers; and Section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts — strict liability — applies, defeating the argument that workers had assumed their own risk. The defendants had retained W. Page Keeton, dean of the University of Texas School of Law, to argue that applying strict liability to asbestos was "preposterous"; the court rejected that position.

The Insurance Industry Knew in 1918

In 1918, Frederick Hoffman, a statistician for Prudential Insurance, reported in a U.S. Department of Labor bulletin that it was "generally the practice" of American and Canadian life insurance companies to decline coverage to asbestos workers because of the trade's assumed health-injurious conditions. That statement — from an insurance-industry statistician, on the record, 55 years before the Borel verdict — shows the actuarial risk was understood well before most of Clarence Borel's coworkers had even started the jobs that would kill them.

The Scale of What Followed

Paul Brodeur, who covered the asbestos industry for The New Yorker for two decades and documented it in his 1985 book Outrageous Misconduct, called Borel "the greatest avalanche of toxic-tort litigation in the history of American jurisprudence." Through 2002, the RAND Institute for Civil Justice counted more than 730,000 claimants against roughly 8,400 defendant companies, with over $70 billion paid by defendants and insurers — the longest-running mass tort in American history, according to RAND. Economists have separately projected the eventual total cost of U.S. asbestos litigation at $200 to $265 billion.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Borel v. Fibreboard and why does it matter?

Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Co. (493 F.2d 1076) was decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on September 10, 1973. Written by Judge John Minor Wisdom, it was the first asbestos personal-injury case to establish that manufacturers bear a strict-liability duty to warn workers of foreseeable dangers — holding manufacturers to the knowledge of an expert in their field, requiring warnings reach the workers themselves, and rejecting the argument that workers assumed their own risk.

Who was Clarence Borel?

Clarence Borel was an industrial insulation worker for 33 years on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. Diagnosed with asbestosis in January 1969, he filed suit that October — before any asbestos worker had won a similar case — and died of mesothelioma on June 3, 1970, without seeing his case reach a jury.

Why did Ward Stephenson's first asbestos case fail?

Stephenson's 1966 case on behalf of Claude Tomplait went to trial in May 1969 and lost in a week. Stephenson spent the following two years assembling 86 pre-1938 medical journal articles on asbestosis, evidence he introduced at Borel's 1971 trial to prove manufacturers knew, or should have known, of the dangers decades earlier.

What did the jury decide, and how much was the verdict?

The jury found Clarence Borel contributorily negligent on the negligence count — which would have eliminated that recovery under Texas law at the time — but found every defendant liable under strict liability, awarding $79,436.24. After settlement credits from defendants who had settled pre-trial, the remaining defendants were held jointly and severally liable for $58,534.04.

What did the Fifth Circuit hold in the Borel decision?

The court held that manufacturers have an affirmative duty to warn of foreseeable dangers, are held to the knowledge of an expert in their field, must ensure warnings reach the end users rather than just employers, and are subject to strict liability under Section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts — defeating the assumption-of-risk defense.

Did the insurance industry know asbestos was dangerous before Borel?

Yes. In 1918, Prudential Insurance statistician Frederick Hoffman documented that American and Canadian life insurers generally declined to write policies on asbestos workers because of the trade's known health hazards — 55 years before the Borel verdict.

How large did asbestos litigation become after Borel?

Through 2002, the RAND Institute for Civil Justice counted more than 730,000 claimants against roughly 8,400 defendants, with over $70 billion paid by defendants and insurers — described as the longest-running mass tort in American history. Economists have separately projected eventual total costs of $200 to $265 billion.

Full Transcript

Cold Open: The Hospital Room

Host 1: September 7, 1973. A hospital room in Orange, Texas. Ward Stephenson has bone cancer. He's been dying for over a year. He tried the asbestos case from a hospital bed, and now he's waiting. The Fifth Circuit opinion was argued months ago. He doesn't know if he'll live long enough to hear it.

Host 2: And did the court let him.

Host 1: Someone at the federal courthouse — aware that Stephenson was on his deathbed — telephoned him with the news. The judgment was affirmed.

Host 2: Before the opinion was even filed.

Host 1: Three days before. He died on September 7th. The Fifth Circuit issued its opinion on September 10th, 1973. He knew he'd won. He didn't live to see it published.

Host 2: Today on Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making—

Host 1: Episode 35: Borel v. Fibreboard.

Host 2: The verdict that opened the floodgates.

Sponsor Break 1

Host 2: Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is brought to you by Danziger and De Llano, nearly two billion dollars recovered for asbestos victims and their families. dandell.com.

The Case Before This Case

Host 1: Last episode, we documented the moment the industry's "we didn't know" defense collapsed — the Simpson Papers, some 6,000 internal documents proving they had known since the 1930s and voted in 1948 to suppress it. And the IARC 1977 classification making the global scientific consensus official.

Host 2: But the case that made the industry face a jury came four years before the Simpson Papers surfaced.

Host 1: Four years. Borel was tried in 1971. The Fifth Circuit decided it in 1973. What Ward Stephenson did — what he proved — he didn't have the Simpson Papers. He didn't have the industry's own handwriting. He had something else. He had 86 medical journal articles, every one of them published before 1938, proving the manufacturers had known about asbestos disease before almost any of their workers even started the jobs that killed them.

Host 2: And he had a client whose name would end up on the case that broke the industry open.

Host 1: Clarence Borel. Industrial insulation worker. Thirty-three years. Shipyards and oil refineries on the Texas-Louisiana border — Beaumont, Orange, Port Arthur, the Golden Triangle. He grew up in that world and he worked in it his whole life. He was diagnosed with asbestosis on January 19, 1969. In February 1970, the diagnosis changed. Mesothelioma. On June 3, 1970, Clarence Borel died.

Host 2: Fifteen months from diagnosis to grave.

Host 1: He filed the lawsuit in October 1969 — nine months after the asbestosis diagnosis, four months before the mesothelioma diagnosis. And here's what I want to be clear about, because it's the whole shape of this story. When Clarence Borel filed, no asbestos worker had ever won a case like this. There was no verdict to hope for. There was no law on his side yet — the law that would eventually carry his name didn't exist. He filed anyway. He gave his deposition. He described what the end of a workday felt like — his clothes so dusty he could "just barely pick them up without shaking them." He described respirators being available on some jobs but workers not required to wear them, and workers finding them uncomfortable, too hot, impossible to breathe through. And no manufacturer ever told him — not once in thirty-three years — what the dust was doing to his lungs.

Host 2: And he died before any of it was decided.

Host 1: June 3, 1970. A little over seven months after he filed. He never sat in the courtroom. He never heard a jury say a number. He never learned that the case with his name on it would become the case that changed American law. Clarence Borel died not knowing whether filing had meant anything at all.

Host 2: The widow inherited the fight.

Host 1: Thelma Borel became the plaintiff. She substituted in. Ward Stephenson — their attorney, out of Orange, Texas — took it to trial in September 1971. Judge Joe J. Fisher, United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont. Four days on the docket. Eleven defendants at the counsel table.

Host 2: Name them.

Host 1: The ones we can verify from the record — Fibreboard Paper Products. Johns-Manville. Owens-Corning Fiberglas. Combustion Engineering. Philip Carey. Ruberoid. Pittsburgh Corning. Armstrong. That's the top of the industry. Four of the eleven settled before trial for a combined $20,902.20. The other seven took their chances with a jury.

Host 2: And Stephenson had built the record for two years by that point.

Host 1: For longer than that. Because this wasn't Stephenson's first asbestos case. It was his second. His first was Claude Tomplait — December 10, 1966. Tomplait was an insulator too, diagnosed with asbestosis in July of that year. Stephenson filed what one legal historian has called "the first asbestos products lawsuit in the modern era." It went to trial in May of 1969. He lost. One week. Verdict for defendants.

Host 2: He lost the first one.

Host 1: He lost the first one. And the reason he lost it is the reason Borel exists. After Tomplait, Stephenson papered the country with letters. He wrote to medical associations. He wrote to libraries. He wrote to scientific publications. He built, slowly, a library of what the industry had known and when. Eighty-six articles on asbestosis published in medical journals before 1938. He introduced them into evidence in Borel and he proved that the defendant manufacturers either were, or should have been, fully aware of every one. And then he proved the flip side — that during Borel's working career, no manufacturer ever warned contractors or insulation workers of the dangers associated with inhaling asbestos dust.

Host 2: Not one warning in thirty-three years.

Host 1: Not one. And furthermore: no manufacturer ever tested the effect of their products on the workers using them. They knew the hazards existed. They published nothing to warn. They tested nothing to measure exposure. And they hired a man named W. Page Keeton — famed torts scholar, dean of the University of Texas School of Law — to stand up in the Fifth Circuit and call Stephenson's application of strict liability to asbestos "preposterous."

Sponsor Break 2

Host 2: That's what the team at Danziger and De Llano spends thirty years doing. Finding the record. Finding the warnings that were never issued, the studies that were never done, the documentation that proves what the workers were never told. If you or a family member has a mesothelioma diagnosis, they know how to find it. dandell.com.

The Man Who Tried the Case

Host 1: One more thing you should know about the man who tried this case. Ward Stephenson was a former insulator himself. He came out of the pipefitter unions. His father was a trial lawyer in East Texas who had told him to look for answers in the law library. He got out of Southern Methodist Law School in 1947 and set up in Orange. His early cases were railroad crossing wrecks and one of the first silicosis cases in Texas. Then he was diagnosed with bone cancer in early 1971. Following surgery, he conducted the four-day Borel trial that September. That's who was arguing the case. A dying insulator, standing up for a dead one.

Host 2: What did the jury do.

Host 1: The jury did a strange, complicated thing that turned out to be the whole ballgame. Stephenson had sued on three theories — negligence, gross negligence, and strict liability. On negligence, the jury found for the plaintiff against most defendants — but they also found Clarence Borel contributorily negligent for handling asbestos in the conditions he handled it in. Under Texas law at the time, that finding would have wiped out the entire negligence recovery. On gross negligence, no defendant was found grossly negligent. That left strict liability.

Host 2: And on strict liability.

Host 1: On strict liability, the jury found every defendant liable. Damages: $79,436.24. That's what the jury determined Clarence Borel's life and suffering were worth. Not a million dollars. Not some headline number. Seventy-nine thousand four hundred thirty-six dollars and twenty-four cents.

Host 2: A life priced to the penny.

Host 1: After settlement credits from the defendants who paid pre-trial, the remaining six were jointly and severally liable for $58,534.04. The defendants appealed. Stephenson had won at trial and he knew it would go to the Fifth Circuit. He spent the next two years waiting.

Host 2: And the Fifth Circuit held what.

Host 1: The Fifth Circuit affirmed. Judge John Minor Wisdom writing for the court. Panel of Tuttle, Wisdom, Simpson — three of the most respected judges on that court. Cite it if you want it: 493 F.2d 1076. The holdings reshaped American product liability law. One: manufacturers have an affirmative duty to warn users of foreseeable dangers. Two: manufacturers are held to the skill of an expert in their field — meaning the body of literature Stephenson had assembled was evidence of what the manufacturers should have known, regardless of what they claimed to know. Three: the warning must reach the end users — the workers themselves, not just contractors. And four: Section 402A of the Restatement Second of Torts — strict liability — applied. The contributory negligence defense, the argument that workers assumed their own risk — rejected on the strict liability count.

Host 2: The workers didn't sign up for this and the court knew it.

Host 1: Wisdom put it plainly in the opinion. An insulation worker, he wrote, "no less than any other product user," has the right to decide for himself whether to accept the risk. The manufacturer had the information. The worker had dust in his lungs. The court refused to pretend those were equal parties to a bargain.

Host 2: And Stephenson died three days before this came out.

Host 1: Someone called him from the courthouse to tell him it was affirmed. He died knowing he'd won. The official text of 493 F.2d 1076 published September 10, 1973. Stephenson died September 7th.

Host 2: The worker filed before there was hope. The lawyer filed the appeal from a cancer ward.

Host 1: Both of them. Think about the symmetry. Clarence Borel filed in 1969 and died in 1970 — never knowing anyone would ever win. Ward Stephenson tried the case and died in 1973 — knowing he'd won, but never seeing the opinion in print. The worker died before there was hope. The lawyer died before there was proof. The case that opened the floodgates for 730,000 people was built by two men, neither of whom lived to see what it became.

Host 2: The one whose name is on it never knew it would matter.

Host 1: Clarence Borel's name is on the decision that reshaped American product liability law. He never knew the decision existed. That's the cost this arc has been counting the whole way — the truth arrived, and it kept arriving too late for the people it was about.

Host 2: What did the Borel decision actually do.

Host 1: Paul Brodeur, who covered this industry for The New Yorker for two decades and put the definitive account in a 1985 book called Outrageous Misconduct, called Borel "the greatest avalanche of toxic-tort litigation in the history of American jurisprudence." Let me put numbers on the avalanche. Through 2002, the RAND Institute counted 730,000 claimants. 8,400 defendant companies. $70 billion paid by defendants and insurers.

Host 2: Where did $70 billion actually go.

Host 1: Roughly forty-two percent — about thirty billion — went to the claimants themselves as compensation. Thirty-one percent — twenty-one billion — went to defense costs. Twenty-seven percent — nineteen billion — went to plaintiff-side legal costs. And that $70 billion was barely the beginning — industry experts project total U.S. asbestos litigation costs at $200 to $265 billion before it's finished.

Host 2: Was any of this a surprise to the insurance industry.

Host 1: No. In 1918 — fifty-five years before Borel — Frederick Hoffman, a statistician for Prudential Insurance, wrote that it was "generally the practice" of life insurance companies in the United States and Canada to decline to insure asbestos workers because of the health hazards of the trade. That's an insurance-industry statistician, on the record, in 1918, saying the entire American life insurance industry was already refusing to write policies on asbestos workers. Not because of a warning label. Because the actuaries could read the numbers.

Host 2: They ran the numbers.

Host 1: Before the workers Borel worked with were born, the actuaries had run the numbers. The insurance companies knew. The manufacturers knew. The lawyers knew. Thirty-three years later, Clarence Borel was told nothing.

Arc 7 Recap

Host 2: We've been building toward this case for six episodes. Where does it leave the whole arc.

Host 1: Think about where Arc 7 started. Episode 30 — Selikoff. One doctor in Paterson, New Jersey, counting bodies the industry spent thirty years making sure nobody counted. Seventeen insulation workers, fifteen already dead. He built the study they'd suppressed since the 1930s.

Host 2: And then the conference.

Host 1: Episode 31. Four hundred scientists at Mount Sinai in October 1964. The science becomes undeniable — and the industry answers with a public relations office instead of a warning. Then Episodes 32 and 33 — the second mass exposure happening at the same time, three-point-four million servicemembers in Southeast Asia, the men of Project 100,000 funneled into the worst jobs. And Episode 34 — the Simpson Papers finally surface. Six thousand documents. "They knew," in their own handwriting.

Host 2: So by the time we get to Borel—

Host 1: By the time we get to Borel, the truth is completely out. The science is public. The documents are public. And this case is where all of it finally walks into a courtroom and gets a verdict. That's the shape of the whole arc — the question we opened with was "who finally told the truth, and what did it cost them?" The answer is a doctor who wouldn't stop counting, and two men who died before they could see what they'd proved.

Host 2: The truth came out. It just came out too late for the people it was about.

Host 1: Every time. That's Arc 7. And it changed everything that came next. Attorneys across the country filed case after case. The defense strategy collapsed. The industry tried to find exits. One of those exits is the story of Arc 8.

Sponsor Break 3: Michelle's Story

Host 2: One of those exits is a name you know. Every family who calls Danziger and De Llano is connected to the work that started with a case Ward Stephenson filed in 1969 and won dying in a hospital bed two years later. Michelle was four years old when she started helping her father out of his work clothes. Six years of breathing asbestos fibers in their home. At age ten, she was given three to six months to live. She's been alive for thirty-five years. She raised a son. Adopted four children. Counseled two hundred families through their own diagnoses, for free. That story is in a book called Beating the Odds: Surviving Mesothelioma — compiled by Dave Foster, available on Amazon, or free to any family facing a new diagnosis. Call Danziger and De Llano, or visit dandell.com.

Host 1: Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano founded this firm in 1995. Nearly two billion dollars recovered for over a thousand families.

Host 2: Danziger and De Llano offers consultations at no cost, seven days a week, at dandell.com.

Closing and Tease

Host 1: Next time, we open Arc 8: The Reckoning. Here's the turn. For seven arcs, the story was whether the industry would ever be held responsible. Borel answered that — yes. So Arc 8 asks the next question: what does a company do when it's finally, provably liable and the cases are piling up by the thousands? It doesn't pay. It finds exits. Bankruptcy. Trust funds. A ten-year fight to kill a federal ban. An entire town in Montana poisoned. And at the very end of the arc, the answer to the mystery this whole series opened with — the Twin Towers.

Host 2: And it starts with the biggest exit of all. The company sitting at that defense table in Beaumont.

Host 1: Johns-Manville Corporation. One of the largest companies in the United States. In 1982, the bankruptcy judge described it as "the most financially healthy company ever to file for Chapter 11." That phrase — "most financially healthy" — is how the judge characterized what happened. They weren't bankrupt. They were doing something else. Episode 36.

Host 2: Thank you for listening.

Host 1: Thank you for listening.

External Links

Primary Documents and Legal Records

• Mesothelioma Compensation Options — Danziger & De Llano
• Asbestos Exposure and Mesothelioma — Danziger & De Llano
• Danziger & De Llano, LLP

Case Law and Litigation History

• Texas State Historical Association — Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corporation
• Legal Newsline — Present at the Creation (Tomplait and Borel history)

Research and Academic Sources

• RAND Institute for Civil Justice — Asbestos Litigation (MG-162, 2005) (archived capture)
• NBER — Asbestos and the Future of Mass Litigation
• eLCOSH — What They Knew, When They Knew It

Podcast Resources

• Episode 35: Borel v. Fibreboard — MLNM podcast landing page
• Asbestos Podcast Hub — All episodes

Series Navigation

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — Arc 7: The Truth Emerges
Previous: Episode 34: The Asbestos Papers	Episode 35: Borel v. Fibreboard (Arc 7 Finale)	Next: Episode 36: Johns-Manville Bankruptcy

Related Wiki Pages

• Asbestos_Podcast_EP34_Transcript — The Asbestos Papers: the Simpson Papers discovery that proved industry knowledge in writing
• Asbestos_Podcast_EP36_Transcript — Johns-Manville Bankruptcy: the corporate exit strategy that followed Borel
• Asbestos_Trust_Funds — Compensation mechanisms and trust fund filing process
• Asbestos_History_Timeline — Full chronological history of asbestos knowledge, use, and litigation
• The_Asbestos_Podcast — Main podcast page with all episodes

About This Series

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is a 52-episode documentary podcast tracing the complete history of asbestos from 4700 BCE to the 2024 EPA ban. The series is produced by Danziger & De Llano, LLP, a nationwide mesothelioma law firm with over 30 years of experience and nearly $2 billion recovered for asbestos victims.

Episode 35 is the finale of Arc 7 ("The Truth Emerges"). Episode 34 documented the Simpson Papers discovery — the industry's own documents proving it knew and suppressed the danger. Episode 35 turns to the courtroom four years earlier, where Ward Stephenson and Clarence Borel — without the Simpson Papers, using only 86 pre-1938 medical journal articles — proved the same knowledge and won the verdict that created the modern law of asbestos liability.

Borel v. Fibreboard remains the foundational citation in asbestos litigation today. Attorneys still cite its four holdings — duty to warn, expert-knowledge standard, warnings must reach workers, and Section 402A strict liability — as the doctrine that opened the door to the more than 730,000 asbestos claims filed by 2002 against roughly 8,400 defendants, with over $70 billion spent — figures RAND called the longest-running mass tort in American history, with economists separately projecting eventual total costs of $200–265 billion.