The Cost of His Crusade

On February 20, 2015, Marc Edwards, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, got an email from a lawyer in the university counsel’s office. A law firm representing the public water utility in Washington, D.C., had used open-records laws to request copies of pretty much everything Edwards had written about lead in that city’s water supply, including his correspondence with other academics, D.C. residents and their lawyers, government employees, and members of Congress.

It was a nosy request, and staggering in its breadth. Edwards was pretty sure he knew what the lawyers were trying to do. At the time, he was scheduled to testify on behalf of D.C. residents who claimed their loved ones had been poisoned by lead in the city’s water system. With millions of dollars on the line, lawyers for the water utility were on the hunt for anything they could use to discredit him.

“They just wanted to waste my time and harass me,” he said. “They were trying to bleed me dry.”

The university lawyer rebuffed much of that request. But there was a touch of irony to the situation. Edwards had spent the last decade of his career using the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, and state open-records laws to go after those he considers enemies of the people — particularly scientists who work for government agencies. For Washington, he obtained data and emails among scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to show how the agency had fumbled its analysis of the lead crisis there. Later in 2015, he would embark on another investigation, getting his hands on the emails of government officials in an effort to get to the bottom of how officials failed to quickly address another water crisis, this time in Flint, Mich.

Science is his trade, but investigating malfeasance is his full-time hobby. It has earned Edwards a reputation as a brave crusader, someone who stands up for the little guy against powerful institutions.

His battles have left him with a desire to protect his reputation. Lately, Edwards has felt under attack once again. Only this time it is not the government agencies and their lawyers who are trying to put his reputation under the microscope. It’s the little guy.

This year, a group of several dozen Flint residents and their allies published a letter online. Marc Edwards is not a virtuous humanitarian, they wrote, but an egotistical bully from whom they need to be protected.

Doing research doesn’t just create knowledge; it also creates relationships. When the public good is at stake, those relationships can become intense. People have strong opinions on what the public good is, and who is best qualified to judge that. In Washington, Edwards learned the value of having friends who could help keep him sane. He has credited one friend, the anthropologist and water activist Yanna Lambrinidou, with figuratively saving his life in those years.

But Lambrinidou comes from a different academic tradition, one that instilled her with particular views on how scientists should relate to the public, and over time she came to think of Edwards as someone who could not be counted on to put other people’s needs before his own. It had been a source of tension between them. And when the Flint residents published their letter, he suspected that she might be one of those behind it.

It wasn’t just the public good that was at stake now. It was Edwards’s reputation. So he turned once more to open-records requests. This time the target of his investigation was Lambrinidou. He filed requests to get his hands on her emails to colleagues and confidants, dating back years, seeking anything she had written about him that might prove his suspicions right.

Edwards also sued her, along with two others, and asked a judge to make them pay him $3 million for the damage he believed they had caused.

When Lambrinidou met Edwards, in 2007, she was working with a group of fellow Washington residents to bring attention to the city’s water problem.

Her background was in medical ethnography studying how doctors care for patients. She had particularly focused on the importance of empathy and self-knowledge in caregivers. Supporting people through pain and illness is not just about serving them with science, Lambrinidou and her colleagues had written in a book on palliative care, “but also in the art of building and sustaining relationships and using the self as a primary instrument for diagnosis and treatment.”

Edwards, meanwhile, was waging a lonely scientific battle against an army of abbreviations: the CDC, the EPA, D.C. WASA (that’s the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority). He had seen a friend and mentor cross over to the other side. He suspected that an official at the utility had recruited someone in his lab at Virginia Tech to spy on him. He wasn’t sure whom he could trust.

Eventually, he came to trust Lambrinidou, and the two formed a partnership. He taught her how to better understand the science of lead in plumbing; she taught him how to better understand the people who were affected by it. In 2010 they developed an ethics course for young engineers at Virginia Tech, with an explicit goal of teaching them how to be better listeners. The university appointed Lambrinidou as an adjunct faculty member, and she and Edwards applied for grants, with some of the money flowing to her nonprofit organization, Parents for Nontoxic Alternatives.

It wasn’t always an easy collaboration. They came from different traditions. He believed in solving public problems through hard science; she believed in making sure members of the public were heard. When Edwards talked about public service, he discussed having the personal fortitude to tell the truth while under attack. Lambrinidou talked about subduing the ego and listening to others tell their truths. Sometimes they butted heads about how best to prepare engineering students to do good in the world.

Something broke in their relationship. Edwards felt moved to impose boundaries on what the two friends could and could not talk about with each other. He says he read some of her more emotionally intense emails to mean that she had taken a romantic interest in him. Lambrinidou says that’s not true. She points to an email in which Edwards explicitly told her that he didn’t believe she wanted an affair.

Eventually she asked to stop teaching the ethics course with him.

At first, Edwards was hesitant to let Lambrinidou off the hook. He was afraid it would go against the terms of one of their grants from the National Science Foundation. “Since NSF is a major sponsor,” he said, “I have to do things by the book.” After email discussion, they agreed that it was acceptable for her to focus on other parts of the grant instead, and the two reached a fragile detente. Edwards told her he was available to talk about work, as long as she respected his boundaries.

Lambrinidou was frustrated. She had worked hard on the ethics course, especially the part where they talked to students about quieting the ego and listening — really listening — to the people who were most vulnerable to environmental injustices, whose voices were often ignored and erased from history.

She started to feel erased by Edwards, too. “He’s already officially (and to common colleagues) calling the class ‘his,’” she wrote to a friend in August 2013. In another email, Lambrinidou lamented how long she had allowed herself to be taken advantage of.

“The only part of me that was rewarded,” she wrote, “was the part that helped him.”

Then, in 2015, Flint happened.

Residents of the embattled Michigan city, which had been managed by the state since 2011, had been complaining to government officials about their discolored tap water for months, to little avail. LeeAnne Walters, a former medical assistant, was alarmed by how the water seemed to be making her family sick. She taught herself about public water systems and figured out that her water didn’t contain chemicals that were supposed have been added during treatment to prevent it from pulling dangerous metals off the pipes as it flowed into her home.

The water did contain lead, though. That was a major discovery, and not necessarily obvious even though the water appeared discolored. Invisible to the eye, lead can be hard to detect if you don’t know how to look for it. The health effects, meanwhile, can be insidious and irreversible.

City officials didn’t seem to take Walters seriously, but Edwards did. He brought a team of researchers to Michigan, and Walters put together a team of Flint residents to help them collect water samples from Flint homes. Edwards and his team analyzed the samples and found more lead.

They organized a press conference to announce the findings. Edwards recommended that the Flint residents bring in Lambrinidou to advise on media strategy. “If you can get Yanna,” he told one resident, a woman named Melissa Mays, “you are getting the best.”

Edwards and Lambrinidou had been in touch, but the wounds were still fresh. Several weeks earlier, he had let her know that he was applying for a grant to travel to Flint and study the problems there. She had sent a note back objecting to the idea of him “basing a funding proposal on concepts that constitute the very essence of my professional work, if not my being.” He sent her the proposal, and she was relieved to find that it did not seem to appropriate her work. Nevertheless, it prompted to a tense back-and-forth over whether Edwards was taking too much credit for the course they had created together.

“I will never try to stop you from continuing to grow your rewards and reputation,” she told him then, “but I will question the true intent behind your ‘newer’ ideas and excursions.”

When Mays asked for advice on the press conference, Lambrinidou obliged. She said that the citizens of Flint should take center stage at the press conference. “It is very important that the politicians, the public, and the press see you guys in charge,” she told Mays in an email. “At the end of the day your knowledge, vigilance, and outrage are what’s going to matter the most.”

When the press conference finally happened, Lambrinidou was dismayed to see Edwards holding court. Not only did that approach go against her recommendation, but also against a lesson she had emphasized in their ethics course: Scientists should empower the victims of environmental injustice to speak for themselves, not speak for them. (Edwards disputes the suggestion that he monopolized the press conference, at which Flint residents including Walters also spoke.)

“Marc colonized Flint so completely this week,” she wrote to a friend after the press conference, which she described as a “Marc-fest.” As she’d feared, the news coverage had focused on the scientists, not the Flint residents. “If I were a resident of Flint,” Lambrinidou told the friend, “I would be offended.”

She kept thinking about the people who didn’t seem to be getting their due credit for exposing the crisis. She did a “quick and dirty” analysis of news articles about the Flint crisis that had referred to anyone as a “hero,” and found that Edwards and the other scientists involved in exposing the contamination were mentioned far more often than any of the Flint residents who had been working on the problem for far longer.

Edwards and his team stayed visible. They set up a website where he announced the results of his team’s water studies in Flint. They started filing records requests, trying to get to the bottom of which officials were responsible for letting the crisis happen. They used the website to discredit people whom they believed were doing bad science.

He saw himself as a defender of science, and therefore a defender of the people of Flint. After all, the knowledge, vigilance, and outrage of Flint residents had not been enough to persuade state officials that there was something wrong with the water. It was a pair of scientific studies — a water study led by Edwards’s team and a blood study led by a pediatrician at the local hospital — that had certified their outrage and forced those in power to act.

Hadn’t it worked? Hadn’t the governor finally ordered that the city’s plumbing be connected to a different water source, reducing the immediate risk to Flint residents and their families? Wasn’t that the most important thing?

And yet Edwards’s tactics rubbed some people the wrong way. On their website the Virginia Tech team continued to weigh in with judgments on who was really helping the people of Flint and who wasn’t. First they went after those they saw as hucksters and naifs. Then they went after a researcher from a local university. When a pair of state officials were charged with criminal wrongdoing related to the water crisis, Edwards came to their defense; in his opinion, there is not enough evidence to blame them.

He said he was listening to science, but some locals believed that he was no longer listening to them. It seemed that Edwards was playing on his own team — that maybe he believed his own knowledge, vigilance, and outrage mattered more than anyone else’s.

Eventually, their frustration boiled over.

“Residents of Flint object to Mr. Edwards fighting his own petty and vicious fights against anyone and everyone he sees as a challenger or competitor,” wrote the group of disillusioned Flint residents in the 2018 letter, “and against anyone and everyone Flint residents turn to for help other than himself, all under the guise of ‘protecting’ and ‘saving’ us, or ‘defending’ science.”

“This is dishonest, paternalistic and exploitative,” the group continued, “and, we fear, used by Mr. Edwards to build his own professional and financial power.”

More than 50 Flint residents signed the letter, along with a few dozen outsiders. Lambrinidou was one of them.

She had been reluctant to air her grievances publicly. Edwards was almost single-handedly responsible for shedding light on the very real threat of lead in drinking water. His work in Flint had prevented people from being poisoned. Lambrinidou knew this, and for all the faults she saw in him, she admired him deeply for it.

But she worried that the admiration that the world had for Edwards — especially the world of science — could have side effects. In 2016, Time named him to its list of 100 most influential people. She was disturbed to think that his approach in Flint could become a model for how scientists should intervene in environmental emergencies.

Privately, she had been talking to friends about how to tell a different story of what had happened in Michigan — one that put the focus on the residents. She started talking, off-the-record at first, to a New York Times Magazine reporter who had been assigned to write a story about Edwards and Flint.

She told the reporter that she didn’t want to say anything negative. But she did try to steer him toward people who could talk about the danger of erasing nonexperts from stories about environmental justice. The goal, she told her friends, would be to try to “shift the piece from hero-worship to something a little more complex.”

On Edwards, Lambrinidou offered the reporter a few measured sentences: “We all know that at times we’ve shined beyond even our own greatest expectations, and at times we’ve failed spectacularly to the point of self-shock,” she said. Edwards, she continued, “struggles sometimes to hear this.”

When the story came out, Edwards believed he heard Lambrinidou loud and clear: She was attacking his reputation.

About a year later, Lambrinidou sat on a panel at a conference to discuss technology and democratic participation. There was some discussion of the public narratives of the water crises in D.C. and Flint. “Flint water activists undermined by experts held up as heroes,” wrote Donna Riley, now head of the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, on Twitter. “Activists everywhere recognize this structural bullying: #metoo.”

Riley’s use of the #MeToo hashtag was an exasperating touch. Edwards didn’t want his name anywhere near that hashtag.

Then came the letter from the group of several dozen Flint residents — the one accusing Edwards of bullying people and exploiting the water crisis for personal gain. The authors published the letter online and notified the president of Virginia Tech and people in the science world who had given Edwards awards for his work in Flint.

“We are reaching out to you, key representatives of the scientific and engineering communities who keep awarding and rewarding Mr. Edwards for his behavior,” they wrote, “because we need full protection from Mr. Edwards immediately.”

To Edwards, it felt like a siege. There were still plenty of Flint residents with whom he still had good relationships — including LeeAnne Walters, the woman who had tipped him off to the lead problem in the first place. He needed to defend himself.

“Your reputation is everything,” the professor told me in an interview. “Before this happened, I believe I had a well-deserved reputation for ethical conduct.”

That reputation was crucial to what he saw as his life’s work: fighting to get lead out of people’s drinking water and bloodstreams. The letter seemed like it could threaten that work. And Edwards believed Lambrinidou was involved.

So he sued her, along with a pair of water activists from Flint and D.C., accusing them of conspiring with her.

One of the activists was Melissa Mays, the Flint resident whom Edwards had connected with Lambrinidou for advice on how to run the press conference. The other was Paul Schwartz, a Washington-based activist who had worked with Lambrinidou and Edwards on bringing attention to the lead crisis there. Both Mays and Schwartz had grown disillusioned with Edwards, too.

Edwards, it seems, came to see them as a kind of three-headed monster that was determined to paint him as a villain. Schwartz had criticized the Virginia Tech professor on Facebook, accusing him of “belittling” Flint residents. Mays had written on Twitter that Edwards had been “co-opted by the State.” When Edwards suggested that some residents might have gotten sick because a celebrity activist and his nonprofit had scared them out of bathing, Mays told a reporter that Edwards must think Flint people are “dumb and dirty.”

Whoever had written the letter from the Flint residents and their allies had incorporated many of those criticisms into a tour-de-force condemnation of Edwards’s behavior.

Edwards’s complaint accuses Lambrinidou and the others of conspiring against him, defaming him, and costing him awards and speaking gigs.

Shortly afterward, the professor started trying to get his hands on emails that Lambrinidou had sent about him to friends and colleagues.

Edwards says he would have been satisfied to have his lawyers secure Lambrinidou’s emails. But then one of her lawyers, William Moran, began waging a Twitter campaign to shame Edwards into dropping his lawsuit. Moran, tweeting from the handle @BillMoranWins, called the lawsuit “sadistic” and ridiculed Edwards with internet memes.

Through a third party, his law firm filed a request to Virginia Tech for emails between Edwards and various colleagues. The requester also asked for any messages that Edwards might have sent from his university account since the beginning of 2016 that contained the words “affirmative action,” “climate change hoax,” “blacks,” “welfare,” “handouts,” and other terms.

Edwards “is a BIG proponent of FOIA’ing other professors,” Moran wrote on Twitter. “I was up late last night — FOIAs on Marc Edwards coming soon.”

Two could play that game, of course. And Edwards had a fair amount of experience with open-records laws.

He knew, for example, that emails sent to the inboxes of public-university employees counted as public records — even if they came from a private email account. He knew Lambrinidou’s private email address, and he knew who her friends were at Virginia Tech. He filed his own request to the university, asking for emails Lambrinidou had sent to two female scholars at the university.

Edwards then coordinated with an ally — the Massachusetts-based water activist Michael Hootstein — to file additional requests for emails Lambrinidou had sent to academics at Purdue and Michigan State Universities, the Universities of Michigan, of Florida, and of California at Berkeley, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Some of the faculty members at those institutions had signed an open letter endorsing the right of the disillusioned Flint residents to “be heard” on the matter of Edwards’s behavior. Lambrinidou had not signed that letter, but Edwards wanted to find out what she might have been discussing with the people who did.

“This is the network of faculty with whom she interacts,” he told me. “And if there are defamatory statements, this is my method of trying to discover those.”

A few weeks later, Edwards began getting the results of the records requests. He got a bundle of emails that Lambrinidou had sent to friends, some marked “confidential.” He also got messages that she had sent to reporters, including me, that included huge portions that were off the record.

Edwards highlighted passages that had to do with him. Every once in a while, he would send me excerpts that he found especially galling.

“F*** ME!!” one of Lambrinidou’s friends had written, referring to Edwards by his initials, trying to buck her up about her professional prospects now that she was no longer working with him.

In another email, Lambrinidou had cheekily referred to Edwards as “ME-ME-ME.” She told a friend that she felt like she was “dealing with a psychopath sans a soul.”

Lambrinidou’s anguish over the story being told about Edwards’s work in Flint was clear. “The injustice of it all, the exploitation, the abuse, and the national narrative of celebration and heroism is eating me up alive,” she wrote in another email. “It’s like looking at your rapist get the Nobel Prize for gender equality.”

She told me she’s not ashamed of what she wrote in her private emails. The real shame, Lambrinidou said, would be if people mistake her criticism of Edwards’s work for a personal vendetta rather than a serious critique of the power dynamic between experts and the people they are supposed to serve. Too often, she said, experts are the ones who get to tell other people’s stories.

The standard for winning a defamation lawsuit is high, especially when the plaintiff is a public figure. The case is still pending.

I asked Edwards how it felt to read messages about him that others had written to each other in confidence. Plenty of people fantasize about eavesdropping on conversations about themselves, but some stones might be better left unturned. Edwards felt vindicated by what he had found, but was it worth it? Did he feel better now?

He didn’t seem to understand. Reading the emails made him feel sick, he offered. “Soul-sick.” And amazed that Lambrinidou and her friends actually put this stuff in writing. It felt like being “part investigative reporter and part detective,” Edwards wrote, “figuring out who murdered your reputation.”

“Maybe I am dead to whatever it is you are looking for here,” he added. “Maybe if I wasn’t dead to it, I would have quit long ago. I am just wired differently.”

Lead is tough, not least because it’s invisible to the untrained eye. You have to know how to see it. And you have to be ready to reckon with the consequences.

When I read through the correspondence Edwards shared with me, a set of emails jumped out. It was a back-and-forth between Edwards and Lambrinidou from 2013, when their friendship was ending. Edwards hadn’t highlighted any part of it, probably because the emails contained no new information that would help him beat Lambrinidou in court.

He had wondered if Lambrinidou would consider helping him write the story of the work they had done together in D.C., as a book. She declined. Her spirit, she said, was broken. Edwards was taken aback. “I honestly do not understand why you would say such a thing,” he wrote.

“I have already shared with you everything there is to share, for many years now,” Lambrinidou replied. “My sense is that, in most of these instances, you did not understand — either cognitively or emotionally — what I was saying.”

“Your sense is wrong,” Edwards protested. “I have always been deeply concerned about your well-being.”

He remembered Lambrinidou saying once that everyone important in her life had abandoned her. He wondered now whether that might be because she expected more of people than they felt they could give.

But as Edwards recalled these things to Lambrinidou, she realized that he hadn’t really understood some of the things she had shared back when they were close. She told him that she never said people abandoned her. She still had friends from childhood. Maintaining relationships had never been a problem.

“If you really want to reach out to someone in a meaningful way,” Lambrinidou wrote, “something you might want to consider doing is suspending your assessments of what you have done ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and opening yourself up to hearing that the impact of your personhood and actions might sometimes have been different from what you intended or subsequently believed it to be.”

Edwards seemed at a loss. He told Lambrinidou that she was a “very good person.” He liked to think that she could count on him, even now. But when they looked at what had happened in Flint, and in their friendship, they did not see the same story.

“Clearly,” he replied, “our memories of events and words spoken are so different that any discussion would not get us anywhere.”

Steve Kolowich writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.