BOB FIDDAMAN PODCAST EXTRA
AM: Yeah. You also followed a birth defects trial which again involved GlaxosmithKline. Would you like to kind of elaborate on that?
BF: Yeah, it was the Liam – first of all, the Liam Kilker trial was — was a child that was born and suffered terrible heart defects and I took an interest in it because it was GSK, GlaxoSmithKline, and anything at the time that involved them I wanted to sort of, like, be part of so I could take it apart and do the reporting on it that I knew the British press wouldn’t do. So, yeah, I watched that and I read through all the court material on it and became clued up, if you like, on the birth defects issue with Paxil. And I think the one that you’re talking about was a woman that contacted me some years later from Pennsylvania who had actually aborted her child because she was told that the chances of survival was very, very small. Now, she was on Paxil and her name was Joanne Thomas, and her name didn’t come out in the previous trial that we just spoke about but she was mentioned as this woman wrote to GSK, and there was evidence there. And GSK internally had blamed Paxil on the birth defects of her child. So there was many, many people, including the lawyers at the Kilker trial, was looking for this woman and they couldn’t find her. And then even David Healy had wrote two posts on his popular blog, kind of trying to reach out towards this mysterious American woman. And I got an email out of the blue and it was from this woman and she started talking to me and I was kind of putting two and two together and I thought, wow, this is the woman that everybody’s been looking for. So I asked her to watch a video deposition which I’d managed to get my hands on and made public on YouTube. And she did and within 10 minutes she emailed me back and she said, oh, my god, they are talking about me; I am this woman.
Now, she had lost her case against GSK because of the statutes of limitations was one of them, and the fact that they said that her unborn fetus at the time she aborted was a “nonviable” fetus; in other words, it wouldn’t have survived anyway. So once I knew this, once I knew that she was the mysterious American woman that everybody had been after, like, I reached out to a bunch of attorneys that I know and also some experts and I said, hey, I’ve got this mysterious American woman; I can guarantee it’s the same person. And I was getting like, oh, my god, how did you find her? I said it was just luck. She got in touch with me; I put the pieces together.
Anyway, I then got in touch with her attorneys and told them that they had missed a trick, that Joanne’s name, although it hadn’t been mentioned, her case was actually mentioned in a previous trial; therefore, the statute of limitations could not apply to this because GSK knew about it and they should have told her attorneys that they knew about it. So a lot of stuff went on behind the scenes that I was privy to because Joanne was still telling me what was going on. And GSK then turned around and offered her a settlement to keep quiet, because they had committed fraud here. They hadn’t come forward and said, oh, we know Joanne because she wrote to us years ago. They just used the statute of limitations on her.
Anyway, Joanne got a settlement out of it. I wrote the two blogs and really slammed not only GSK but their attorneys, and Joanne was kind of able to get on with her life, and such a shame, but she didn’t talk to me after. I think she was advised; that was probably part of the deal: Do not talk to this man after you get your settlement. And she didn’t. She got something out of it. And I’m really proud of that. I’m really proud of that work that I did. I basically did the work of attorneys, and some American attorney said to me, you should have been paid the 40 percent the American attorneys get because you won this woman her case. And of course, I didn’t get a penny and I don’t get a penny for any of the work that I do. You know?