Glory Days Gone By
How Predatort law firm, Wisner Baum, got caught promoting a film about … Wisner Baum
Life must be sad if all you do all day is talk about the Good Ole Days. Life is definitely sad if you have to pay others to promote something you were involved in eight years ago. Life is even sadder when others then force you to shut up.
Such is the situation for the US Predatort law firm, Wisner Baum, which is spending the hundreds of millions of dollars it received from the first Bayer glyphosate settlement not on plaintiff payouts but on trying to promote their upstart lawyer who was in the news back in 2018 during Wisner Baum’s bellwether case.
This week, Wisner Baum paid a small PR firm to promote the beginning of the production of the film “Monsanto”, a movie “inspired by Wisner Baum’s historic win”, syndicating their paid “news” article in dozens of other newspapers. Within a day, the law firm was forced to take down their self-promotion, which seemed to suggest that the law firm was actively involved in the entire project. This is not unusual for US tort law firms to splash out lavishly on films promoting US tort law firms (see my “review” of a similar film called “Into the Weeds”) but they are often a little more discreet.
The paid promotion wanted to portray young lawyer, R. Brent Wisner, as a hero standing up to fight evil industry and bring justice to its victims. While the “news article” was removed from all of the publications, the Firebreak received a copy and thought an analysis into the vanity and secret influence campaigns rampant in the litigation industry was worthwhile.
The paid article starts innocently enough:
This lede already raises certain questions. Why is the film called “Monsanto”, when the company had no longer existed by the time the great lawyers had taken Bayer to court? While it is understood that film dramas are given license with the truth, from the very title it becomes clear that the film “Monsanto” would be a work of fiction.
Also, why is a film about a US tort lawsuit that took place in California being produced in Germany? It seems that part of the funding for the film is via a German organization and this allows for any other cofunding from US special interest groups to be outside of any transparency measures.
But this does not hide the special interests behind the promotion of R. Brent Wisner.
The scriptwriter, Michael Wisner, also known by his Hollywood Scientologist name, R. Michael Wisner, who is also known as R. Brent Wisner’s father. The second screenwriter is Alexandra Duparc, whose bio reveals that her birth name is Alexandra Wisner (Brent’s sister). Apparently, she worked at Wisner Baum as a side job (internship) while waiting for her music band to become famous (spoiler alert: it didn’t). As if the Wisner family doesn’t already suffer from self-aggrandizement syndrome, Alexandra not only was tasked with portraying her heroic brother, she also wrote herself into the movie.
As an aside, Wisner Baum partner, Michael Baum is an elder in the Church of Scientology hierarchy (allegedly involved in Operation Snow White during the 1970s), but I understand that anyone who tries to connect the law firm with scientology or a series of lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies producing antidepressants risks being sued, so the Firebreak will not make that claim. But it is widely known that Wisner Baum paid vast sums to RFK Jr for client referrals before he became the US Secretary for Health and Human Services. When Junior moved to Washington and was forced to disassociate from that plum business, his son Conor conveniently took his place in this noble law firm (as described below by some respected journalist).
It is sad to think that this law firm is spending millions to promote itself by writing themselves into a film where they will no doubt paper over the deception and corruption purveying the US litigation industry. It might make a nice fictional drama used to promote the ambitions of a young upstart, but it is sad to think that the film industry is tolerating such nonsense to just pick up the check.
But why did the law firm then take down the article they wrote about themselves within 24 hours after they had paid for widespread syndication? Perhaps Wisner Baum’s PR firm did not think through the fact that tort law firms only do well when they work from the shadows. Or perhaps the film’s producer, or maybe Netflix, did not want the role of these ambitious Predatorts to be revealed. If people hear about this, they might start asking questions over how deeply the lawyers were involved.
I suppose when your family has always been on the periphery of the film industry in Hollywood, self-promotion is irresistible, even in an field where discretion is highly valued. A young lawyer who has a PR firm to promote a film about a case he was involved in eight years ago, written by his father and sister (whose ambition rivals her sibling’s), and funded by dark special interests goes far out of line with the industry practice of quietly profiting in the background from the plaintiff’s they promote. It is no surprise that Wisner was forced to take down his article and I can imagine that many more experienced lawyers in the industry are quietly waiting to take down Hollywood Brent.
Someone in Wisner Baum must have seen how the folly of one man’s vanity was making the entire law firm vulnerable.
If such vain self-promotion isn’t sad enough, spare a thought for poor Carey Gillam. This sad queen of self-promotion is quietly waiting to see who plays her role in the “Monsanto” movie. In an earlier article, Carey could not help but claim the central role one of her books played in the entire case. If the Wisner PR machine chooses to pass over the self-proclaimed role of this EWG activist, then she may have to exercise the rights to her life story, sold to another filmmaker. And Carey knows a thing or two about how vengeance is best served.
The subplot of “Monsanto” is as a film about a group of sad individuals fighting to promote some relevance and meaning in their lives. Fitting that the film’s cast of B-list actors has been given one last chance at stardom.