Ojai Woman in Tobacco Suit Calls Award Secondary

Lung cancer patient Leslie J. Whiteley made history last month by winning a $21.7-million settlement from tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds despite the fact she started smoking after warning labels appeared on cigarette packs.

But the 40-year-old Ojai woman doesn’t expect to live to see the money.

For her, proving the U.S. cigarette makers guilty of negligence and fraud was enough. And for legions of other dying smokers, Whiteley’s case has fractured a historically impenetrable industry by setting precedent for future lawsuits, legal experts say.

“People get intimidated by them,” Whiteley said. “They need to be stopped. They’re committing genocide.”

Whiteley is suffering the debilitating side effects of weekly radiation and chemotherapy treatments that doctors hope will eradicate cancers in her brain and liver. When the San Francisco jury announced its verdict, Whiteley was recovering from brain surgery.

Due to her fragile health, Whiteley was interviewed by e-mail for this story. Her San Francisco-based attorney, Madelyn Chaber, read Whiteley’s e-mailed responses.

The appeals process could hold up payment of Whiteley’s settlement for at least five years, though the funds are needed to supplement her husband’s income as a truck driver, help support her four young children and pay more than $110,000 in medical bills.

But Whiteley dismissed the monetary award as secondary to the real reason she decided to fight the tobacco companies.

“Money is not why I did this,” she responded. “These companies need to be held accountable for 450,000 deaths a year from their products. Unfortunately, all they understand is money.”

Attorneys for Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds said the battle is far from over. They said if Whiteley’s settlement survives the appeals process it would be the first to do so.

William S. Ohlemeyer, vice president and general counsel for Philip Morris Cos., said company attorneys plan to challenge Superior Court Judge John E. Munter for allowing the jury to consider as evidence cigarette ads published years before Whiteley was born.

While jurors said they were convinced Whiteley deserved the settlement because of their findings that the tobacco companies deliberately encouraged their customers to doubt the health risks of cigarette smoking and lied to Congress in 1994 about those risks, Ohlemeyer said those arguments were not relevant to Whiteley’s case.

“The issue is supposed to be: ‘Was Mrs. Whiteley aware of the risk?’ ” he said. “The questions don’t involve a lot of discussion about what someone from Philip Morris said to Congress in 1994. It is hard for me to understand how you can argue that an intelligent and articulate woman like Mrs. Whiteley wasn’t aware of the risks of smoking.”

Whiteley asserts tobacco advertisements lured her to the habit before she was mature enough to understand the consequences.

“Thirteen-year-olds have no common sense,” Whiteley said in her e-mail response. “Nor do they have the capability of making a lifelong decision of smoking. I say lifelong, because once you’re addicted you can’t just stop because a cigarette package says so.”

Whiteley began smoking Marlboros at age 13 in 1972 while growing up in Ventura. She was the second youngest in a large family with a pipe-fitter father, and a homemaker mother.

By 1978, at age 19, Whiteley was smoking a pack-and-a-half a day. Eight years later she met her future husband, Leonard, at Oxnard College while they both were applying for truck-driving licenses. She drove trucks for a few years and then left her job to care for her children, who now range in age from 3 to 11.

Whiteley smoked up to two packs of cigarettes a day until February 1998, when what she thought was a bad case of bronchitis turned out to be lung cancer. Now her days are marked by doctor appointments. She said her family is very proud of her legal victory, but exhausted by the strain her disease and the 2 1/2-month trial she likened to being “dragged through the mud.”

“People are quick to judge and forget we are real people who have feelings and have been through physical and emotional pain through the cancer and the trial,” Whiteley wrote. “I didn’t smoke so I could get lung cancer and sue somebody.”