The string of victories in deflecting most of the regulatory and legal challenges left the Sacklers overconfident. Purdue seemed invincible. Competing narcotic painkillers from other pharma companies had not dented OxyContin’s record sales. Florida had closed its wide-ranging investigation, the FDA remained almost completely passive, the DEA probe had stalled, and more than half of the one hundred lawsuits filed by victims’ families had been dismissed.1 John Brownlee, the Virginia U.S. attorney, was the last worry. Although a federal criminal probe was cause for concern, the Sacklers doubted that Brownlee could muster much of a case from his tiny Western Virginia district.
The victories would prove short-lived. Everyone at Purdue underestimated the growing fury, determination, and commitment among the families of Oxy victims.
Twenty-nine-year-old Jill Carol Skolek was a single mom in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. April 29, 2002, was the first time her six-year-old son, Brian, had come back from school and not found her waiting for him at the bus stop near their house. When he got home he discovered his mother in bed, in what he thought was a deep sleep. He fixed a snack, spent a few hours watching cartoons and playing with toys, and then crawled beside her and fell asleep. The next morning, when she still seemed asleep, he shook her and kept yelling “Mommy.” Finally, he called 911. “I need your help. I think my mommy’s heart stopped.”2 Only when the EMS arrived did they realize that Jill had been dead since the previous day.
Jill’s mother, Marianne Skolek, a part-time nurse, lived thirty minutes away in Readington. The unexpected death of her daughter left her to care for her grandson.3 Marianne could not understand why her daughter died. Her only physical problem was a herniated disk from lifting furniture the previous year. The funeral three days later was a small gathering of family. The obituary in the Courier-News read in part: “Jill, I love you with all my heart and am truly proud of the way you raised your son. Rest in peace precious daughter until we can be together again. Love Mommy.”
One morning, a week after Jill’s funeral, Brian startled his grandmother.
“Mommy changed.”
“What do you mean?”
“She changed after taking that pill.”4
He had gone with his mother on visits to a family doctor and remembered how her back felt much better after she got something the doctor called “oxy.”
Marianne, who worked weekend shifts at the oncology unit at Somerset Medical Center, was familiar with OxyContin. She dispensed it herself to end-of-life cancer patients.5 “I turned to my grandson and said, ‘Mommy didn’t take OxyContin, honey.’ ”6 Marianne was stunned when the medical examiner’s toxicology report confirmed that Jill had died of respiratory arrest. The cause? Heart failure due to OxyContin. The death was ruled accidental.7
“Anyone who is responsible for this is going to be held accountable,” she vowed.”8
It was time to start digging into what happened to her daughter. She wanted answers as to why the drug she administered to terminally ill cancer patients was prescribed to Jill for back pain. Marianne was no stranger to research. In 1991 she had been the top student and president of her graduating nurse class. She had a paralegal certification and had served on the local Community Service Board for Gannett’s Courier-News. Her articles about the many problems faced by AIDS patients, coupled with her volunteer service at an AIDS support group, earned her a Community Service Award in 1993 from a local HIV/AIDS Task Force.9
She tracked down a couple of other patients familiar with the doctor’s practice where Jill had been a patient. One told her that after the first appointment with the physician, subsequent ones were with the receptionist, who wrote the Oxy refills. That prompted Marianne to write to the New Jersey and Pennsylvania medical boards where the physician was licensed. State investigators interviewed her and opened a case. Meanwhile, she met with lawyers at a Philadelphia-area firm that friends had recommended. They seemed confident there was a wrongful death action for what had happened to Jill. They worked for weeks with Marianne on preparing a complaint.10
A few days before the complaint was scheduled to be filed, one of the attorneys called. They could not proceed. He claimed they did “not have the resources for it.”
It made no sense to her that lawyers who had been so hot to take the case dropped out without a good reason. At home that evening she sat at her dining room table. It doubled as a work desk, half of it filled with a computer, printer, and fax. What could they have meant by “we don’t have the resources”? Then it dawned on her.
“I said aloud, ‘It’s not the doctor—it’s the pharmaceutical company!’ ”11
Her first online search was to learn more about the company that made OxyContin. Every night she explored the web for information about the executives who ran Purdue and the history of OxyContin. “It was becoming more and more evident to me as I dug that it was a web of deceitful marketing.”12
Promising herself that her daughter’s death would not be in vain, Marianne Skolek became a one-person advocate on behalf of Jill and other OxyContin victims. She delved into how the drug was being dispensed nationwide. Her grandson, Brian, sometimes asked, “Did you get the bad guys yet?”13
For six months she peppered the FDA with letters providing examples in which she thought Purdue was mass-merchandising its powerful painkiller. She also called local reporters in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and encouraged them to look into the company and its best-selling painkiller. A few small-town newspapers in areas hard hit by OxyContin reported that “Marianne has launched her own investigation into her daughter’s death.”14 New Jersey’s Courier-News let her write an op-ed in which she listed her phone number and asked others who “are interested in starting a grass-roots campaign” to get in touch.15
She did not then know it, but her letters helped move the FDA to issue a January 2003 “warning letter” to Purdue. It read in part, “Your journal advertisements omit and minimize the serious safety risks associated with OxyContin, and promote it for uses beyond which have been proven safe and effective.”16 In particular, the FDA highlighted osteoarthritis, which Purdue’s detail team pushed as a treatable condition at the same time downplaying the drug’s potential addictiveness. Purdue supervisors had also drafted an article published in a medical journal without any disclosure of the company’s role. It claimed that patients taking less than 60 milligrams per day can stop the drug “abruptly without withdrawal symptoms.” The detail team cited that extensively in sales pitches.
The FDA had enough evidence of misconduct to commence a false advertising hearing. That would allow the agency to punish Purdue with restrictive labeling requirements and restrictions on refills. Giuliani, however, met half a dozen times with FDA officials and again managed to make it go away. Ultimately, Purdue did not make any public admission of wrongdoing or remove OxyContin from pharmacy shelves. It only had to promise not to do it again.17
The month after the FDA letter to Purdue, Skolek drove to New York for a conference at Columbia University’s National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse.18 She had decided to attend after seeing a notice that Purdue was sending medical director J. David Haddox. “I wanted to see what made this company tick,” she later wrote.19 She read about Haddox before the conference and learned he was the dentist turned doctor who had invented the theory of pseudoaddiction. Besides Haddox, Marianne got a chance to see the DEA’s Laura Nagel, who warned about the abuse potential for “hillbilly heroin.”20 Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general (and now U.S. Senator), was also a panelist. Purdue’s Stamford headquarters were in Blumenthal’s jurisdiction.
Marianne sat in the front row. She had bought off eBay an OxyContin “window shade” pen that had been one of the many small gifts the detail team distributed to doctors by the tens of thousands. She had wanted that pen because the FDA had ordered it pulled from the market since some of the dispensing information on the pullout shade was wrong.
In Haddox’s presentation, he extolled Oxy’s pain relief benefits and glossed over its potential for addiction. Marianne stared at him and played with the pullout shade. “The lies, the lies he was spewing in front of a packed audience grated on me.”21
When the conference ended, Haddox walked through a makeshift aisle between dozens of rows of folding chairs. As they passed one another, Skolek said she “did not hear the word ‘now’ but felt the word ‘now.’ ” The one-hundred-pound Skolek rammed Haddox with her shoulder and sent him crashing into the folding chairs.
“Now you know how the victims of OxyContin feel when they hit the depths of addiction and are on their knees fighting the horrific effects of the withdrawing from the drug,” she said as she walked past.22
After Haddox hurriedly left the hall, the only remaining Purdue executive was Robin Hogen, the company’s soft-spoken press spokesman (his official title was vice president of public affairs). He had witnessed Marianne’s body block of Haddox. Some reporters had gathered around Hogen. He was easy to spot, sporting a different colorful bow tie every day.
The Purdue press office was familiar with Marianne. Initially they had avoided saying anything publicly about her. It was a no win, they concluded, to get into a public fray with a grieving mother. A couple of months before the Columbia conference, however, Hogen’s deputy press director, James Heines, told reporters that Skolek had “raised a lot of fear and concern based on misinformation.… The death of her daughter is tragic, but I don’t know the real circumstances behind it and I haven’t seen the autopsy report.… She [Marianne] might be a well-meaning person, but I don’t believe she is an expert in pain management.”23
As the Columbia conference broke up, Hogen indicated that he had additional information about Skolek’s daughter. “We think she [Jill] abused drugs.”24 Bob Braun, a Courier-News reporter, noted the medical examiner’s report had not mentioned that. “That’s a pretty heavy charge to make against a young woman who died, leaving behind a 6-year-old son… because Jill can’t defend herself.” Hogen shrugged, smiled, and said he “really doesn’t know.”25
But Hogen had done what he wanted to do, planted a seed of doubt. Maybe Jill Skolek was not as often described as an adoring and innocent mother. Purdue had gotten dozens of lawsuits dismissed with its aggressive defense that put the victims on trial. It claimed the plaintiffs were often addicts who had latched on to the painkiller to satisfy their drug habits.
Braun wrote about Hogen’s “disclosure” in his Courier-News column a few days later. What Hogen said was important “because it might lead journalists—like me—to avoid writing about her mother’s efforts to hold a big pharmaceutical house accountable. No one wants to create sympathy for a junkie. But Jill was no junkie.”26 I 27
Hogen and others at Purdue misjudged Marianne Skolek if they thought she would abandon her search for answers if they tarred her daughter’s reputation. “I told Hogen that you messed with the wrong mother.”28 She redoubled her commitment to expose Purdue as “an out of control, greedy pharmaceutical company.”29 Two weeks after Braun’s column, Purdue’s chief operating officer, Michael Friedman, wrote to the newspaper. His statement read in part, “I write on behalf of Purdue Pharma L.P. to repudiate the comment about Jill Skolek made by our employee, Robin Hogen, as reported in Bob Braun’s March 5 column. Hogen regrets having made the remark and has acknowledged in a letter to Jill Skolek’s mother, Marianne, that he was wrong to do so.… Hogen’s inappropriate remark is inconsistent with our values and our commitment, and we sincerely regret that it was made.”30
The diminutive grandmother became a regular at local hearings and she refined her investigation and writing skills. When she learned that Purdue had asked the FDA to approve OxyContin to treat postpartum pain for new mothers who were breastfeeding their infants, Skolek “flooded the country with emails and faxes to Attorneys General and the media reporting.” She told them “we had enough devastation in the country without addicting infants to OxyContin.” Purdue withdrew its request for expanded approval.
At the end of 2002, investigators working for U.S. Attorney John Brownlee got in touch with Marianne. She had written to all fifty state attorneys general and dozens of federal prosecutors beseeching them to investigate Purdue and offering whatever help she could provide.31 The timing was ideal for Brownlee. He had just started his probe.
By telephone and email she remained in daily contact. Skolek gave his investigators some early leads. Marianne had found an employee in Purdue’s legal department when buying some OxyContin promotional items on eBay. Marianne and her son drove to Stamford to meet with her at a Starbucks. There they discovered that a Purdue employee had “become addicted to OxyContin and was fired.… She had worked for Purdue Pharma for close to 25 years.” Although the ex-employee “was petrified of Purdue Pharma and their power, what a story she had to tell.” Skolek put her in touch with “Delta Force,” her nickname for the Brownlee task force.
Marianne seemed to be everywhere. She set up a website, oxydeaths.com, as a resource for those who wanted to share stories about the drug’s dangers.32 In Iowa, she teamed up with Chelly Griffith, an outspoken mother of two who had become an addict after being prescribed OxyContin for a herniated disk. She was furious that the FDA had failed to require Purdue to include the word “addictive” on Oxy’s label instead of the more obtuse notice that it has “an abuse liability similar to morphine.”33 And Skolek got Purdue to remove from their website a press release titled “65–0: OxyContin Cases Against Purdue Pharma Dismissed at a Record Rate.” She “told them it was very bad taste to call them an OxyContin victory and to gloat over it.”34
Skolek was a key source for reporter Doris Bloodsworth’s seminal front-page, five-part Orlando Sentinel series titled “OxyContin Under Fire: Pain Pill Leaves Death Trail.” The first installment appeared on October 19, 2003. The Columbia Journalism Review, in a later analysis of early media coverage about OxyContin, noted that “The Sentinel’s coverage was more ambitious [than earlier reporting]. At its core was a claim that posed a serious threat to Purdue’s business: Taking OxyContin as prescribed could lead to dependence, addiction, and death.”35
Instead of countering with facts, Purdue looked for mistakes in the series. “In retrospect, despite the Sentinel’s prescience, journalistic carelessness caused the project to backfire, and thus miss its target. Within days, serious reporting errors in the series emerged.” Two “innocent victims” were in fact drug addicts.36 Bloodsworth’s conclusions from her analysis of the autopsy reports were overstated; instead of 573 fatal overdoses “solely from OxyContin” in Florida during 2001 and 2002, only 25 percent of those were from Oxy alone. As the Sentinel made a series of corrections, Purdue used the “unforced errors” to “attack the Sentinel in a PR campaign ultimately aimed at avoiding a regulatory crackdown and ensuring a bonanza of profits.”37 Bloodsworth resigned the following February and the city editor was reassigned.II38
In 2004, OxyContin officially earned the dubious distinction as the most abused drug in the United States.39 A former Purdue assistant marketing manager told the author that he never heard anyone mention that dark milestone at its Stamford headquarters. “It was as if we did not talk about it, it hadn’t really happened.” A coworker joked once to him that the news reports made it seem like there was a “paindemic” in the making. “He thought it was funny. If anyone in a supervisory position heard that, he would have been terminated. It was not a joking matter.”40
Meanwhile, the Sacklers kept the Purdue team focused on news that avoided any discussion of the growing OxyContin health crisis. The company championed the “Global Day Against Pain.” That was a World Health Organization–sponsored event to make pain relief a basic human right. Canada and Sweden were the first countries to go along. This emerging view of pain treatment was, as some experts noted, an “inflection point” in which “failure to provide pain management was professional misconduct and… poor medicine.”41
The Sacklers and Purdue, however, could not ignore the accumulating bad news forever. John Brownlee was busy putting the finishing touches on what he was certain was a substantial and damning case. He had focused on a narrow aspect of federal criminal law. Misbranding or fraudulently marketing OxyContin was a felony. The statute did not require proof of intent or any damages. Simply doing it was the crime. Although that was the minimum count Brownlee wanted to file, his task force was confident it had gathered enough evidence for charges against Purdue money-laundering, wire and mail fraud, and defrauding the government.42
Under Justice Department regulations, Brownlee’s superiors in Washington had to sign off on his case. He forwarded it to headquarters in 2006.43 The Criminal Division career prosecutors who reviewed it recommended the most serious charges. One reason for their confidence was a confidential Department of Justice memorandum prepared by Brownlee’s team that determined that senior Purdue executives were aware of OxyContin’s abuse problems within months of its 1996 on-sale date, not five years later as they claimed.44
When Purdue learned that Brownlee was far enough along to send a draft complaint to headquarters, Giuliani called James Comey, the deputy attorney general.45 Purdue’s lawyers had assembled what they claimed was proof that Brownlee’s team had abused its investigatory powers. When Comey called Brownlee to ask whether it was true, Brownlee immediately drove to Washington to make his case in person. Comey was satisfied after they met that there was no wrongdoing. He sent Brownlee back to Virginia and told him, “Do your case.”
Purdue kept scrambling for ways to derail it. Howard Udell, its general counsel, convinced a senior DOJ lawyer to telephone Brownlee at home shortly before he was about to seek a sealed grand jury indictment. He suggested Brownlee wait since Purdue wanted to settle the matter without formal proceedings. Brownlee was certain it was another delay tactic.
Brownlee and his team met with Giuliani and Purdue’s defense lawyers over two days in September. As a former U.S. attorney, Giuliani was intimately familiar with how the process worked. Although he had no intention of bringing the case to trial since public opinion was turning against his client and its product, Purdue’s defense team blustered they would turn the case into a humiliating public defeat for the government. Brownlee was unimpressed.46 A few weeks later, defense attorneys met with senior Justice Department officials in Washington and failed to convince them there was not enough evidence to bring charges against Purdue and some top exeuctives.47
Only years later would internal Purdue documents demonstrate that while its legal team negotiated with federal prosecutors, it continued most of the same bad behavior that had gotten the company into trouble. In the first three months of 2007, during plea bargaining negotiations, the Sackler-family directors learned that more than five thousand “adverse events” had been reported to Purdue. They came from doctors, pharmacists, health clinics, hospitals, and law enforcement. Over one hundred consumers had called Purdue’s compliance hotline reporting everything from suspected illegal sales to overdoses. It was a record number of alerts, more than triple that of any previous quarter.
The FDA defined “adverse events” as “any undesirable experience associated with the use of a medical product in a patient.” Drug companies are required to report “serious” ones to the government, including when a drug is suspected of causing death, hospitalization, disability, and birth defects. The FDA has a catchall category, “Other Serious,” which includes such trigger events as anything “requiring treatment in an emergency room… [and] the development of drug dependence or drug abuse.”48
Purdue’s compliance team only investigated twenty-one cases from the flood of calls and reports. They cherry-picked the ones that appeared less serious. Then, based on those, they concluded there was no widespread diversion or abuse problem with Oxy. They did not report a single call from the hotline or the five thousand adverse events to the FDA, even though those reports indicated that as many as two thirds involved hospitalization or visits to the ER or raised questions about OxyContin dependence or abuse.49 They did not inform the DEA or any other federal, state, or local drug and law enforcement agency.50
In early summer, Brownlee got bad news from headquarters. Top DOJ officials, including Alice Fisher, then the Criminal Division’s chief, decided against filing the expanded charge and instead authorized Brownlee to bring only the less serious misbranding case.51 That was a clean and straightforward prosecution. “They decided at HQ to go for the low-hanging fruit,” a case investigator confided to the author.52 Brownlee later told Joseph Rannazzisi, a DEA official, that the DOJ decision had put him into an untenable position. By eliminating the most serious charges, it forced him to settle the case without going to trial. Otherwise, he told Rannazzisi, Purdue’s large, well-funded legal team might well overwhelm his small group of prosecutors. “He told me he was outgunned,” Rannazzisi told The New York Times.53
On May 10, Purdue’s Michael Friedman (now president), Howard Udell, and its former medical director Paul Goldenheim, and a team of nearly a dozen lawyers, arrived at a federal courthouse in Abingdon, Virginia. Giuliani and Purdue’s lawyers had hashed out a plea agreement with Brownlee.
Brownlee had agreed not to seek jail time for the three executives in exchange for their guilty pleas to the misbranding charges. The Sackler-family directors voted unanimously that Purdue Frederick, the drug firm Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond had bought in 1952, would plead guilty to a felony for deceptive and fraudulent marketing practices in misbranding OxyContin as less addictive and subject to abuse than immediate release opioids.54 It was a clever strategy. Purdue Frederick’s plea effectively put it out of business while protecting Purdue LP and Purdue Inc., the two entities primarily responsible for OxyContin since its 1996 release. Avoiding a guilty plea also ensured that Purdue Pharma retained its ability to do business with government health care agencies such as Veterans Affairs, Medicaid, and Medicare.55
In the Virginia courthouse, Purdue’s lawyers admitted that starting a year before OxyContin’s release, its “supervisors and employees, with the intent to defraud or mislead, marketed and promoted OxyContin as less addictive, less subject to abuse and diversion, and less likely to cause tolerance and withdrawal than other pain medications.”56 Friedman, Udell, and Goldenheim pled guilty to criminal fraud in marketing OxyContin.57 Purdue was fined $634.5 million. Some legal analysts questioned whether that was a big enough penalty considering that Purdue had $9.6 billion in sales of Oxy in the previous six years. The three executives also got fined: Friedman $19 million, Udell $8 million, and Goldenheim $7.5 million.
In the Consent Agreement, Purdue agreed that going forward it “shall not make any written or oral claim that is false, misleading, or deceptive” in marketing OxyContin. The court ordered the company to give doctors and patients an evenhanded presentation of the dangers and benefits of the drug. It agreed to present the risks of taking OxyContin for longer periods and at higher doses, including the likelihood of addiction and possibly death.
In a separate Corporate Integrity Agreement, Purdue agreed to adhere strictly to rules and regulations that banned the type of deception that had been its trademark OxyContin promotion. The Sacklers and top management committed to a training course to ensure they understood and would comply with all the requirements. The agreement obligated Purdue and its directors and employees to promptly report to the government any signs of deceptive or false marketing.58
The company also agreed to create an “abuse and diversion detection program” designed to identify high-prescribing physicians. When Purdue became suspicious of “potential abuse or diversion,” it was required to stop promoting and selling OxyContin to those doctors and promptly report it “to appropriate medical, regulatory or law enforcement authorities.”59
Although the Sackler family escaped without any personal admission of guilt, the settlement required that Richard, Jonathan, Mortimer, Beverly, Ilene, Kathe, and Theresa Sackler certify in writing that each had read and understood the rules and swore to follow them.60 The Sacklers had reluctantly agreed to a sentence on which Justice Department prosecutors were insistent: “Purdue is pleading guilty as described above because Purdue is in fact guilty.” (In 2019, an ex–family director, David Sackler, played down the extent of the company’s culpability: “It is conduct that the company engaged in, yes. A number of sales reps took the language on the label and overdid the safety. We wish it never happened. For sure the company should have had a more robust compliance framework, and should have weeded out the reps that were misbranding the medication. For sure.”)61
Brownlee had asked Marianne Skolek to present a victims’ impact statement at the sentencing hearing. She was furious that the three defendants would leave the court as free men. “As I walked in front of the defense table Friedman, Udell and Goldenheim, surrounded by their flock of high-profile attorneys glared at me. I stood 3-feet from them and said, ‘You are sheer evil. You are bastards.’ ”
She began to move toward them, thinking about reaching out and slapping one. “They deserved it.” But she did not do it.62 Instead, she gave an impassioned plea during which the courthouse fell silent. She did not convince the judge, however, to change his mind by sending the trio to jail or to issue an order that “they should not be gainfully employed again in the pharmaceutical industry.”63
Federal prosecutors and public health advocates hailed the 2007 judgment as the end of the criminal misconduct at Purdue. Pharmaceutical industry analysts forecast that OxyContin had been stopped in time to avoid a more serious and deadly epidemic.64
The DEA’s Laura Nagel, who had tried building a case against Purdue for five years, was one of those who did not join in the celebration. “I would not have been happy unless we put them in shackles in front of the courthouse.”65 Marianne Skolek was also not pleased. “I knew that the evil I witnessed that day was not going away.… They would continue their need for greed and be successful at it.”66
Brownlee and his fellow prosecutors had been so impressed with Skolek’s impact statement that they asked her to present it again two months later before the Senate’s Judiciary Committee hearings into whether the Purdue plea deal was adequate enough punishment. Skolek appeared with her eleven-year-old grandson. She wanted him to see where the fight to get justice for his mother had brought them. The Senate chamber fell hushed when Marianne settled at the large oak table and pulled out a few sheets of paper with handwritten notes. Before she began, she noticed that only two seats away was Jay McCloskey, who had been the U.S. attorney from Maine from 1993 to 2001. He had been the first federal prosecutor to take notice of problems with OxyContin abuse. “He was relentless in exposing Purdue Pharma,” Marianne thought to herself. “He was not seated at the table with me as an ally though. McCloskey was now a hired consultant for Purdue Pharma and he was defending them.”
She told the senators that “Pain patients from various pain societies will speak of the merits of OxyContin and their quality of life being restored because of the drug. These pain societies throughout the country, are funded by Purdue Pharma.”67
Her voice picked up tempo. “Anything that is imposed against these convicted criminals will not give us back Jill, but I will guarantee that Purdue Pharma will never forget the name Jill Skolek.… I want to know why 12 warning letters were sent by the FDA to Purdue Pharma about their marketing of OxyContin and to this day, they are not required to put ‘highly addictive’ or ‘addictive’ on the label of the drug. I want to know why the FDA deleted without reading so many of my emails about the marketing of OxyContin until this last month. I want to know why Curtis Wright, while employed by the FDA, played an intricate part in the approval of OxyContin and then was hired by Purdue Pharma.… I want to know how Rudy Giuliani could be the ‘big star’ hired by Purdue Pharma to play down the abuse and diversion of OxyContin and also get paid by the DEA for work performed for them. I want to know why the Sackler family has not been held accountable for their involvement with Purdue Pharma and the mass marketing of OxyContin. Eventually Purdue Pharma will introduce another blockbuster drug similar to OxyContin.… My advice to Purdue Pharma is when you are ready to introduce another drug such as OxyContin… look behind you, because I will be right there. I will be working at having Howard Udell disbarred for his criminal activities and Paul Goldenheim’s medical license revoked for what amounts to white collar drug trafficking. I will be actively working at Friedman, Udell and Goldenheim never being able to work in the pharmaceutical industry again because they are convicted criminals who criminally marketed OxyContin. I will accomplish this… do not doubt me at not being successful at achieving this. Her name was Jill Carol Skolek. She did not deserve to be prescribed OxyContin and die because of the criminal activities of individuals of Purdue Pharma. Please give my family justice and investigate the criminal activity of Purdue Pharma.”68
I. After the conference, Braun had also interviewed Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal. During the panel discussion, Blumenthal said his office had “an ongoing inquiry” about Purdue. Braun asked whether that “constituted an investigation.” “Well, yes, you can call it an investigation,” Blumenthal said. “It might not be a criminal investigation, but it’s an investigation.” Purdue’s Hogen had overheard the exchange and left Braun a voicemail a few hours later. “There is no investigation under way.” He claimed Blumenthal had only asked for some Purdue marketing documents, “but that does not constitute an investigation, and that would be inaccurate for you to report tomorrow that the attorney general of Connecticut has launched an investigation of Purdue Pharma.”
II. The Sentinel never retracted the story but did assign two senior reporters who worked for three months before the paper printed a 2,500-word article on what had gone wrong in Bloodsworth’s reporting and the paper’s editorial and fact-checking oversight.