Where this was said
The Lawsuit: Five Dying Women vs. U.S. Radium Corporation
At 1:03:40 · chapter starts 1:00:30
Grace Fryer had spent years suspecting that her bosses at U.S. Radium knew exactly what they were doing — a suspicion confirmed when she recalled von Sashaki once quietly telling her not to put the brush in her mouth. She spent two years finding a lawyer willing to take on the case before filing suit in May 1927, joined by Katherine Schaub, Edna Huesmann, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice. The five women asked for $125,000 in damages [1] — Alaina Urquhart "Five Radium Girls sued for $125,000: In May 1927, Grace Fryer and four other former painters — Edna Huesmann, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDo…" 54:50 . By the time of the January 1928 hearing, two were bedridden and none could raise their arms to take an oath. U.S. Radium's lawyers responded to this urgency by requesting a delay until September — because their witnesses were vacationing in Europe [2] — Alaina Urquhart "Several U.S. radium witnesses are vacationing in Europe." 1:01:57 . The public outrage that followed was enormous. Katherine Schaub, in one of the episode's most powerful moments, offered herself to doctors as a living specimen for medical experiments, saying she was 'willing to undergo experiments that may save the other girls.'
U.S. Radium hired a Harvard-trained physiologist in 1924 whose findings were severely negative, so the company forged a fake positive report under his name and submitted it to the New Jersey Department of Labor.
The five Radium Girls accepted a settlement of $10,000 plus $600 per year — far less than they'd asked for — because they knew they would die before a full trial concluded. U.S. Radium never admitted wrongdoing. Their president's statement to the press: the company had generously employed 'cripples and persons similarly incapacitated' as an act of kindness.
