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by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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Amara Harris, the young Black woman from suburban Chicago who won a yearslong fight against a police ticket that accused her of stealing a classmate’s AirPods, took her fight to court again Tuesday.

This time, she was the plaintiff, not the defendant.

Harris’ attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday alleging civil rights violations, including racial discrimination and malicious prosecution. When she was a high school junior in 2019, a city police officer based at the school, using information gathered by school deans, ticketed her for violating a municipal ordinance against theft. Harris has always said she did not steal the AirPods but picked them up by mistake, thinking they were her own.

The city refused to drop the ticket, which could have cost Harris up to $500, despite a lack of evidence, the lawsuit alleges. Harris maintained her innocence for nearly four years and took the ordinance violation case to a rare jury trial in August. A jury found Harris not liable after a three-day trial.

The lawsuit names as defendants Naperville — Illinois’ fourth-largest city, about 30 miles west of Chicago — as well as former school-based police officer Juan Leon and his then-supervisor, Jonathan Pope. Leon, who issued the ticket, acknowledged during the trial he had no direct evidence that Harris had stolen the AirPods.

ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune first spotlighted Harris’ fight in 2022 as part of “The Price Kids Pay” investigation, which examined school ticketing in Illinois schools and the impact on students and their families. Two civil rights attorneys took on Harris’ case after that story was published.

Now 21, Harris graduated from Spelman College in Atlanta on Sunday, then traveled home to Naperville ahead of the lawsuit being filed.

Harris said she hopes the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, not only rectifies her troubling experience but leads to students being treated fairly. The lawsuit seeks compensatory damages of at least $20 million, punitive damages and for Naperville and its police department to implement training and oversight to prevent future civil rights violations.

“They were wrong and they have to face consequences and be held accountable for what they did and for dragging this on,” Harris told ProPublica this week.

Naperville City Attorney Mike DiSanto said in a statement that the allegations “are without merit” and the city plans to “vigorously defend this lawsuit.” He said the city relied on statements from school officials and students, and noted that the city won several pretrial motions, including one from Harris’ lawyers seeking to have the case dismissed.

“The fact that the jury acquitted Ms. Harris does not negate the factual basis for the actions of the City and its officers,” according to the statement.

“The Price Kids Pay” investigation found that across Illinois, students have been subjected to a capricious system of police ticketing as a form of school discipline. The municipal tickets — for violating ordinances such as vaping, truancy and disorderly conduct — are difficult to fight and often come with fines and administrative fees that can reach hundreds of dollars. Some families have gone into debt and faced serious financial consequences because of unpaid tickets. Unlike in juvenile court, there is no option for a public defender. And taking the case to a jury, as Harris did, can require incredible resources and commitment.

“We’re hoping to highlight that this form of discipline needs to be prohibited throughout the state of Illinois and even throughout the country,” said Juan Thomas, Harris’ attorney and a recent chair of the civil rights and social justice section of the American Bar Association.

Following the Tribune-ProPublica investigation, the Illinois superintendent of education told administrators to stop outsourcing discipline to police, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he wanted to stop school-based ticketing and state lawmakers have considered ways to change the law, though efforts have stalled during the past two legislative sessions.

S. Todd Yeary, who also represents Harris, said he hopes the lawsuit will deter schools from using tickets as was done in Harris’ case.

“If the legislators aren’t going to fix the law, if the system isn’t going to make sure there is accountability, the only recourse is to get the courts involved,” said Yeary, the former CEO of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a civil rights organization.

“This is about one young woman’s courage to say, ‘The reason I am not going to pay the ticket is because I did nothing wrong,’” Yeary said. Just before the trial was set to begin in August, a Naperville prosecutor offered to settle the case if Harris paid a $100 fine. She refused.

Harris’ attorneys, S. Todd Yeary, left, and Juan Thomas, speak with Harris and her mother, Marla Baker, outside the DuPage County Courthouse in August. (Mustafa Hussain for ProPublica)

The ProPublica-Tribune investigation found that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed at school than their white peers. At Naperville North High School, Harris’ school, Black students were nearly five times more likely than white students to be ticketed by police over the three school years the investigation examined, up until the spring of 2021.

The lawsuit alleges that Harris was discriminated against because she is Black and that the ticket issued to her “constituted racial discrimination, a denial of constitutional rights, intimidation and retaliation.”

“If there were ever a civil rights issue, this is it,” Yeary said.

Naperville spokesperson Linda LaCloche has previously denied that race played a role in Harris’ case or in police decisions to ticket students. The school district has distanced itself from the case and has said the Naperville police decide whether to ticket students.

Since police issued her the ticket, Harris graduated early from high school, earned an associate’s degree from a community college, studied abroad in Japan and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in international studies. She said she plans to apply to veterinary school.

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by Jeremy Schwartz

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I have been covering the bare-knuckle, far-right political battles in a rural North Texas county since shortly after the 2020 presidential election. Just about an hour southwest of Fort Worth, Hood County might be off the beaten path, but it has been at the cutting edge of hard-line conservative activism in Texas for the past few years.

A year after the 2020 presidential election, I covered the effort in the county, which voted 81% for former President Donald Trump, to force out its independent elections administrator and give her duties to an elected county clerk who had used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.

That’s when a local activist named Courtney Gore first came across my radar; she seemed to be the very embodiment of an uncompromising Republican movement intent on making schools the battleground for culture war issues over race and gender. As the co-host of a local far-right web-based talk show, Gore and her colleagues had taken aim at fellow Republicans they considered insufficiently conservative and frequently attacked the school district, alleging it was providing sexually explicit books to kids and teaching socialism and left-wing ideology about race and gender.

Gore ran for a seat on the Granbury Independent School District board in the fall of 2021. After she won, I spoke to parents who feared the worst. One gay parent said she and her wife were contemplating moving their 4-year-old son out of the district.

“Seeing stuff like the school board election definitely opens my eyes,” the parent told me. “Even though this is a small town, and I know most of the people, and I grew up next door, when it comes to sexuality nobody’s safe.”

A few months after the election, the local school district became one of the first in Texas to remove about 130 library books. The district eventually returned most of the books to the shelves, but in 2022 the Department of Education launched an investigation into whether the district violated federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender after ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News published audio of the district superintendent targeting books with LGBTQ+ themes.

As we continued to cover the district and efforts to remove LGBTQ+ library books, I kept tabs on the always lively local Facebook forums, where I watched Gore make a stunning about-face.

In May 2022, she publicly broke with her former hard-line supporters and admitted to her Facebook followers that she had unwittingly contributed to an effort to weaken support for public education in Granbury. Without naming names, she warned her followers on social media to be on guard against misinformation and efforts to manipulate their emotions with “conjecture.”

In May 2022, Gore wrote on Facebook about misinformation and efforts to “manipulate with the power of suggestion.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Gore’s social media messages became more pointed a week later. In response to a Facebook post about some of the tactics she believed were being used by her former allies, she spoke bluntly: “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy bs,” she wrote. “I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer, it’s not serving our party. We have to do better, imvho.”

The next month, she made her break explicit and began warning residents that a deeper plan was afoot to eliminate public education in Texas.

In June 2022, Gore wrote on Facebook, “I refuse to be someone’s puppet.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Then, in October, she told her Facebook followers that she had witnessed firsthand a plan for “weaponizing” the school board in an effort to build support for a voucher program, in which public education dollars would be spent on private and religious schools.

In October 2022, Gore wrote on Facebook about a “systemic plan” that involved “weaponizing our local school board.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)

I reached out to Gore to see if she would be willing to talk to me about her political evolution. She was initially hesitant to do an interview, but I kept in communication with her. Then, nearly a year after I’d first reached out, as the Granbury district continued to undergo battles about library books, bond elections and vouchers, she agreed to meet with me. Since then we have done hours of interviews over Zoom, where she has described her experience, providing insight into what was happening behind the scenes as she ran for school board and in those first crucial months after she took office. Our stories this week detail how she came to her conclusions and her thoughts on what she sees as the larger forces that have played a role in Hood County politics.

Texas politics experts told me it is rare to see someone in modern political life have the fortitude to not just admit that they were wrong and had been misled, but to then turn around and challenge the party directly. Much more common in the Trump age, political scientists told me, is for politicians to stay silent or quietly resign rather than risk facing the wrath of the conservative hard-liners.

I’ll continue to report on school district elections and vouchers in Texas throughout the year. If you have tips or inside information, you can fill out this form.

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by Andy Kroll

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Standing in a cafe decorated with tiny American flags and antique cabinets as big as bodyguards, Peter Meijer paused as he considered what to say to the man in the “Stand for God” shirt who had just called for his bodily harm.

It was a snowy morning in February. Meijer was the keynote speaker at a coffee-and-donuts meeting hosted by the Republican Party chapter in Kent County, Michigan, the most populous county on the west side of the state. Dressed in a candidate-casual uniform of jeans, a flannel shirt and an outdoorsy blazer, Meijer was seeking the Republican nomination for an open U.S. Senate seat, a race that could determine control of Congress’s upper chamber, in a state that could decide the presidential election. If Republicans wanted to win in November, Meijer told the 40-odd people in attendance, they needed to move on from the past and focus on their shared enemy.

“Is there anyone who thought that Jan. 6th was good for the Republican Party?” he asked. “Did it help us win in 2022?”

“We weren’t gonna win,” someone yelled. “It was rigged.”

“The election was stolen,” another person said. “It doesn’t matter.”

I watched this exchange from a table near the back of the room. Until that moment, the crowd met Meijer’s stump speech with polite nods and gentle applause. But when he brought up elections and Jan. 6th, the mood turned from Midwest nice to hostile.

Not long ago, this setting was friendly terrain for Meijer. For decades, voters here rewarded sensible, pro-business, avowedly conservative politicians. Meijer fit the archetype of a West Michigan Republican when he first ran for Congress in 2020. He was also basically Michigan royalty as an heir to the Meijer grocery store fortune. In one of the state’s most competitive districts, he won his debut congressional race by a comfortable 6-point margin.

At the Kent County event, however, many attendees seemed to feel nothing but scorn for him. That anger flowed from a single decision Meijer had made in Congress: He voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump. In response, he faced a far-right primary challenger who had served in the Trump administration and said Biden’s 2020 victory was “simply mathematically impossible.” Meijer narrowly lost. Now, as a Senate candidate, he was trying to make amends, even pledging to vote for Trump — whom he had once called “unfit for office” — if the former president won the Republican nomination. But to some, he was still a traitor.

“How did you vote to impeach Trump when he said in his [Jan. 6] speech, ‘I want a peaceful demonstration,’” a man angrily asked. “You don’t have to go any further than that to know that he was right and that he shouldn’t have been impeached.”

“I was there,” another man called out. “We were peaceful.”

“No shouting now,” the emcee said.

Then-Rep. Peter Meijer, a Republican, voted in 2021 to impeach President Donald Trump. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)

One audience member accused Meijer of taking a bribe in exchange for his impeachment vote.

Another challenged him to name five “political prisoners from Jan. 6” who were “sitting in prison and falsely accused.” I watched Meijer struggle to complete a sentence before being cut off.

A third person pointed a finger at him as he questioned whether Meijer was actually in the Capitol complex on Jan. 6, 2021, as he’d claimed.

“I have a photo I took in the House,” Meijer said, trying to defend himself without sounding defensive. Mostly, he listened wide-eyed, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

An older woman asked, in a gentler tone, if Meijer would redo his impeachment vote if he could. Would he at least have abstained instead of voting “yes”?

Meijer responded by saying that when he was in Congress, someone had once joked that they’d throw him off a bridge if he ever voted “present.”

A deep voice rang out on the far side of the room. The man in the “Stand for God” shirt.

“Sorry?” Meijer said, not hearing him.

The man repeated himself: “You should’ve gotten thrown off the bridge.”

A crowd gathers outside the Capitol at a pro-Trump protest on Jan. 6, 2021. (Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/AP Images) The System Falls Apart

What divides the Republican Party of 2024 is not any one policy or ideology. It is not whether to support Donald Trump. The most important fault line in the party now is democracy itself. Today’s Republican insurgents believe democracy has been stolen, and they don’t trust the ability of democratic processes to restore it.

This phenomenon is evident across the country, in Georgia and Nevada, in Arizona, Idaho and Florida. But it’s perhaps the starkest in Michigan, a place long associated with political pragmatism and a business-friendly GOP, embodied by governors George Romney, John Engler and, most recently, Rick Snyder. It was a son of Michigan, former President Gerald Ford, who once said, “I have never mistaken moderation for weakness, nor civility for surrender.”

I grew up in Michigan. My own political education and my early years as a journalist coincided with a stunning Republican resurgence in my home state. Over several decades, Michigan’s dynastic families — the DeVoses and Meijers and Van Andels on the west side, the Romneys and Fords on the east — poured money and manpower into the Michigan Republican Party, building it into one of the most vaunted political operations in the country. They transformed Michigan from a bastion of organized labor that leaned Democratic into a toss-up state that, until recently, had a right-to-work law and put Republicans in control of all three branches of government for eight of the last 14 years. Michigan Republicans were so successful that other states copied their tactics. As Dick DeVos, heir to the Amway fortune and a prolific Republican donor, once told a gathering of conservative activists, “If we can do it in Michigan, you can do it anywhere.”

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Several years ago, however, my home state stopped making sense to me. I watched as thousands of political newcomers, whose sole qualification appeared to be fervor of belief, declared war on the Republican establishment that had been so dominant. Calling themselves the “America First” movement, these unknowns treated the DeVoses and other party leaders as the enemy. I had covered the DeVoses and the Michigan Republican Party long enough to know that they were not just pro-business but staunch conservatives who wanted to slash taxes, abolish regulations and remake the public education system in favor of vouchers and parochial schools. Yet the new “America First” activists disparaged prominent Michigan Republicans as “globalist” elites who belonged to a corrupt “uniparty” cabal. That cabal had denied Trump a rightful second term and needed to be purged from the party.

With a consequential election looming, I traveled back to Michigan earlier this year to understand how this all happened. I sought out the activists waging this struggle, a group of people who don’t trust institutions or individuals except Trump and one another — and sometimes not even that. Could they triumph over the elites? I found chaos, incompetence, strife, a glimpse of a future post-Trump Republican Party and, all around me, danger for our system of government and the state of the country.

“We can’t keep going through election after election like this where a large plurality of the country just does not accept the outcome of the majority and refuses to abide by it,” said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who now works with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “That’s when the system falls apart.”

Trump at a 2024 rally in Waterford Township, Michigan (Scott Olson/Getty Images) A Call From God

After Peter Meijer’s event in Kent County, I drove west toward Lake Michigan to meet a plumber named Ken Beyer for lunch. Barrel-chested and with a neatly trimmed goatee, Beyer is in his late 50s but looks younger. He’s disarmingly earnest, the kind of guy who’d offer to help you fix a flat tire in a snowstorm. In less than two years, Beyer had risen from a political nobody to a district chair in the state GOP and a leader of the “America First” movement in Michigan. He is known for his fiery videos, in which he might equate a rival to Adolf Hitler or warn that “the storm is upon us.” Like many of his “America First” allies, he questions whether democracy still exists in this country. “I don’t know if any election is fair anymore,” he said.

Over chicken tenders and iced tea, Beyer, a church-going Christian, told me about a series of what he saw as divine revelations that had delivered him to this point. The pandemic and 2020 election had shaken him. He no longer recognized his own country. He feared that the moment had come, he said, “where freedom and the American dream end.”

Ken Beyer, a Republican district chair, feels he is on a divine mission. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica)

His next revelation happened on Jan. 6, 2021. Because he was convinced that Democrats stole the White House from Trump, he had gone to Washington to make his voice heard and show support for the president. Standing on the steps of the Capitol, he encountered a reporter with the conservative outlet Newsmax who needed help carrying gear. Beyer grabbed a tripod and backpack and filled in as a makeshift field producer for one of the biggest events of the 21st century. “What God wanted me to do,” he later said, “was help capture the history of what’s happening and get the truth out of what really was going on there.”

Back in Michigan, Beyer enlisted the help of a young videographer who had produced content for Beyer’s plumbing business, and together they churned out videos about COVID-19 (overblown), election fraud (rampant) and the “truth” of Jan. 6 (“a big prayer meeting”). He read about disturbing allegations about voting-machine software changing votes. He listened to poll workers allege that mysterious suitcases of mail-in ballots had arrived overnight at the state’s largest ballot-processing site in downtown Detroit (a claim that was later debunked). The more he heard, the more he came to believe that his home state had been central to the Democrats’ plan to steal the 2020 election.

In his free time, Beyer urged Republican lawmakers to investigate the allegations of fraud made by Trump and his allies. Most Republicans brushed him off. A few, like Peter Meijer, had openly turned on Trump, voting for impeachment or dismissing Trump’s stolen-election theories. Beyer couldn’t understand it. “Why weren’t they fighting for him?” he said.

According to more experienced people in the party, there was a simple answer: Many of the claims brought forward weren’t true. A long-awaited investigation by a Republican-led state Senate committee found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” in Michigan.

If Republicans wouldn’t act, Beyer reasoned, then they were just as bad as the Democrats. Trump supporters in other states had also encountered Republican indifference in response to Trump’s fraud allegations. What were they supposed to do now?

Republican Party delegates listen to a speaker at a state GOP convention. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica) The Re-Founding Fathers

A solution arrived in the form of the “precinct strategy.” It was a plan promoted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to ensure that the political establishment in both parties didn’t “steal” future elections. Precincts are the smallest geographical unit in American elections. In Michigan, there are roughly 4,700 precincts typically made up of a few thousand active registered voters. Each precinct elects at least one delegate as its representative to a county convention, and sometimes three or four. In all, there are upwards of 8,000 delegate positions in Michigan.

If a state political party is a pyramid with a chairperson at the top, precinct delegates occupy the lowest, broadest tier. Until recently, it was an obscure position. Thousands of the seats often sit empty. If enough Trump supporters filled them, Bannon said, they could form a majority within the party, elect allies to leadership positions and, eventually, take control.

Ken Beyer had never heard of a precinct delegate until he stumbled across the website for MI Precinct First, a group inspired by Bannon’s plan. He decided to run. He believed that this, too, must be part of God’s plan for him. “I believe that He’s using people like me throughout the United States to become the re-founding fathers,” he told me.

The precinct strategy proved successful. In Michigan, thousands of new activists, many recruited by “America First” groups, became precinct delegates in 2022. In Ottawa County, a deeply conservative enclave along Lake Michigan, the number of delegates leapt from 170 to 330. The same trend played out in other battleground states. “The Trump apparatus did very little correct except infiltrate the party right down to the precinct level,” said Timmer, the former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. “Not just in Michigan but all over.”

The first test for the new “America First” delegates came in late August 2022. In Michigan, the voters select most nominees for elected office in a normal primary election. But for two key positions with oversight of elections — attorney general and secretary of state — the precinct delegates decide the party’s nominees at a statewide convention. These conventions were often sleepy affairs, the outcome predetermined. But this time, when the party’s chair, a wealthy donor and former U.S. ambassador named Ron Weiser, took the stage, the cavernous ballroom filled with boos and jeers.

“How many of you believe we can sweep in November?” Weiser asked.

“With the new people!” a woman wearing a “Keep America Great” hat yelled. “With ‘America First’!”

Over the opposition of Weiser and other longtime party operatives, the “America First” contingent nominated two election deniers for attorney general and secretary of state. Matthew DePerno, a combative lawyer who had promoted a viral yet baseless theory about voting fraud in tiny Antrim County, Michigan, vowed to use the power of the attorney general’s office to investigate election crimes. Kristina Karamo, a tall, commanding woman in her late 30s with a breathless speaking style, was the “America First” pick for secretary of state. A community college instructor and live-trivia host, Karamo had come to prominence after she testified before the Michigan Legislature about irregularities involving ballot counting and voting machines she said she’d witnessed as a poll challenger in Detroit in 2020.

The party convention nominated Kristina Karamo, who has argued that the 2020 election was illegitimate, to be the GOP secretary of state candidate in 2022. (Nic Antaya/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

As a show of political force, nominating DePerno and Karamo was impressive. As an electoral strategy, it was disastrous. Both candidates were trounced in November, and Michigan Democrats won control of all three branches of government for the first time in more than 30 years.

DePerno conceded defeat right away. Karamo did not. To outside observers, her stance was laughable: She had lost by 615,000 votes, roughly the population of Detroit. But Beyer and many other “America First” delegates saw Karamo’s actions as brave and principled, the opposite of DePerno’s cowardly and hypocritical concession. Several months later, she and DePerno ran against each other to be the next chair of the Michigan Republican Party. DePerno won endorsements from Trump and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and a funder of the election-fraud movement. But the delegates rallied behind Karamo and delivered her the victory. In just two years, Bannon’s precinct strategy had gone from a quixotic scheme to a reality.

No sooner had Karamo won than paranoia set in. Standing on the convention floor just before her victory, a well-connected precinct delegate approached Beyer to deliver a message. “He says, ‘Leadership is going to let you guys have this one,’” Beyer recalled. Karamo would be chair, in other words, because party leaders let it happen. Why’d they do that, Beyer asked. “Because they believe that they can make her fail quicker than they can Matt DePerno.”

File Number One

A state political party is like the HVAC unit of American politics. When it does its job, you don’t think about it. It hums away in the background, as unsexy as it is essential. State parties recruit candidates to run for office. They mobilize voters. They raise money that helps candidates spread their message and win elections.

Karamo had other priorities when she took over the Michigan Republican Party. Top of the list: “election integrity.” She created a new “election security operations” team to recruit hundreds of volunteers as poll challengers, dropbox monitors and recount specialists, and to serve on county canvassing boards, which certify the final vote count. To oversee this work, she enlisted grassroots activists best known for filing a lawsuit that accused Detroit’s election clerk of running an “illegal election” in 2022. (A judge dismissed the case, calling it “frivolous” and “rife with speculation.”) Training and embedding “America First” activists in every part of the election process was critical to the future of the party and the state. “Otherwise,” one of Karamo’s advisers told a group of activists, “the big money is going to come right back in and start doing all this for us and selecting all the candidates for us again.”

Karamo’s plan to “secure” elections had two objectives: Not only did she and her team hope to catch future cheating by the Democrats, but they sought revenge against the Republican establishment. To do that, Karamo turned to a lawyer and political outsider named James Copas. He was given a special project: write a new constitution for the state Republican Party that would give as much power as possible to precinct delegates. People like Ken Beyer.

There was no greater priority for Karamo’s team. “If you were to look in my records, I opened 82 different project files,” Copas told me. “The constitution was file number one.”

Karamo showed little interest in the day-to-day work of running the party. Bills went unpaid, emails unanswered. When members of the party’s state committee, in effect the board of directors, questioned her, she ignored them or removed them from leadership positions. Even her allies were critical. “I can tell you unequivocally that there was no chance that Kristina was qualified to be the chair,” Copas said. “So what? She was elected.” (Karamo did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Near the end of 2023, Copas circulated a draft of his proposed overhaul of the party constitution. The new constitution proposed a radical change: Eliminate open primary elections and replace them with closed caucuses. Under the current system, about a million people voted in an August GOP primary to choose nominees for local elected offices, state legislative seats, judgeships and federal House and Senate races. Instead of those million or so voters casting ballots, fewer than 10,000 precinct delegates — the same precinct delegates who had powered Karamo to victory — would meet behind closed doors and select the candidates.

The aim of this proposal, said Joel Studebaker, who was Karamo’s chief of staff, was to break up the “corruption club” that had ruled Michigan Republican politics for far too long. “We want something that’s pure,” he told me. “The best answer for that is putting power in the hands of the people.” The irony, critics pointed out, was that Karamo’s proposal would disenfranchise far more people than it empowered.

A portion of the preamble and introduction of a proposed new version of the Michigan Republican Party’s constitution (Obtained by ProPublica)

There was another reason the closed-caucus model appealed to the “America First” faithful: It meant there was no need for voting machines, mail-in ballots, high-speed scanners or any of the other technologies that election-fraud believers had spent the last two years railing against. “You’re eliminating cheating in the election system,” Beyer told me.

The backlash was fierce. “Nothing says ‘we respect democracy’ like cutting out millions of Michigan voters,” wrote one prominent Michigan conservative activist.

Karamo’s proposed voting reforms and the party’s dire finances plunged the organization into turmoil with the 2024 elections less than a year away. Even some of Karamo’s own supporters turned against her. Privately, a group of delegates discussed whether to urge her to step down for the good of the party. Karamo had no plans to resign. If her enemies wanted her gone, they would have to try to remove her.

And so they did: On Jan. 6, 2024, a group of anti-Karamo delegates on the Republican state committee invoked party bylaws and voted to remove Karamo as chair. Two weeks later, the same faction elected former U.S. representative Pete Hoekstra to replace her.

Former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra addresses the press at the 2024 convention of Michigan precinct delegates. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica) Up From the Ashes

By the time Trump walked onstage in Waterford Township, Michigan, in mid-February with his red hat pulled low, the Michigan Republican Party was a national punchline. Karamo had refused to leave office, saying the vote to oust her was “illegitimate.” An unsigned statement issued by the state GOP called it a “political lynching.” Her critics filed a lawsuit in state court to enforce the removal vote, and Karamo said only a judge’s order could make her leave. In the meantime, she urged her followers to travel to Detroit on March 2 for a special convention. There, they would vote on her controversial plan to rewrite the Michigan GOP’s constitution.

At his mid-February rally, Trump waded into the chaotic mess that was the Michigan Republican Party despite his supporters urging him not to. He described Hoekstra as “your new Michigan Republican Party chairman,” a line that was greeted with a mix of cheers and boos. The boos continued as Trump said he’d recommended Hoekstra for the job. “I said, ‘Do you think you could ever get this guy Hoekstra? He’s unbelievable,’” Trump said.

The Trump campaign seemed to recognize that the longer Karamo remained in charge, the weaker the state party was and the less chance he had to win Michigan. For both Trump and Biden, Michigan is arguably a must-win state.

Still, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters saw his support for Hoekstra as a betrayal. “I’m not happy with Mr. Trump right now,” one voter said at a Republican town hall I attended. “I think he should keep his nose out of Michigan politics.” When I asked Beyer what he thought, he said he suspected Trump was playing a double game. “If you know anything about election integrity, you know it’s a rigged program here,” he said. For Trump to win, “he’s gotta join the riggers.” I heard a Karamo supporter say she had read on “Truth” — meaning Truth Social, the social media platform partly owned by Trump — that Trump hadn’t even written the endorsement of Hoekstra that appeared on his account.

Around the time of Trump’s visit to Michigan, I went to hear Karamo speak in Saginaw County, an hour and a half north of Detroit. The event was part of a barnstorming tour of the state meant to rally her supporters and assure them that she remained the party’s legitimate leader. To her supporters, the date of the vote to remove her, Jan. 6, 2024, had taken on a mythological quality — it was the new Jan. 6. Their Jan. 6. The audience sat rapt as Karamo told them that it wasn’t just 2020 and 2022 that were rigged. “Our election system has been corrupted for decades. There’s an entire network protecting the corrupt system.”

At the end of her remarks, she reminded her supporters to go to Detroit on March 2. The date had taken on an outsize significance. Not only would delegates choose which presidential candidate received Michigan’s 39 remaining delegates on the path to the Republican nomination, but they would vote on Karamo’s constitution plan. Hoekstra, who was calling himself the rightful chair, was planning a separate event on the same day in Grand Rapids. The schism in the party would be on full display.

A few days before the dueling conventions, a judge issued a preliminary ruling that Karamo had been properly removed. The Detroit convention was called off, and her constitutional overhaul was shelved for the time being. With Karamo’s event canceled, Beyer, now a regional GOP chairman as well as a delegate, said he would carry the torch for the “America First” movement. In an act of defiance aimed at “Adolf” Hoekstra, as Beyer called him, he and Studebaker announced their own miniconvention.

On the morning of March 2, Beyer picked me up at a Wendy’s on the drive to his breakaway convention. A deluge of text messages lit up his phone as we drove down the highway. Beyer told me that the theme for Hoekstra’s convention was “Up From the Ashes.”

“It’s fitting,” he said. “Because they lit the match. They don’t like the new group of people that have come in over the last two years.” He paused. “They’re burning down the Republican Party to get rid of people like me.”

After Beyer and Studebaker had run their protest convention, they jumped in Studebaker’s truck and drove to Hoekstra’s event in Grand Rapids. There, Studebaker ran into some operatives aligned with Trump’s team in Michigan. Studebaker was furious with them and with Trump for abandoning Karamo and for, as he saw it, thwarting the will of the delegates.

“He’s going to lose Michigan if he keeps doing this,” Studebaker said. The delegates will still vote for Trump, he added, but they’re not going to knock doors and they’re not going to give money. They might tune out of state and national elections and focus on local races.

The operatives were unmoved. “We gotta go,” one of them said. “Trump stuff.”

A constituent wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat at a state Republican convention in early March. (Nick Hagen for ProPublica) A Future Without Trump

Not long afterward, Trump disappointed his grassroots followers again. In Michigan’s high-stakes Republican Senate contest, Trump endorsed Mike Rogers, a former representative, all but assuring that Rogers would clinch the nomination in the August primary.

As for Peter Meijer, that throw-you-off-the-bridge exchange in the cafe in February had proved prophetic: His comeback bid was doomed. In late April, he dropped out.

Trump’s endorsement of Rogers left his supporters mystified. Like Meijer, he had been a vocal critic of Trump, once calling the former president “more gangster than presidential.” He had chaired the powerful House intelligence committee, which led Trump followers to label him a member of the “deep state.” A former aide to Trump had tweeted: “Can’t imagine a worse or more dangerous ‘Republican’ candidate for Senate than Mike Rogers.”

Jim Copas, who quit his role with the party shortly before Karamo was forced out, told me he was disgusted with Trump’s actions. “I’ve lost complete faith in the state GOP and I’ve lost complete faith in the national GOP,” he said. Speaking of Trump, he added: “To be honest, I think Don has learned a little bit about being a politician and he’s forgotten his soul.”

Beyer hadn’t given up on Trump. He still “loved” the man, he said, but he wasn’t taking direction from Trump. “I’m not gonna always listen to him,” Beyer told me. “I’m not part of a cult.”

He had his own plans. In one of our last conversations, he laid out a more religious, more uncompromising version of the “America First” movement. He had started his own PAC called Faith Family Freedom and he planned to target the precinct delegates around the state who had opposed Karamo and replace them with “America First” allies in the next round of delegate elections this August. He had already signed up 350 supporters in various counties, he said, to help with his efforts.

If the Republican establishment — the DeVoses and the Meijers, Pete Hoekstra and the people who had voted to remove Karamo — fought him and his compatriots, Beyer stood ready. “They’re not after Trump. They’re not after Kristina,” he told me. “They’re after me. They’re after everybody like me. That’s what this is all about.”

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by Michael Grabell

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Marshall Allen, a former ProPublica investigative reporter who relentlessly took on the U.S. health care system and fought for the rights of patients facing unfair medical bills, died Sunday at a hospital in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was 52.

The cause was a heart attack, said Sonja Allen, his wife of 29 years.

Guided by his Christian faith, Allen approached his stories with the moral conviction that doctors, hospitals, drugmakers and health insurers could be less wasteful and more transparent and humane. His stories showed that drug companies purposely made eyedrops too big and set unnecessarily short expiration dates for drugs that were still effective and safe, leading to waste and driving up costs.

With other reporters, he analyzed millions of Medicare records to create “Surgeon Scorecard,” a ProPublica database that allowed patients to see for the first time the death and complication rates of surgeons performing common procedures like knee replacements and gallbladder removals. In another story, he showed how a hospital system refused to cover the care of an employee’s premature baby, leaving her with a bill for $898,984.57. Within days of Allen calling the system’s media representative, it promised to cover the bill.

“He would be our tour guide to things that were incredibly enraging,” said Tracy Weber, a ProPublica managing editor who worked with Allen. “He would walk us through it, and then he'd show us how it didn’t have to be that way.”

Allen’s journalism won numerous honors. A series of stories he did on patient safety in Las Vegas hospitals while at the Las Vegas Sun won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. He was one of the first people at ProPublica to volunteer to cover the COVID-19 pandemic and was a member of the team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer in public service in 2021. That year, Allen also published a book, “Never Pay the First Bill: And Other Ways to Fight the Health Care System and Win,” which showed consumers how to advocate for themselves.

More than the honors, his stories exposing medical scams, waste in the health care system and hidden incentives in the insurance industry steadily achieved impact and motivated people in power to make changes.

“Marshall had this curiosity about the health care system that allowed him to explore stories with a freshness that many veteran health care reporters can’t do,” said Charles Ornstein, a ProPublica managing editor and longtime health journalist.

That curiosity led him to receive an award as one of America’s “Top Doctors,” despite having no medical credentials. Rather than ignoring a voice message from a telemarketer, calling about his “Top Doctor” award, Allen decided to inquire, exposing the absurdity of the accolades in the process.

After he explained that he was actually a journalist, not a doctor, he asked if he could still receive the award. Indeed, he could — for a “reduced rate” of $289.

Allen came to journalism through his work as a Christian missionary. After graduating from the University of Colorado Boulder with an English degree, he spent five years as an evangelical minister, including three in Kenya, and earned a master’s degree in theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in California.

While he and his wife were in Kenya, he started writing newsletters and reports to his family about their experiences, Sonja Allen said. “He just came to life when he started to write,” she said. “I would say the No. 1 thing that motivated his work was his belief in the Bible, of standing up for what's right.”

But not all editors saw it that way. In an interview for one of his first journalism jobs, a hard-nosed editor questioned Allen about how his faith background would prepare him for reporting.

“I explained what I saw as a natural progression from the ministry to muckraking, pointing out that both are valid ways of serving a higher cause,” Allen wrote in a 2018 essay that was copublished in The New York Times. “The Bible endorses telling the truth, without bias. So does journalism. The Bible commands honesty and integrity. In journalism, your reputation is your main calling card with sources and readers.”

After a few years working for community newspapers in Southern California, he joined the Las Vegas Sun. There, his editor asked him to cover health care.

“Marshall’s exact words were, ‘I couldn’t imagine anything more boring than health care,’” Sonja Allen said.

But he soon discovered an endlessly intriguing and infuriating beat, challenging what many people accepted as just the way it is. The opening to the series that won the Goldsmith began, “There’s a running joke about hospitals here: ‘Where do you go for great health care in Las Vegas?’ ‘The airport.’ The implication is everyone knows hospital care in Southern Nevada is substandard.”

Allen and his colleague showed that health care insiders had access to information that the public didn’t. Analyzing records on preventable infections and injuries, they provided consumers with quality-of-care data that allowed them to make better decisions and led to new state laws.

In 2011, Allen was hired by ProPublica, where he began to dig into surgical complications.

“Everybody told Marshall that this was impossible, that you could never do this, that you could never do this right, that you should leave this to the pros,” Ornstein said. “And, of course, Marshall was completely undaunted by this challenge.”

Marshall Allen reporting from a hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, in 2014 (Daymon Hartley for ProPublica)

Farley Chase, Allen’s literary agent, described him in almost identical terms: “He was insulted by the inscrutability of the health care system but had this kind of like just roll-up-your-sleeves, undaunted-by-any-kind-of-challenge attitude.”

In addition to his steadfastness, Allen was known in the newsroom for his generosity, especially as a mentor to younger reporters.

Caroline Chen, who covers health care, said that when she moved across the country to New York, Allen immediately invited her and her husband over for dinner.

“He was just generous in every way, like talking over stories,” she said. “He sent me sources. I’d send him sources. We would sometimes take a peek at each other’s drafts.”

When COVID-19 hit, Allen, Chen and others raced to pursue stories in a stressful environment. But no matter how late it was, Chen said, he kept his cool as a team player with no ego.

Allen’s passion for mentoring others extended into teaching at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. In 2020, he edited a project for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, showing how New Jersey police unions had cut deals to shield cops from accountability while increasing their benefits.

In 2021, Allen decided to leave journalism to tackle the problems he saw in the health care system directly by working for the Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. There, he led work tracking pandemic relief funds and helped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention improve the process for nursing homes to report COVID-19 data, the agency said.

But Allen never gave up his passion for writing — or for helping patients. Following the success of his book, he started a Substack newsletter where he continued to expose abuses in the health care system and give consumers advice about how to fight medical bills. He created a company called Allen Health Academy to turn his book into video tutorials and regularly spoke at conferences for health insurance brokers and benefits advisers, where he would offer to lend a hand.

“Hundreds and hundreds of people called him, and he helped them navigate their bills,” Sonja Allen said. He never charged anyone and used any money he received from his newsletter to hire patient advocates for people who needed additional help, she said.

To extend his reach further, Allen had recently created an AI clone of himself, she said, training it on all his articles, his book and podcasts and teaching it to mimic his own voice, so that more people could tap into his knowledge.

At home, Allen was deeply involved in his church, teaching Sunday school and leading a group of men, encouraging them to be good husbands and fathers, his wife said. He was a coffee connoisseur and roasted his own beans. “You could smell it when you drove up because the whole neighborhood smelled like coffee,” she said.

But more than anything, Sonja Allen said, he dreamed of being a good father to his three sons, Isaac, Ashton and Cody. He came up with quizzes to ensure they paid attention in church and invented games that made him famous for his neighborhood birthday parties.

In one, played outside at night, his sons’ friends had to sneak through the dark and place a penny in a plastic bin hidden in the woods. But if Allen shined his flashlight on them, they were out.

“He could totally see the kids, but he would, you know, kind of pretend that he couldn’t see them,” his wife said. “They were crawling on the ground and hiding behind trees and, you know, giggling, and then he would kind of pass by them like he didn’t see them. And then he would turn around and catch people every so often with his flashlight.”

Allen went into cardiac arrest on Thursday and was rushed to Baylor Scott & White Medical Center-Grapevine, where he died Sunday surrounded by friends and family. Dr. Marty Makary, a friend and professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who hired Allen to edit two of his books, said he visited him in the hospital.

“In the final hours, this is what I told him,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Marshall, we watched you fight tirelessly for the voiceless and become a fierce advocate for the defenseless — a fight many will continue.”

Friends have created a GoFundMe page to help support the family.

by Talia Buford

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We are pleased to announce the 10 journalists chosen as the 2024 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program.

The ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program was established in 2023 to expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country, with a focus on journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.

This program is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports journalism, film and arts organizations whose work is dedicated to social justice and strengthening democracy.

Participants will undergo a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, with courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors. After the boot camp, participants will gather virtually every two months for continuing development seminars and be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on their work and careers.

This year, 115 people applied for the program.

“ProPublica is proud to continue this unique program, which aims to help diversify the industry by providing investigative editing training to journalists from underrepresented backgrounds,” said Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief of ProPublica.

We’re thrilled to introduce the 2024 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program:

Rebekah Allen is the politics editor of The Texas Tribune, an award-winning nonprofit newsroom that focuses on policy and politics. She oversees a team based in Austin and Washington, D.C., that reports on government accountability and political influence. Previously, Rebekah was a state government reporter at The Dallas Morning News. Before that, she worked as an investigative reporter at The Advocate/Times Picayune in South Louisiana, where she was named Louisiana Reporter of the Year in 2018 by the Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press and Media Editors Contest. She was in the inaugural cohort of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

Liz Brazile is the deputy online managing editor at KUOW Public Radio in Seattle, where she helps oversee the newsroom’s daily web coverage and digital news strategy and edits stories across various beats. Liz joined KUOW in January 2020 as an online editor/producer, splitting her time between reporting and editing. Prior to that, Liz covered education for Crosscut/KCTS 9. She is also an alumna of YES! Magazine, WLWT-TV and The Cincinnati Herald. Liz is senior vice president on the board of the Seattle Association of Black Journalists.

Ana Campoy is an editor in The Washington Post’s climate team, where she oversees the Climate Solutions vertical and other climate reporters who focus on innovative storytelling. She started her journalism career at her hometown newspaper in Monterrey, Mexico, before covering the oil industry and national news for The Wall Street Journal. Her reporting portfolio ranged from complex data projects to quirky features on such topics as suburban feral pigs. Before arriving at the Post, Ana was an editor at Quartz, where she led a team of international reporters covering the inner workings of the global economy.

Leah Donnella is a senior editor on NPR’s award-winning Code Switch team, which reports on race, identity, politics and culture. In her role, Leah edits the Code Switch podcast and writes the weekly newsletter, which analyzes how race intersects with the biggest news stories around the country. She has worked on the Code Switch team since 2015, reporting on everything from Donald Trump’s entrance into presidential politics to the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder to how Jewish American identity has been reshaped since the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. Before coming to NPR, Leah worked at WHYY in Philadelphia, where she supported the Public Media Commons, which trains young people who are interested in becoming journalists.

Subrina Hudson is the business editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, where she manages a team under the newly created Money desk that helps readers understand how business impacts their daily lives. Previously, she was the business editor at the Las Vegas Review-Journal after serving as the assistant business editor. She joined the Review-Journal as a retail reporter and expanded her coverage to include real estate and unemployment. She has also been a reporter at the Orange County Business Journal, The Real Deal and the Los Angeles Business Journal. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s in journalism from Boston University.

Clarissa A. León serves as the deputy editor for Documented, New York's go-to source for immigration news. At Documented, she works on advancing newsroom operations and community engagement reporting. Previously, she held numerous positions as an editor, researcher, reporter and educator. Originally from Reno, Nevada, she is now based in New Jersey.

Asraa Mustufa is managing editor at The Examination, an investigative news outlet focused on global health. She was previously an editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, where she worked on the award-winning Pandora Papers investigation and other global reporting collaborations. She’s also served as an editor, digital producer and social media specialist helping shape and promote investigative reporting and news products in Chicago on a range of topics including COVID-19 data, police misconduct, public school funding and local elections.

Soo Oh is an investigative editor at The Markup. Before joining The Markup, she was the data editor at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. She has reported stories, analyzed data, coded interactive visuals, and built internal tools at the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Wall Street Journal, Vox, the Los Angeles Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2018, she was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where she researched how to better manage and support journalists with technical skills.

Maye Primera is the editorial director at El Tímpano, a civic media organization serving and covering the Bay Area’s Latino and Mayan immigrants. She has worked as a reporter and editor for more than 20 years, covering politics, immigration, borders, human rights, and violence in Latin America and the U.S. Her enterprise multimedia work has received a national News and Documentary Emmy Award, the Hillman Prize, the RFK Human Rights Award, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, two King of Spain Awards, and the Ortega and Gasset prize. Primera is an alumna of the executive program in news innovation and leadership at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Naveena Sadasivam is an investigative journalist at Grist covering the oil and gas industry and climate change. She previously worked at the Texas Observer, Inside Climate News and ProPublica and has won accolades from the Society of Environmental Journalists, Society of Professional Journalists and Online News Association, among others. She is based in Oakland, California.

by Sharon Lerner, photography by Haruka Sakaguchi, special to ProPublica

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This story is exempt from our Creative Commons license until July 19.

Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-­it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination.

Several of 3M’s most successful products contained man-made compounds called fluorochemicals. In a spray called Scotchgard, fluorochemicals protected leather and fabric from stains. In a coating known as Scotchban, they prevented food packaging from getting soggy. In a soapy foam used by firefighters, they helped extinguish jet-fuel fires. Johnson explained to Hansen that one of the company’s fluorochemicals, PFOS — short for perfluorooctanesulfonic acid — often found its way into the bodies of 3M factory workers. Although he said that they were unharmed, he had recently hired an outside lab to measure the levels in their blood. The lab had just reported something odd, however. For the sake of comparison, it had tested blood samples from the American Red Cross, which came from the general population and should have been free of fluorochemicals. Instead, it kept finding a contaminant in the blood.

Johnson asked Hansen to figure out whether the lab had made a mistake. Detecting trace levels of chemicals was her specialty: She had recently written a doctoral dissertation about tiny particles in the atmosphere. Hansen’s team of lab technicians and junior scientists fetched a blood sample from a lab-­supply company and prepped it for analysis. Then Hansen switched on an oven-­size box known as a mass spectrometer, which weighs molecules so that scientists can identify them.

As the lab equipment hummed around her, Hansen loaded a sample into the machine. A graph appeared on the mass spectrometer’s display; it suggested that there was a compound in the blood that could be PFOS. That’s weird, Hansen thought. Why would a chemical produced by 3M show up in people who had never worked for the company?

Hansen didn’t want to share her results until she was certain that they were correct, so she and her team spent several weeks analyzing more blood, often in time-consuming overnight tests. All the samples appeared to be contaminated. When Hansen used a more precise method, liquid chromatography, the results left little doubt that the chemical in the Red Cross blood was PFOS.

Hansen now felt obligated to update her boss. Johnson was a towering, bearded man, and she liked him: He seemed to trust her expertise, and he found something to laugh about in most conversations. But, when she shared her findings, his response was cryptic. “This changes everything,” he said. Before she could ask him what he meant, he went into his office and closed the door.

This was not the first time that Hansen had found a chemical where it didn’t belong. A wiry woman who grew up skiing competitively, Hansen had always liked to spend time outdoors; for her chemistry thesis at Williams College, she had kayaked around the former site of an electric company on the Hoosic River, collecting crayfish and testing them for industrial pollutants called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Her research, which showed that a drainage ditch at the site was leaking the chemicals, prompted a news story and contributed to a cleanup effort overseen by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. At 3M, Hansen assumed that her bosses would respond to her findings with the same kind of diligence and care.

Hansen stayed near Johnson’s office for the rest of the day, anxiously waiting for him to react to her research. He never did. In the days that followed, Hansen sensed that Johnson had notified some of his superiors. She remembers his boss, Dale Bacon, a paunchy fellow with gray hair, stopping by her desk and suggesting that she had made a mistake. “I don’t think so,” she told him. In subsequent weeks, Hansen and her team ordered fresh blood samples from every supplier that 3M worked with. Each of the samples tested positive for PFOS.

3M Global Headquarters in Maplewood, Minnesota

In the middle of this testing, Johnson suddenly announced that he would be taking early retirement. After he packed up his office and left, Hansen felt adrift. She was so new to corporate life that her office clothes — pleated pants and dress shirts — still felt like a costume. Johnson had always guided her research, and he hadn’t told Hansen what she should do next. She reminded herself of what he had said — that the chemical wasn’t harmful in factory workers. But she couldn’t be sure that it was harmless. She knew that PCBs, for example, were mass-produced for years before studies showed that they accumulate in the food chain and cause a range of health issues, including damage to the brain. The most reliable way to gauge the safety of chemicals is to study them over time, in animals and, if possible, in humans.

What Hansen didn’t know was that 3M had already conducted animal studies — two decades earlier. They had shown PFOS to be toxic, yet the results remained secret, even to many at the company. In one early experiment, conducted in the late ’70s, a group of 3M scientists fed PFOS to rats on a daily basis. Starting at the second-lowest dose that the scientists tested, about 10 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, the rats showed signs of possible harm to their livers, and half of them died. At higher doses, every rat died. Soon afterward, 3M scientists found that a relatively low daily dose, 4.5 milligrams for every kilogram of body weight, could kill a monkey within weeks. (Based on this result, the chemical would currently fall into the highest of five toxicity levels recognized by the United Nations.) This daily dose of PFOS was orders of magnitude greater than the amount that the average person would ingest, but it was still relatively low — roughly comparable to the dose of aspirin in a standard tablet.

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In 1979, an internal company report deemed PFOS “certainly more toxic than anticipated” and recommended longer-term studies. That year, 3M executives flew to San Francisco to consult Harold Hodge, a respected toxicologist. They told Hodge only part of what they knew: that PFOS had sickened and even killed laboratory animals and had caused liver abnormalities in factory workers. According to a 3M document that was marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” Hodge urged the executives to study whether the company’s fluorochemicals caused reproductive issues or cancer. After reviewing more data, he told one of them to find out whether the chemicals were present “in man,” and he added, “If the levels are high and widespread and the half-life is long, we could have a serious problem.” Yet Hodge’s warning was omitted from official meeting notes, and the company’s fluorochemical production increased over time.

Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic. In the weeks after Johnson left 3M, however, she felt that she was under a new level of scrutiny. One of her superiors suggested that her equipment might be contaminated, so she cleaned the mass spectrometer and then the entire lab. Her results didn’t change. Another encouraged her to repeatedly analyze her syringes, bags and test tubes, in case they had tainted the blood. (They had not.) Her managers were less concerned about PFOS, it seemed to Hansen, than about the chance that she was wrong.

Sometimes Hansen doubted herself. She was 28 and had only recently earned her Ph.D. But she continued her experiments, if only to respond to the questions of her managers. 3M bought three additional mass spectrometers, which each cost more than a car, and Hansen used them to test more blood samples. In late 1997, her new boss, Bacon, even had her fly out to the company that manufactured the machines, so that she could repeat her tests there. She studied the blood of hundreds of people from more than a dozen blood banks in various states. Each sample contained PFOS. The chemical seemed to be everywhere.

When 3M was founded, in 1902, it was known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. After its mining operations flopped, the company pivoted to sandpaper and then to a series of clever inventions aimed at improving everyday life. An early employee noticed that autoworkers were struggling to paint two-tone cars, which were popular at the time; he eventually invented masking tape, using crêpe paper and cabinetmaker’s glue. Another 3M employee created Post-it notes to help him bookmark passages in his church hymnal. An official history of 3M, published for the company’s 100th anniversary, celebrated its “tolerance for tinkerers.”

Fluorochemicals had their origins in the American effort to build the atomic bomb. During the Second World War, scientists for the Manhattan Project developed one of the first safe processes for bonding carbon to fluorine, a dangerously reactive element that experts had nicknamed “the wildest hellcat” of chemistry. After the war, 3M hired some Manhattan Project chemists and began mass-producing chains of carbon atoms bonded to fluorine atoms. The resulting chemicals proved to be astonishingly versatile, in part because they resist oil, water and heat. They are also incredibly long-lasting, earning them the moniker “forever chemicals.”

In the early ’50s, 3M began selling one of its fluorochemicals, PFOA, to the chemical company DuPont for use in Teflon. Then, a couple of years later, a dollop of fluorochemical goo landed on a 3M employee’s tennis shoe, where it proved impervious to stains and impossible to wipe off. 3M now had the idea for Scotchgard and Scotchban. By the time Hansen was in elementary school, in the ’70s, both products were ubiquitous. Restaurants served French fries in Scotchban-treated packaging. Hansen’s mother sprayed Scotchgard on the living-­room couch.

Hansen grew up in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, not far from 3M’s headquarters. Her father was one of the company’s star engineers and was even inducted into its hall of fame in 1979; he had helped to create Scotch-Brite scouring pads and Coban wrap, a soft alternative to sticky bandages. Once, he molded some fibers into cups, thinking that they might make a good bra. They turned out to be miserably uncomfortable, so he and his colleagues placed them over their mouths, giving the company the inspiration for its signature N95 mask.

First image: Lake Elmo, Minnesota, the town not far from 3M headquarters where Kris Hansen grew up. Second image: Family photos of Paul Hansen, Kris’ father, at 3M functions over the years.

Hansen never intended to follow her father to the company. She spent her childhood summers catching turtles and leopard frogs at the lake and hoped to have a career in environmental conservation. Her first job after earning her chemistry Ph.D. was on a boat, which took her to remote parts of the Pacific Ocean. But the voyage left her so seasick that she lost 20 pounds, and she soon retreated to Minnesota. In 1996, at her father’s suggestion, Hansen applied for a position in 3M’s environmental lab.

After Hansen started her PFOS research, her relationships with some colleagues seemed to deteriorate. One afternoon in 1998, a trim 3M epidemiologist named Geary Olsen arrived with several vials of blood and asked her to test them. The next morning, she read the results to him and several colleagues — positive for PFOS. As Hansen remembers it, Olsen looked triumphant. “Those samples came from my horse,” he said — and his horse certainly wasn’t eating at McDonald’s or trotting on Scotchgarded carpets. Hansen felt that he was trying to humiliate her. (Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.) What Hansen wanted to know was how PFOS was making its way into animals.

She found an answer in data from lab rats, which also appeared to have fluorochemicals in their blood. Rats that had more fish meal in their diets, she discovered, tended to have higher levels of PFOS, suggesting that the chemical had spread through the food chain and perhaps through water. In male lab rats, PFOS levels rose with age, indicating that the chemical accumulated in the body. But, curiously, in female rats the levels sometimes fell. Hansen was unsettled when toxicology reports indicated why: Mother rats seemed to be offloading the chemical to their pups. Exposure to PFOS could begin before birth.

Another study confirmed that Scotchban and Scotchgard were sources of the chemical. PFOS wasn’t an official ingredient in either product, but both ­contained other fluorochemicals that, the study showed, broke down into PFOS in the bodies of lab rats. Hansen and her team ultimately found PFOS in eagles, chickens, rabbits, cows, pigs and other animals. They also found 14 ­additional fluorochemicals in human blood, including several produced by 3M. Some were present in wastewater from a 3M factory.

At one point, Hansen told her father, Paul, that she was frustrated by the way senior colleagues kept questioning her work. Paul had recently retired, but he had confidence in 3M’s top executives, and he suggested that she take her findings directly to them. But as a relatively new employee — and one of the few women scientists at a company of about 75,000 people — Hansen found the idea preposterous. When Paul offered to talk to some of 3M’s executives himself, she was mortified at the idea of her father interceding.

Hansen knew that if she could find a blood sample that didn’t contain PFOS then she might be able to convince her colleagues that the other samples did. She and her team began to study historical blood from the early decades of PFOS production. They soon found the chemical in blood from a 1969-71 Michigan breast cancer study. Then they ran an overnight test on blood that had been collected in rural China during the ’80s and ’90s. If any place were PFOS-free, she figured, it would be somewhere remote, where 3M products weren’t in widespread use.

The next morning, anxious to see the results, Hansen arrived at the lab before anyone else. For the first time since she had begun testing blood, some of the samples showed no trace of PFOS. She was so struck that she called her husband. There was nothing wrong with her equipment or methodology; PFOS, a man-made chemical produced by her employer, really was in human blood, practically everywhere. Hansen’s team found it in Swedish blood samples from 1957 and 1971. After that, her lab analyzed blood that had been collected before 3M created PFOS. It tested negative. Apparently, fluorochemicals had entered human blood after the company started selling products that contained them. They had leached out of 3M’s sprays, coatings and factories — and into all of us.

That summer, an in-house librarian at 3M delivered a surprising article to Hansen’s office mailbox. It had been written in 1981 by 3M scientists, and it described a method for measuring fluorine in blood, indicating that even back then the company was testing for fluorochemicals. One scientist mentioned in the article, Richard Newmark, still worked for 3M, in a low-lying structure nicknamed the “nerdy building.” Hansen arranged to meet with him there.

Newmark, a collegial man with a compact build, told Hansen that, more than 20 years before, two academic scientists, Donald Taves and Warren Guy, had discovered a fluorochemical in human blood. They had wondered whether Scotchgard might be its source, so they approached 3M. Newmark told her that his subsequent experiments had confirmed their suspicions — the chemical was PFOS — but 3M lawyers had urged his lab not to admit it.

As Hansen wrote all this down in a notebook, she felt anger rising inside her. Why had so many colleagues doubted the soundness of her results if earlier 3M experiments had already proved the same thing? After the meeting, she hurried back to the lab to find Bacon. “He knew!” she told him.

Bacon’s face remained expressionless. He told Hansen to type up her notes for him. She remembers him telling her not to email them. (In response to questions about Hansen’s account, Bacon said that he didn’t remember specifics. When I called Newmark, he told me that he could not remember her or anything about PFOS. “It’s been a very long time, and I’m in my mid-80s, and just do not remember stuff that well,” he said.)

A few months later, in early 1999, Bacon invited Hansen to an extraordinary meeting: She would have the chance to present her findings to 3M’s CEO, Livio D. DeSimone. Hansen spent several days rehearsing while driving and making dinner. On the day of the meeting, she took an elevator up to the executive suite; her stomach turned as a secretary pointed her to a conference room. Men in suits sat around a long table. Her boss, Bacon, was there. DeSimone, a portly man with white hair, sat at the head of the table.

A photo that Kris Hansen saved shows her father, Paul, with 3M CEO Livio D. DeSimone.

Almost as soon as Hansen placed her first transparency on the projector, the attendees began interrogating her: Why did she do this research? Who directed her to do it? Whom did she inform of the results? The executives seemed to view her diligence as a betrayal: Her data could be damaging to the company. She remembers defending herself, mentioning Newmark’s similar work in the ’70s and trying, unsuccessfully, to direct the conversation back to her research. While the executives talked over her, Hansen noticed that DeSimone’s eyes had closed and that his chin was resting on his dress shirt. The CEO appeared to have fallen asleep. (DeSimone died in 2017. A company spokesperson did not answer my questions about the meeting.)

After that meeting, Hansen remembers learning from Bacon that her job would be changing. She would only be allowed to do experiments that a supervisor had specifically requested, and she was to share her data with only that person. She would spend most of her time analyzing samples for studies that other employees were conducting, and she should not ask questions about what the results meant. Several members of her team were also being reassigned. Bacon explained that a different scientist at 3M would lead research into PFOS going forward. Hansen felt that she was being punished and struggled not to cry.

Even as Hansen was being sidelined, the results of her research were quietly making their way into the files of the Environmental Protection Agency. Since the ’70s, federal law has required that companies tell the EPA about any evidence indicating that a company’s products present “a substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” In May 1998, 3M officials notified the agency, without informing Hansen, that the company had measured PFOS in blood samples from around the U.S. — a clear reference to Hansen’s work. It did not mention its animal research from the ’70s, and it said that the chemical caused “no adverse effects” at the levels the company had measured in its workers. A year later, 3M sent the EPA another letter, again without telling Hansen. This time, it informed the agency about the 14 other fluorochemicals, several of them made by 3M, that Hansen’s team had detected in human blood. The company reiterated that it did not believe that its products presented a substantial risk to human health.

Hansen recalls that in the summer of 1999, at an annual picnic that her parents hosted for 3M scientists, she was grilling corn when one of the creators of Scotchgard, a gray-haired man in glasses, confronted her. He accused her of trying to tear down the work of her colleagues. Did it make her feel powerful ruining other people’s careers? he asked. Hansen didn’t know how to respond, and he walked away.

Several of Hansen’s superiors had stopped greeting her in the hallways. When she presented a poster of her research at a 3M event, nobody asked her about it. She lost her appetite, and her pleated pants grew baggy. She started to worry that an angry co-worker might confront or even harm her in the company’s dark parking lot. She got into the habit of calling her husband before walking to her car.

A year after Hansen’s meeting with the CEO, 3M, under pressure from the EPA, made a very costly decision: It was going to discontinue its entire portfolio of PFOS-­related chemicals. In May 2000, for the first time, 3M officials revealed to the press that it had detected the chemical in blood banks. One executive claimed that the discovery was a “complete surprise.” The company’s medical director told The New York Times, “This isn’t a health issue now, and it won’t be a health issue.” But the newspaper also quoted a professor of toxicology. “The real issue is this stuff accumulates,” the professor said. “No chemical is totally innocuous, and it seems inconceivable that anything that accumulates would not eventually become toxic.”

Hansen was now pregnant with twins. Although she was heartened by 3M’s announcement — she saw it as evidence that her work had forced the company to act — she was also ready to leave the environmental lab, where she felt marginalized. After giving birth, she joined 3M’s medical devices team. But first, she decided to have one last blood sample tested for PFOS: her own. The results showed one of the lowest readings she’d seen in human blood. Immediately, she thought of the rats that had passed the chemical on to their pups.

Hansen told me that, for the next 19 years, she avoided the subject of fluorochemicals with the same intensity with which she had once pursued it. She focused on raising her kids and coaching a cross-country ski team; she worked a variety of jobs at 3M, none related to fluorochemicals. In 2002, when 3M announced that it would be replacing PFOS with another fluorochemical, PFBS, Hansen knew that it, too, would remain in the environment indefinitely. Still, she decided not to involve herself. She skipped over articles about the chemicals in scientific journals and newspapers, where they were starting to be linked to possible developmental, immune system and liver problems. (In 2006, after the EPA accused 3M of violating the Toxic Substances Control Act, in part by repeatedly ­failing to disclose the harms of fluorochemicals promptly, the company agreed to pay a small penalty of $1.5 million, without admitting wrongdoing.)

During that time, forever chemicals gained a new scientific name — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, an acronym that is vexingly similar to the specific fluorochemical PFOS. A swath of 150 square miles around 3M’s headquarters was found to be polluted with PFAS; scientists discovered PFOS and PFBS in local fish and various fluorochemicals in water that roughly 125,000 Minnesotans drank. Hansen’s husband, Peter, told me that, when friends asked Hansen about PFAS, she would change the subject. Still, she repeatedly told him — and herself — that the chemicals were safe.

First image: Hansen. Second image: A sign warns against consuming fish from Eagle Point Lake in Lake Elmo Park Reserve because of PFAS contamination.

In the 2016 book “Secrecy at Work,” two management theorists, Jana Costas and Christopher Grey, argue that there is nothing inherently wrong or harmful about keeping secrets. Trade secrets, for example, are protected by federal and state law on the grounds that they promote innovation and contribute to the economy. The authors draw on a large body of sociological research to illustrate the many ways that information can be concealed. An organization can compartmentalize a secret by slicing it into smaller components, preventing any one person from piecing together the whole. Managers who don’t want to disclose sensitive information may employ “stone-faced silence.” Secret-keepers can form a kind of tribe, dependent on one another’s continued discretion; in this way, even the existence of a secret can be kept secret. Such techniques become pernicious, Costas and Grey write, when a company keeps a dark secret, a secret about wrongdoing.

Certain unpredictable events — a leak, a lawsuit, a news story — can start to unspool a secret. In the case of forever chemicals, the unspooling began on a cattle farm. In 1998, a West Virginia farmer told a lawyer, Robert Bilott, that wastewater from a DuPont site seemed to be poisoning his cows: They had started to foam at the mouth, their teeth grew black and more than a hundred eventually fell over and died. Bilott sued and obtained tens of thousands of internal documents, which helped push forever chemicals into the public consciousness. The documents revealed that the farm’s water contained PFOA, the fluorochemical that DuPont had bought from 3M, and that both companies had long understood it to be toxic. (The lawsuit, which ended in a settlement, was dramatized in the film “Dark Waters,” starring Mark Ruffalo as Bilott.) Bilott later sued 3M over contamination in Minnesota, but the judge prohibited discussion of health repercussions; a jury ultimately decided in 3M’s favor. Finally, in 2010, the Minnesota attorney general’s office filed its own suit, alleging that 3M had harmed the environment and polluted drinking water. The company paid $850 million in a settlement, without an admission of fault or liability. The AG also released thousands more internal 3M records to the public.

The AG’s records helped me report a series of stories for The Intercept about forever chemicals. Much of my reporting, which started in 2015, focused on what 3M and DuPont knew, even as they continued to produce PFAS. But, as I reported on the cover-up, I wondered what it meant for a sprawling multinational company to know that its products were dangerous. Who knew? How much, exactly, did they know? And how had the company kept its secret? For many years, no one inside 3M would agree to speak with me.

Then, in 2021, John Oliver did a segment on his comedy news show, “Last Week Tonight,” about forever chemicals. The segment, which mentioned my reporting, said that they could cause cancer, immune-system issues and other problems. “The world is basically soaked in the Devil’s piss right now,” Oliver said. “And not in a remotely hot way.” One of Hansen’s former professors sent her the segment, and Hansen watched it at her kitchen table — a moment that would eventually lead her to me.

“This actually made me sad as there are so many inaccuracies,” Hansen wrote to her professor in response. But, when the professor asked her what was incorrect, Hansen didn’t know what to say. For the first time, she Googled the health effects of PFOS.

Hansen was deeply troubled by what she read. One paper, published in 2012 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that, in children, as PFOS levels rose so did the chance that vaccines were ineffective. Children with high levels of PFOS and other fluorochemicals were more likely to experience fevers, according to a 2016 study. Other research linked the chemicals to increased rates of infectious diseases, food allergies and asthma in children. Dozens of scientific papers had found that, in adults, even very low levels of PFOS could interfere with hormones, fertility, liver and thyroid function, cholesterol levels and fetal development. Even PFBS, the chemical that 3M chose as a replacement for PFOS, caused developmental and reproductive irregularities in animals, according to the Minnesota Department of Health.

Reading these studies, Hansen felt a paradoxical kind of relief: As bad as PFOS seemed to be, at least independent scientists were studying it. But she also felt enraged at the company and at herself. For years, she had repeated the company’s claim that PFOS was not harmful. “I’m not proud of that,” she told me. She felt “dirty” for ever collecting a 3M paycheck. When she read the documents released by the Minnesota AG, she was horrified by how much the company had known and how little it had told her. She found records of studies that she had conducted, as well as the typed notes from her meeting with Newmark.

In October 2022, after Hansen had been at 3M for 26 years, her job was eliminated, and she chose not to apply for a new one. Three months later, she wrote me an email, offering to speak about what she had witnessed inside the company. “If you’d be interested in talking further, please let me know,” she wrote. The next day, we had the first of dozens of conversations.

When Hansen first told me about her experiences, I felt conflicted. Her work seemed to have helped force 3M to stop making a number of toxic chemicals, but I kept thinking about the 20 years in which she had kept quiet. During my first visit to Hansen’s home, in February 2023, we sat in her kitchen, eating bread that her husband had just baked. She showed me pictures of her father and shared a color-coded timeline of 3M’s history with forever chemicals. On a bitterly cold walk in a local park, we tried to figure out if any of her colleagues, besides Newmark, had known that PFOS was in everyone’s blood. She often sprinkled her stories with such Midwesternisms as “holy ­buckets!”

Hansen at her home in Minnesota

During my second trip, this past August, I asked her why, as a scientist who was trained to ask questions, she hadn’t been more skeptical of claims that PFOS was harmless. In the awkward silence that followed, I looked out the window at some hummingbirds.

Hansen’s superiors had given her the same explanation that they gave journalists, she finally said — that factory workers were fine, so people with lower levels would be, too. Her specialty was the detection of chemicals, not their harms. “You’ve got literally the medical director of 3M saying, ‘We studied this, there are no effects,’” she told me. “I wasn’t about to challenge that.” Her income had helped to support a family of five. Perhaps, I wondered aloud, she hadn’t really wanted to know whether her company was poisoning the public.

To my surprise, Hansen readily agreed. “It almost would have been too much to bear at the time,” she told me. 3M had successfully compartmentalized its secret; Hansen had only seen one slice. (When I sent the company detailed questions about Hansen’s account, a spokesperson responded without answering most of them or mentioning Hansen by name.)

Recently, I thought back on Taves and Guy, the academic scientists who, in the ’70s, came so close to proving that 3M’s chemicals were accumulating in humans. Taves is 97, but when I called him he told me that he still remembers clearly when company representatives visited his lab at the University of Rochester. “They wanted to know everything about what we were doing,” he told me. But the exchange was not reciprocal. “I soon found out that they weren’t going to tell me anything.” 3M never confirmed to Taves or Guy, who was a postdoctoral student at the time, that its fluorochemicals were in human blood. “I’m sort of kicking myself for not having followed up on this more, but I didn’t have any research money,” Guy told me. He eventually became a dentist to support his wife and family. (He died this year at 81.) Taves, too, left the field, to become a psychiatrist, and the trail ended there.

Last year, while reading about the thousands of PFAS-related lawsuits that 3M was facing, I was intrigued to learn that one of them, filed by cities and towns with polluted water, had produced a new set of internal 3M documents. When I requested several from the plaintiff’s legal team, I saw two names that I recognized. In a document from 1991, a 3M scientist talked about using a mass spectrometer — the same tool that Hansen would use years later — to devise a technique for measuring PFOS in biological fluid. The author was Jim Johnson — and he had sent the report to his boss, Dale Bacon.

This revelation made me gasp. Johnson had been Hansen’s first boss and had instigated her research into PFOS. Bacon had questioned her findings and ultimately told her to stop her work. (In a sworn deposition, Bacon said that by the ’80s he had heard, during a water-cooler chat with a colleague, that Taves and Guy had found PFOS in human blood.) What I couldn’t understand was why Johnson would ask Hansen to investigate something that he had already studied himself — and then act surprised by the results.

Jim Johnson, who is now an 81-year-old widower, lives with several dogs in a pale-yellow house in North Dakota. When I first called him, he said that he had begun researching PFOS in the ’70s. “I did a lot of the very original work on it,” he told me. He said that when he saw the chemical’s structure he understood “within 20 minutes” that it would not break down in nature. Shortly thereafter, one of his experiments revealed that PFOS was binding to proteins in the body, causing the chemical to accumulate over time. He told me that he also looked for PFOS in an informal test of blood from the general population, around the late ’70s, and was not surprised when he found it there.

Johnson initially cited “480 pounds of dog” as a reason that I shouldn’t visit him, but he later relented. When I arrived, on a chilly day in November, we spent a few minutes standing outside his house, watching Snozzle, Sadie and Junkyard press their slobbery snouts against his living ­room window. Then we decamped to the nearest IHOP. Johnson, who was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, was so tall that he couldn’t comfortably fit into a booth. We sat at a table and ordered two bottomless coffees.

In an experiment in the early ’80s, Johnson fed a component of Scotchban to rats and found that PFOS accumulated in their livers, a result that suggested how the chemical would behave in humans. When I asked why that mattered to the company, he took a sip of coffee and said, “It meant they were screwed.”

At the time, Johnson said, he didn’t think PFOS caused significant health problems. Still, he told me, “it was obviously bad,” because man-made compounds from household products didn’t belong in the human body. He said that he argued against using fluorochemicals in toothpaste and diapers. Contrac­tors working for 3M had shaved rabbits, he said, and smeared them with the company’s fluorochemicals to see if PFOS showed up in their bodies. “They’d send me the livers and, yup, there it was,” he told me. “I killed a lot of rabbits.” But he considered his efforts largely futile. “These idiots were already putting it in food packaging,” he said.

Johnson told me, with seeming pride, that one reason he didn’t do more was that he was a “loyal soldier,” committed to protecting 3M from liability. Some of his assignments had come directly from company lawyers, he added, and he couldn’t discuss them with me. “I didn’t even report it to my boss, or anybody,” he said. “There are some things you take to your grave.” At one point, he also told me that, if he were asked to testify in a PFOS-related lawsuit, he would probably be of little help. “I’m an old man, and so I think they would find that I got extremely forgetful all of a sudden,” he said, and chuckled.

Out the windows of IHOP, I watched a light dusting of snow fall on the parking lot. In Johnson’s telling, a tacit rule prevailed at 3M: Not all questions needed to be asked, or answered. His realization that PFOS was in the general public’s blood “wasn’t something anyone cared to hear,” he said. He wasn’t, for instance, putting his research on posters and expecting a warm reception. Over the years, he tried to convince several executives to stop making PFOS altogether, he told me, but they had good reason not to. “These people were selling fluorochemicals,” he said. He retired as the second-highest-­ranked scientist in his division, but he claimed that important business decisions were out of his control. “It wasn’t for me to jump up and start saying, ‘This is bullshit!’” he said, and he was “not really too interested in getting my butt fired.” And so his portion of 3M’s secret stayed in a compartment, both known and not known.

3M is among the largest employers in Minnesota.

Johnson said that he eventually tired of arguing with the few colleagues with whom he could speak openly about PFOS. “It was time,” he said. So he hired an outside lab to look for the chemical in the blood of 3M workers, knowing that it would also test blood bank samples for comparison — the first domino in a chain that would ultimately take the compound off the market. Oddly, he compared the head of the lab to a vending machine. “He gave me what I paid for,” Johnson said. “I knew what would happen.” Then Johnson tasked Hansen with something that he had long avoided: going beyond his initial experiments and meticulously documenting the chemical’s ubiquity. While Hansen took the heat, he took early retirement.

Johnson described Hansen as though she were a vending machine, too. “She did what she was supposed to do with the tools I left her,” he said.

I pointed out that Hansen had suffered professionally and personally, and that she now feels those experiences tainted her career. “I didn’t say I was a nice guy,” Johnson replied, and laughed. After four hours, we were nearing the bottom of our bottomless coffees.

Johnson has strayed from evidence-­based science in recent years. He now believes, for instance, that the theory of evolution is wrong, and that COVID-19 vaccines cause “turbo-cancers.” But his account of what happened at 3M closely matched Hansen’s, and when I asked him about meetings and experiments described in court documents he remembered them clearly.

When I called Hansen about my conversation with Johnson, she grew angrier than I’d ever heard her. “He knew the whole time!” she said. Then she had to get off the phone for an appointment. “So glad I’m going to see my therapist,” she added, and hung up.

I once thought of secrets as discrete, explosive truths that a heroic person could suddenly reveal. In the 1983 film “Silkwood,” which is based on real events, Karen Silkwood, a worker at a plutonium plant, assembles a thick folder documenting her employer’s shoddy safety practices; while driving to share them with a reporter, she dies in a mysterious one-car crash. In another adaptation of a true story, the 2015 film “Spotlight,” a source delivers a box of critical documents to The Boston Globe, helping the paper to publish an investigation into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Talking to Hansen and Johnson, though, I saw that the truth can come out piecemeal over many years, and that the same people who keep secrets can help divulge them. Some slices of 3M’s secret are only now coming to light, and others may never come out.

Between 1951 and 2000, 3M produced at least 100 million pounds of PFOS and chemicals that degrade into PFOS. This is roughly the weight of the Titanic. After the late ’70s, when 3M scientists established that the chemical was toxic in animals and was accumulating in humans, it produced millions of pounds per year. Scientists are still struggling to grasp all the biological consequences. They have learned, just as Johnson did decades ago, that proteins in the body bind to PFOS. It enters our cells and organs, where even tiny amounts can cause stress and interfere with basic biological functions. It contributes to diseases that take many years to develop; at the time of a diagnosis, one’s PFOS level may have fallen, making it difficult to establish causation with any certainty.

The other day, I called Brad Creacey, who became an Air Force firefighter in the ’70s at the age of 18. He told me that several times a year, for practice, he and his comrades put on rubber boots and heavy silver uniforms that looked like spacesuits. Then a “torch man,” holding a stick tipped with a burning rag, ignited jet fuel that had been poured into an open-air pit. To extinguish the 100-foot-tall flames, Creacey and his colleagues sprayed them with aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF. 3M manufactured it from several forever chemicals, including PFOS.

Creacey remembers that AFFF felt slick and sudsy, almost like soap, and dried out the skin on his hands until it cracked. To celebrate his last day on a military base in Germany, his friends dumped a ceremonial bucket on him. Only later, after working with firefighting foam at an airport in Monterey, California, did he start to wonder if a string of ailments — cysts on his liver, a nodule near his thyroid — were connected to the foam. He had high cholesterol, which diet and exercise were unable to change. Then he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. “It makes me feel like I was a lab rat, like we were all disposable,” Creacey told me. “I’ve lost faith in human beings.”

To celebrate Air Force firefighter Brad Creacey’s last day on a military base in Germany, his friends doused him with a bucket of the same aqueous film-forming foam they used to extinguish fires. Later, Creacey wondered if a string of ailments was connected to his many years of contact with the foam. (Courtesy of Brad Creacey)

It may be tempting to think of Creacey and his peers as unwitting research subjects; indeed, recent studies show that PFOS is associated with an increased risk of thyroid cancer and, in Air Force servicemen, an elevated risk of testicular cancer. But it is probably more accurate to say that we are all part of the experiment. Average levels of PFOS are falling, but nearly all people have at least one forever chemical in their blood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “When you have a contaminated site, you can clean it up,” Elsie Sunderland, an environmental chemist at Harvard University, told me. “When you ubiquitously introduce a toxicant at a global scale, so that it’s detectable in everyone ... we’re reducing public health on an incredibly large scale.” Once everyone’s blood is contaminated, there is no control group with which to compare, making it difficult to establish responsibility.

New health effects continue to be discovered. Researchers have found that exposure to PFAS during pregnancy can lead to developmental delays in children. Numerous recent studies have linked the chemicals to diabetes and obesity. This year, a study discovered 13 forever chemicals, including PFOS, in weeks-old fetuses from terminated pregnancies and linked the chemicals to biomarkers associated with liver problems. A team of New York University researchers estimated in 2018 that the costs of just two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS — in terms of disease burden, disability and health-care expenses — amounted to as much as $62 billion in a single year. This exceeds the current market value of 3M.

Philippe Grandjean, a physician who helped discover that PFAS harm the immune system, believes that anyone exposed to these chemicals — essentially everyone — may have an elevated risk of cancer. Our immune systems often find and kill abnormal cells before they turn into tumors. “PFAS interfere with the immune system, and likely also this critical function,” he told me. Grandjean, who served as an expert witness in the Minnesota AG’s case, has studied many environmental contaminants, including mercury. The impact of PFAS was so much more extreme, he said, that one of his colleagues initially thought it was the result of nuclear radiation.

In April, the EPA took two historic steps to reduce exposure to PFAS. It said that PFOS and PFOA are “likely to cause cancer” and that no level of either chemical is considered safe; it deemed them hazardous substances under the Superfund law, increasing the government’s power to force polluters to clean them up. The agency also set limits for six PFAS in drinking water. In a few years, when the EPA begins enforcing the new regulations, local utilities will be required to test their water and remove any amount of PFOS or PFOA which exceeds four parts per trillion — the equivalent of one drop dissolved in several Olympic swimming pools. 3M has produced enough PFOS and chemicals that degrade into PFOS to exceed this level in all of the freshwater on earth. Meanwhile, many other PFAS continue to be used, and companies are still developing new ones. Thousands of the compounds have been produced; the Department of Defense still depends on many for use in explosives, semiconductors, cleaning fluids and batteries. PFAS can be found in nonstick cookware, guitar strings, dental floss, makeup, hand sanitizer, brake fluid, ski wax, fishing lines and countless other products.

In a statement, a 3M spokesperson told me that the company “is proactively managing PFAS,” and that 3M’s approach to the chemicals has evolved along with “the science and technology of PFAS, societal and regulatory expectations, and our expectations of ourselves.” He directed me to a fact sheet about their continued importance in society. “These substances are critical to multiple industries — including the cars we drive, planes we fly, computers and smart phones we use to stay connected, and more,” the fact sheet read.

Recently, 3M settled the lawsuit filed by cities and towns with polluted water. It will pay up to $12.5 billion to cover the costs of filtering out PFAS, depending on how many water systems need the chemicals removed. The settlement, however, doesn’t approach the scale of the problem. At least 45% of U.S. tap water is estimated to contain one or more forever chemicals, and one drinking water expert told me that the cost of removing them all would likely reach $100 billion.

In 2022, 3M said that it would stop making PFAS and would “work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio,” by the end of 2025 — a pledge that it called “another example of how we are positioning 3M for continued sustainable growth.” But it acknowledged that more than 16,000 of its products still contained PFAS. Direct sales of the chemicals were generating $1.3 billion annually. 3M’s regulatory filings also allow for the possibility that a full phaseout won’t happen — for example, if 3M fails to find substitutes. “We are continuing to make progress on our announcement to exit PFAS manufacturing,” 3M’s spokesperson told me. The company and its scientists have not admitted wrong­doing or faced criminal liability for producing forever chemicals or for concealing their harms.

A photo of the Hansens: Paul, Kris and her mother, Nancy

Hansen often wonders what her father would say about 3M if he were still alive. A few years ago, he began to show signs of dementia, which worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Every time Hansen explained to him that a novel coronavirus was sickening people around the world, he asked how he might contribute — forgetting that the N95 mask he helped to create was already protecting millions of people from infection. When he died, in January 2021, Hansen noticed some Coban wrap on his arm. It was shielding his delicate skin from tears, just as he had designed it to. “He invented that,” Hansen told the hospice nurse, who smiled politely.

After she left 3M, Hansen began volunteering at a local nature preserve, where she works to clear paths and protect native plants. Last August, she took me there, and we walked to a creek where she often spends time. The water is home to three species of trout, she told me. It is also polluted by forever chemicals that 3M once dumped upstream.

For most of our hike, a thick wall of flowers — purple joe-pye weed and goldenrod — made it impossible to see the creek bank. Then we came to a wooden bench. I climbed on top of it and looked down on the creek. As I listened to the gurgling of water and the buzzing of insects, I thought I understood why Hansen liked to come here. It was too late to save the creek from pollution; 3M’s chemicals could be there for thousands of years to come. Hansen just wanted to appreciate what was left and to leave the place a little better than she’d found it.

The conservancy where Kris Hansen began volunteering after leaving 3M. The creek is polluted with forever chemicals that 3M once dumped upstream.

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Kirsten Berg contributed research.