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Some of history's biggest cover-ups weren't cracked by powerful insiders — they were exposed by everyday people who simply refused to stay silent. Join us as we count down ordinary individuals who blew the lid off massive conspiracies, from nuclear cover-ups to billion-dollar frauds and government scandals that shook the world to its core!
Transcript
00:00Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at 10 ordinary people who looked evil in the
00:04eye and took down some of the biggest cover-ups in history.
00:06I'm often referred to as the environmentalist with cleavage.
00:11Karen Silkwood. Karen Silkwood did not set out to become a martyr.
00:15She just wanted to make sure that her workplace was safe.
00:19But her mysterious death in 1974 would galvanize a growing public movement against nuclear power.
00:26She was just a chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Plant in Oklahoma,
00:30until she became heavily contaminated with dangerous levels of plutonium radiation.
00:34Then Karen Silkwood became a household name. Silkwood found that Kerr-McGee was cutting
00:38safety corners across the board, falsifying quality control data on nuclear fuel rods
00:42and quietly exposing its own workers to dangerous radiation.
00:45She is becoming increasingly disturbed by what she hears.
00:49Alarms going off all too often, signaling that radioactive plutonium dust is in the air.
00:55She started covertly compiling documents that proved the company was knowingly compromising safety
00:59just to keep production moving and the money flowing. On November 13, 1974, she was literally
01:04on her way to hand that evidence over to a New York Times reporter when her car went off the
01:08road
01:08in a crash that many still consider suspicious to this day. Only her death didn't bury the story,
01:13quite the opposite. A massive investigation followed her curious demise, ultimately validating
01:17everything she'd uncovered and forcing the plant to shut its doors for good. Silkwood never lived to see
01:22her whistleblowing pay off, but her case became one of the most chilling and influential in the
01:26history of corporate accountability. How did that plutonium get in my house?
01:30Did you put it there? Did I what? What are you crazy? You think I'd contaminate myself? You think I'd
01:40do that?
01:41I think you'd do just about anything to hurt this company. Harry Markopoulos.
01:44One page with unbelievable performance numbers, almost no losses. And I'm looking at the
01:51characteristics of the portfolio and saying, look, the returns are like this, 45 degree angle.
01:58Bernie Madoff was the mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history,
02:01swindling investors out of a staggering $65 billion. So who caught him? Not the SEC,
02:06who probably should have. Not a hedge fund titan. It was a man named Harry Markopoulos,
02:10a mid-level quantitative analyst whose boss casually asked him to reverse engineer Madoff's trading
02:15strategy so their firm could copy it. It took Markopoulos about five minutes of running the
02:19numbers to realize that Madoff's returns were mathematically impossible, and the findings
02:22kicked off a 10-year obsession to take Madoff down. He says, I can tell you right from the get
02:27-go
02:27this is a fraud, and it's possibly a Ponzi scheme. This discussion took a total of four minutes.
02:34And I said to Harry, oh my god, don't use that word Ponzi. You can't call this guy a fraud.
02:41Markopoulos compiled increasingly detailed dossiers laying out exactly how the fraud worked
02:46and submitted them to the SEC again and again and again. He was brushed off every single time.
02:50Regulators simply couldn't believe that nobody else had noticed what this nobody
02:54Quant was describing. And they didn't want to ruffle the feathers of one of the biggest
02:57names on Wall Street. It wasn't until the 2008 financial crash that Madoff's scheme collapsed
03:01under its own weight that the world realized Markopoulos had been right the entire time,
03:05a decade before anyone else was willing to listen.
03:07I gift wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them,
03:10and somehow they couldn't be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation
03:15because they were too busy on matters of higher priority.
03:18Peter Buxton.
03:19What's this about you not coming for treatment?
03:22I don't trust no government.
03:24For 40 staggering years, the American government ran one of the most horrifying medical experiments in
03:29history. It was called the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and it deliberately withheld life-saving
03:33penicillin from hundreds of black men in Alabama so scientists could observe the
03:37effects of untreated syphilis. At the time, Peter Buxton was just a 27-year-old public health service
03:41employee when he learned what was really going on, and he was horrified. Buxton filed formal
03:46complaints of the chain of command and was told in no uncertain terms to mind his own business.
03:49Most people would have let it go. Buxton didn't. For six years, he kept fighting from the inside,
03:54pushing back against a government machine that desperately wanted this buried. When internal channels
03:58failed him completely, Buxton finally took the story to a reporter at the Associated Press in 1972.
04:03The article detonated a national scandal, and the study was shut down for good.
04:07Following public outcry, a federal investigation, and a lawsuit, the study was finally shut down in 1972,
04:1540 years after it began and 30 after a treatment for syphilis had been found.
04:20Do you want to hear about more conspiracies? Then head over to our 24-7 WatchMojo Pop Culture
04:24livestream. Just scan the QR code on screen and head on over to hear more about conspiracies,
04:28secrets and the people who uncovered them. Worse, my team and I kept collecting additional information
04:33and I kept sending it to the SEC and they kept ignoring it. Joe Darby. Late that summer,
04:39they were pouring into Abu Ghraib. The MPs were overwhelmed. 380 tried to guard thousands of new
04:47inmates. And in utter chaos, no one seemed certain about the prisoner's legal status. He wasn't a
04:55journalist, an activist, or a whistleblower by trade. He was just an army reserve specialist
04:59serving with the military police in Iraq. But one day, Joe Darby asked a fellow soldier for some
05:03photos to use as screensavers and was handed a CD. With that exchange, his life was forever changed.
05:09This army interrogator is still on active duty. He asked Frontline to protect his identity.
05:14It was seen as malleable, it was seen as flexible, and it was a wink-wink atmosphere.
05:22On the CD were the now infamous images of prisoner mistreatment and abuse at Abu Ghraib. Darby knew
05:26immediately what he was looking at, and he knew the risk of doing anything about it as retaliation from
05:31his own unit was a very real fear. But he did it anyway. He brought the CD and a letter
05:34to the
05:35Criminal Investigations Division, and that quiet act of courage blew the lid off a massive
05:39international human rights scandal. It forced a reckoning within the U.S. military, and many
05:43soldiers were court-martialed and sent to prison. But Darby paid a steep personal price for his
05:46honesty, facing threats from those he targeted and eventually having to relocate his family.
05:50We went through some of the changes that are being introduced. For example,
05:55the Human Rights Ministry is going to have a place inside the Abu Ghraib. The International Committee
06:00of the Red Cross is also going to have a place inside, and so are other human rights organizations.
06:07Erin Brockovich. In Hinckley, for me, it wasn't about a cancer cluster. It was about a corporation
06:13who dumped a chemical in the groundwater that was a poison, and they covered it up, and people got sick.
06:22In the early 1990s, Erin Brockovich was just a file clerk and single mother from California. While organizing
06:27paperwork for a routine real estate case, she noticed odd medical records tucked in among the property
06:31files. Curious, she drove out to the town herself and started knocking on doors. She soon found that
06:36Pacific Gas and Electric had been secretly dumping 370 million gallons of cancer-causing chromium-6
06:41into the groundwater of Hinckley, California, and all while assuring residents that their water was
06:46completely safe. Brockovich had no formal investigative training, just persistence and a gut feeling that
07:11something was very wrong and lies were being told. She kept connecting the dots and following illness
07:15after illness in the town until the pattern became undeniable. Her now-famous grassroots digging turned
07:20Erin Brockovich into a household name and led directly to a $333 million settlement, which at the time was
07:25the largest direct action lawsuit settlement in American history.
07:41Martha Mitchell
07:56As the wife of President Nixon's Attorney General, Martha Mitchell was written off by Washington insiders
08:01as a quirky and overly chatty socialite who liked to call reporters late at night. But Mitchell was paying
08:05closer attention than anyone realized, and she discovered that the Nixon administration was
08:09orchestrating illegal activities behind closed doors. To keep her from talking, Nixon's own operatives
08:13held her against her will in a California hotel room and had her forcibly sedated.
08:17She's doing just fine. I'm keeping her away from phones and newspapers. No, Steve's out sick,
08:24but Barry's here with me. Of course. Well, she's very comfortable. Thank you.
08:29And then came the smear campaign, with the administration branding her as an unstable housewife,
08:33making things up and hoping to destroy the credibility of Nixon for personal reasons.
08:37It worked, at least for a while, but once the full scope of the Watergate cover-up came crashing
08:42down, the world realized that the so-called crazy housewife had been telling the truth the entire
08:46time. Today, there's even a psychological term, the Martha Mitchell effect, for what happens when
08:50a credible person is wrongly dismissed as delusional.
08:52The newsroom over in the White House, they picked up the phone and called four or five people and
08:59told them, Martha Mitchell, this happened just a few weeks ago. Martha Mitchell was crazy.
09:03Don't pay any attention to what she says. Herb Stemple.
09:08How are you tonight, Mr. Mandoren? I'm all right. You're okay?
09:10Yeah. And Herb, you got your $69,500 riding here at stake. How do you feel, okay?
09:15That's fine, thank you. In the 1950s, the quiz show was America's biggest reality TV genre,
09:20and of course, it was entirely rigged by producers chasing ratings and money. Herb Stemple found that
09:24out the hard way. A reigning champion on the hit show 21, Stemple was a huge ratings draw,
09:28but producers decided that his image wasn't good for business, so they ordered him to deliberately
09:32lose to a more telegenic and wealthy rival named Charles Van Doren. Stemple did as he was told and
09:37threw the match, but he was furious about it and didn't stay quiet for long. If either of you want
09:41to stop the game, you must tell me so right now. I'll stop. Then you'll win $20,000. Congratulations.
09:48He soon took his story to the press, insisting that the whole show had been staged from the start.
09:52At first, almost nobody believed him, but Stemple refused to back down and his persistence
09:55eventually snowballed into a full congressional investigation that exposed just how fake
10:00reality TV had been all along. It led to sweeping legal changes regarding TV contests,
10:05but it also proves that some things never change.
10:07They made me take a dive, Marty. They made me lose on Marty just to humiliate me.
10:13Who made you take a dive?
10:14Dan Enright. He told me I had plateaued, that the ratings had plateaued.
10:18The sinking ship in the rat state.
10:20Do you think in a million years I wouldn't know Marty and meanwhile Charles Van Moron would be on
10:23the show 11 weeks in a row?
10:24Tyler Schultz.
10:25I had a pretty good relationship with my grandfather. So I went to him with my concerns
10:35and he couldn't really understand the points that I was making. And he said,
10:42just move on with your life.
10:44Theranos was Silicon Valley's golden child, a $9 billion company built on the promise of
10:48revolutionary blood testing technology. Tyler Schultz was just a 22 year old fresh out of college kid
10:53working in the lab, and rather awkwardly the grandson of a Theranos board member. But being
10:57an insider didn't stop him from noticing the massive lie at the heart of the company. As Schultz
11:01eventually discovered, their supposedly groundbreaking machines were barely running any tests.
11:05This isn't just a grandson talking to his grandfather, this is an employee talking to the board member of
11:11the company they both work for. And I felt like he did not, he really did not do his job
11:19as a board
11:19member and look into my concerns as far as I could tell.
11:22Employees were quietly using off-the-shelf Siemens equipment while the company manipulated the
11:26results of blood tests. After failing to reach anyone inside the company, Schultz went to the
11:30Wall Street Journal and blew the whole thing wide open. The fallout was brutal. Theranos' lawyers
11:34came after him hard and his relationship with his grandfather was shattered. But Schultz bravely held
11:39his ground and his testimony became a cornerstone in unraveling one of the biggest corporate frauds
11:43in modern history. They both work there. They know what they saw. No, no. There are very few
11:51times in my life when I have been given the chance to do something that is purely good. And this
11:58is one
11:58of those times. This company is going to save lives. So, is this conversation over? Leanne Walters.
12:06Major developments tonight out of Flint, Michigan now. The whistleblower now speaking out,
12:10saying it never should have happened, claiming when one family raised a red flag, he listened.
12:15A stay-at-home mom with no scientific background, Leanne Walters became very worried when her kids
12:19started losing their hair and breaking out in rashes. She took her worries about contaminated
12:23water to officials, but the story was always the same. The local water was just fine. But Walters
12:28wasn't buying it. So she literally taught herself municipal water chemistry from scratch and started
12:33rigorously testing her own tap water. The results were disturbing, but she needed someone with
12:37credibility to back her up. And she was put in touch with Dr. Mark Edwards at Virginia Tech.
12:42Together, their kitchen table science proved what officials in Flint, Michigan had been denying for
12:45months. The water was not fine. Leanne says the children don't speak as well as others their age.
12:51They struggle with hand-eye coordination and have a hard time writing their letters and numbers.
12:55In fact, it was contaminated with dangerously high levels of lead and was causing a monumental health
13:00crisis within the community. Her findings helped blow the lid off the Flint water crisis and forced a
13:04governmental reckoning over exactly how officials had let it happen. Walters didn't have a lab,
13:09a title, or even a budget. Just her kids' health on the line and the refusal to accept the words,
13:13trust us. I know people who use words like hero, and I'm like, no, I'm just,
13:17I was just a ticked off mom whose kids were being hurt. Merrill Williams. Back in 1988 and 1990,
13:25if you saw something about public education, you knew this was history. Rotten apples,
13:30it wasn't going to do a damn thing. Not one thing would come out of that.
13:35For decades, tobacco companies knew exactly how addictive and dangerous their cigarettes were,
13:39yet they continuously lied about it, even under oath. The man who blew that lie wide open wasn't
13:43a scientist or a senator. It was Merrill Williams, a struggling paralegal making $9 an hour. In January
13:481988, he was hired to code documents for a law firm defending tobacco giant Brown and Williamson.
13:53As he sorted through box after box of seemingly boring files, Williams realized that he was staring at
13:58hard proof of the company's deceit. So he made a decision that could have landed him in prison.
14:08He began surreptitiously stuffing high confidential memos into his pants and smuggling them out of the
14:13building piece by little piece. These documents were eventually leaked to the media and congress
14:17and the fallout was seismic. Williams' leaked files became the foundation for the massive lawsuits that
14:22finally cracked Big Tobacco's decades long cover up wide open and they reshape public health forever.
14:27Part of the reason I'm here is that I felt
14:31that their representation clearly misstated, at least within Brown and Williamson's representation,
14:36clearly misstated what is common language within the company. We are in the nicotine delivery business.
14:42What would you have done if you were in their situations? Let us know in the comments below.