fat Chance
A Screenplay by Rick Christman
Before Ozempic, there was another popular diet drug called Fen Phen, but it caused heart damage. This led to many lawsuits against the drug company, earning billions of dollars in settlements and attracting lawyers like flies to a rotting carcass. Brenda is a lawyer who is struggling financially and drinks too much. She takes on a case against four lawyers who won a $200 million lawsuit for a small group of people but then embezzled most of the money. One of these lawyers is Stan, known as the most successful class action lawyer in the world.
Following a tip, the FBI arrests three of the lawyers and puts them in the County Jail. Stan makes a deal to avoid jail, but the stolen money is missing. Brenda wins a laptop at an auction, which reveals where the stolen money is hidden. However, her situation worsens when her lover steals $3 million and invests it in an illegal drug business. Soon after, Brenda’s precious laptop is stolen. Meanwhile, a horse owned by the jailed lawyers wins the Dubai World Cup. Two of the lawyers go to Federal prison, and one is found not responsible because he was too drunk. The judge who approved the illegal scheme is disbarred after being named Outstanding Judge of the Year.
Throughout the story, Brenda struggles to avoid ruin while trying to return the stolen money.This dark comedy about greed gone wild is based on the nonfiction book, Fat Chance, published by the University of Kentucky Press.
Listen up. The book that should be a movie.
The wild story is revisited in the new book Fat Chance: Diet Mania, Greed, and the Infamous Fen-Phen Swindle by author Rick Christman, who joins Cincinnati Edition to talk about it.
About the screenplay
Female attorney who drinks too much takes on a gang of four others to get back millions of stolen settlement funds. The story is based on actual events.
Brief Interpretation
“Fat Chance: Diet Mania, Greed, and the Infamous Fen-Phen Swindle” By Rick Christman
During the early 1990s, the diet drugs fen-phen and Redux achieved tremendous popularity. The chemical combination was discovered by chance, marketed with hyperbole, and prescribed to millions. But as the drug's developer, pharmaceutical giant American Home Products, cashed in on the miracle weight-loss pills, medical researchers revealed that the drugs caused heart valve disease. This scandal was, incredibly, only the beginning of an unbelievable saga of greed.
In Fat Chance, Rick Christman recounts a story that a judicial tribunal later described as "a tale worthy of the pen of Charles Dickens." Bill Gallion, Shirley Cunningham, and Melbourne Mills devised a plan to file a class-action lawsuit against American Home Products in Covington, Kentucky. Their hired trial consultant, Mark Modlin, had a bizarre relationship with the presiding judge, Jay Bamberger of Covington, who was once honored as the Kentucky Bar Association's "Judge of the Year." Soon after, Stan Chesley, arguably the most successful trial attorney in the United States, joined the class-action suit. Ultimately, their efforts were rewarded with $200 million for the 431 plaintiffs, and the four lawyers immediately began to plunder their clients' money. When the fraud was discovered, two of the attorneys received long prison sentences, and another was acquitted after claiming an alcoholism defense. All four were permanently banished from the practice of law, and Judge Bamberger was disbarred and disrobed.
Recounting a dramatic affair that bears conspicuous similarities to opioid-related class-action litigation against the pharmaceutical industry, Christman offers an engaging, if occasionally horrifying, account of one of America's most prominent product liability cases and the aftermath of the settlement.
What the Readers are saying.
"Fat Chance chronicles the plunder of clients by lawyers in the fen-phen diet drug scandal, focusing on a quartet of avaricious attorneys. The tale and its cavalcade of crazy, double-dealing characters is the stuff of John Grisham. It should, however, be on reading lists for law students, taught in tort classes, and used in legal ethics seminars (if there are any left)."
— Alicia Mundy, Author of Crystal Mesh: How Addiction To Money Turned Medical Device Makers, The FDA, and Doctors into Street Dealers
“Fat Chance is the story of the fen-phen litigation and the prominent lawyers who, blinded by greed and hubris, lied to their clients and the judge, cheated their partners, and tried to keep their clients' money. Rick Christman's book is a well-written and remarkably complete account of fen-phen: the development and marketing of the drugs, the litigation that resulted from side effects, and the generous settlement that led lawyers to unethical and illegal behavior.”
―W. H. Fortune, professor of law at the University of Kentucky
Meet the writer
Rick Christman is CEO of Employment Solutions and a former community columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.