Merlin Olsen’s Massive Mesothelioma Lawsuit
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| Ma, Pa, Half Pint, Manly, and Mr. Garvey |
Siouxsie grew up watching the reruns of “Little House on the Prairie.”
It was a favorite. Maybe it was because the show was set in the Victorian Era. Or maybe because Nellie Oleson had some of the best petticoats and ringlets around. 
(Some even say that “Little House on the Prairie” inspired one of the first Gothic Lolita clothing brands, Pink House.) Who knows?
As a consequence, Siouxsie is a fan of Merlin Olsen a/k/a Jonathan Garvey. She even had a slight crush on him as John Michael Murphy in the series “Father Murphy” in which he played a frontiersman masquerading as a priest.
Sadly, a few months ago, Mr. Olsen received a diagnosis of mesothelioma. Mesothelioma sucks. It is a rare cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. It is fatal. Typically, people with this disease die within a year of diagnosis.
But Merlin Olsen is not going to go down without a fight. A few weeks ago, he filed a lawsuit suing everyone who could have possibly exposed him to asbestos. There are over twenty-five named defendants to the suit. Mr. Olsen is using the time and energy he has left to fight this battle. And his wife, who is named as a plaintiff for loss of consortium (loss of companionship) will continue this fight when he can no longer do so.
In the complaint, Mr. Olsen explains that “[b]eginning at the age of ten or eleven, [he] worked after school and in the summers doing manual labor that exposed him to asbestos. During the summers of his high school and college years, [he] worked full days in construction and manual labor jobs where he [again] was exposed to asbestos.” (Source; alterations supplied by Siouxsie.)
It is not entirely clear from the Complaint how Mr. Olsen was exposed to asbestos in these jobs, but asbestos exposure in construction jobs is not uncommon. So it is not surprising that Mr. Olsen names these employers in his lawsuit.
What is surprising, however, is that he also names employers that are totally unrelated to construction work; he includes the television studios with whom he worked later in his life — NBC Studios, NBC Universal, and 20th Century Fox. Mr. Olsen claims that these television studios exposed him to asbestos while he was filming when he “was around workers working with asbestos drywall patching compounds.” (Source)
This seems like a stretch. Perhaps Mr. Olsen is trying to make a strict liability argument — that asbestos is so dangerous that any exposure creates liability on their part. He asserts that “the scientific and regulatory agencies around the world are in unanimous consensus that all types of asbestos released from asbestos products cause cancer, and that there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos.” (Source)
Apparently, his lawyers have adopted the let’s-throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. Or maybe they are just trying to figure out how the hell he was exposed to asbestos in the first place. But Siouxise admires Merlin Olsen and his work; and so, she will give him and his lawyers the benefit of the doubt that he has some basis for including NBC and 20th Century Fox. Besides, who really likes NBC studios now in light of the Conan O’Brien debacle.
So on this one, even if Mr. Olsen is overreaching, she is rooting for him.
Stay tuned.
I wouldn’t blame Olsen for the pleading. This is standard asbestos suit boilerplate, as written by lawyers from Hawaii to Maine. I doubt Olsen read it before it was filed.
As for mesothelioma, it’s idiopathic but associated with asbestos exposure. Asbestos certainly could have caused t, but so could cosmic radiation. It is also, unfortunately, generally a death sentence, and quite painful. The beneficiaries of the suit, if any, will be Olsen’s surviving family. A sad way to leave the world.
You are absolutely right that this is boilerplate. I think that is the problem. It doesn’t have much else in it. Reading the complaint, it is totally unclear as to what type of manual labor Mr. Olsen performed as a child and how it exposed him to asbestos. That should be in there somewhere, especially since Mr. Olsen is not a typical asbestos plaintiff. The complaint is way too vague for me.
And I’m puzzled as to the lawyers’ decision to name the television studios as defendants but not the NFL or the Rams. If there are facts specific to the television studios, those facts should be in the complaint.