Biography
After it was revealed in 2003 that Ben Kelley helped perpetrate what the Los Angeles Times called "the biggest TV scam since the Quiz Scandals," he stepped down as executive director of the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI). That was just months after his group hosted a conference "intended to encourage and support litigation against the food industry." A longtime PR flack for trial lawyers, Kelley is a PHAI board member and is back helping trial lawyers cash in on the so-called "obesity epidemic."
Looking for trial lawyers' next cash cow, Kelley's sights are set squarely on our thighs. In 2003 he wrote letters to eight major food and restaurant companies, demanding that they detail their efforts to combat obesity. Food providers, he implied, bear full responsibility for the weight of their customers, and indeed the country as a whole. Kelley demanded that companies monitor the calorie consumption of their customers and demonstrate that they somehow made people eat less - and if he was satisfied, his letter read, business could "possibly" preclude an onslaught from Kelley's litigious colleagues.
In 2003, taking a page out of his own sordid playbook, Kelley said a good parallel to obesity prevention "is found in the history of auto safety regulation and litigation." It's an especially good parallel for Kelley, who has a history of enriching the plaintiff's bar through bogus automotive lawsuits.
In 1993, as president of the Institute for Injury Reduction (read: Center for Trial Lawyer Enrichment), Kelley was instrumental in staging what Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz described as "one of the most embarrassing episodes in modern television history." Unknown to viewers of Dateline NBC, model rocket engines were attached to the gas tank of a GM pickup truck and detonated by remote control, in order to ensure an explosion during a videotaped test collision. Kelley subsequently bragged about introducing Dateline to the crew that staged the explosion.
Following the Dateline episode, Kelley wrote a memo to his trial-lawyer sponsors, in which he proposed taping a second staged explosion that would be made "available for public dissemination and litigation use." A jury decided that General Motors should cough up $105 million in damages, even though the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that the trucks in question were actually safer than the average car on the road. That wasn't Kelley's first use of show-biz ethics. Kelley was also an on-camera expert in a CBS "60 Minutes" segment that implied a Jeep was prone to flip over during "fairly gentle" turns. But to get the Jeep to flip, the crash-test dummies inside had to turn the steering wheel at least twice as fast as can be expected for normal drivers in an emergency. The dummies were also accelerating during the turn, and heavy weights had been strategically added to make the Jeep more likely to flip.
Kelley appeared in another "60 Minutes" segment in which a truck's wheel rims were filed down - again, viewers were in the dark -- in order to make the phony case that they were prone to explode while the tires were being filled.
Associated Organizations and Foundations
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