← The Tech Policy Press Podcast
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- [00:01]
Justin Hendricks
Your film is now ready to be shown.
- [00:12]
Good morning. I'm Justin Hendricks, editor of Tech Policy Press. We publish news, analysis and perspectives on issues at the intersection of tech and democracy. Right now in a Los Angeles courtroom, a 19 year old woman known only by her initials KGM is at the center of what could be one of the most consequential legal challenges the social media industry has ever faced. Her case, alleging that platforms like Instagram and YouTube were deliberately designed to be addictive and that their makers knew it, is the first to go before a jury. And a massive wave of litigation playing out on two tracks in California state court, over a thousand cases have been consolidated under what's known as the JCCP. In federal court, more than 2,000 lawsuits are proceeding in a parallel multi district litigation. Together, they represent families, school districts, state attorneys general, and Native American nations all pressing the same core. Can social media companies be held liable not for what users post, but for how they build the product? Internal company documents unsealed ahead of trial suggest these companies understood the harms their designs could cause and prioritized engagement. Anyway, my guest today has been asking that question for more than a decade. Carrie Goldberg is a victims rights attorney and the founder of a law firm that bears her name. In 2017, she brought a lawsuit that sought to apply product liability theory to a tech platform, Herrick vs Grindr, arguing that a dangerous app design, not just user behavior, was the source of harm. That legal framework is now common in the case is going to trial today. In 2022, Goldberg was appointed to the plaintiff steering committee in the Federal Social media Multi district litigation and she's led cases against Amazon, Meta and Omegle and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on child safety issues. I spoke to her from her offices in Brooklyn.
- [01:53]
Carrie Goldberg
My name is Carrie Goldberg. I am the owner of CA Goldberg pllc, which is a law firm that's based in Brooklyn that sues psychos, pervs, trolls and toxic tech.
- [02:05]
Justin Hendricks
Carrie, we are neighbors in Brooklyn, though I don't think we've ever met in New York City. I want to ask you a little bit today just about your career, your current work, and kind of where you see things headed when it comes to the work that you do in terms of pushing for greater accountability and addressing many of the harms. You already mentioned the target of your law firm's work. I think you first kind of came to my attention maybe around 2018, 2019, around the time that your book came out. You were being profiled in the media as the quote, unquote, Revenge Porn Lawyer. Your book made some waves and you know, sounds similar to the target of the firm now. It was called Nobody's Victim Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Purrs and Trolls. How did you come to this work of focusing on tech? Where did it start for you?
- [03:01]
Carrie Goldberg
Well, thank you, Justin. I'm really happy to be here. When I first started my firm 12 years ago in January of 2014, I had just had something really traumatic happen to me involving a guy that I had met on a dating app who when I broke up with him after this brief four month relationship, he just went on an absolute rampage against me. Showing up at my home texting and calling me nonstop, going onto all of social media saying that I was a whore and a drug addict and saying he'd hacked into my work computer and then sending me nude videos and pictures of me, that he said that he was blind copying all these people in my life and then he was also contacting all these people in my life. And it was just this unrelenting, really traumatic barrage. And I was already a lawyer at the time, but I was working with elderly people and I had this involuntary education into stalking and realized very quickly that New York State had no protections for when it came to like intimate images being sent around. You know, I, even after I got my order of protection, which the judge told me my offender had had First Amendment rights and, and didn't have to stop sending naked pictures of me, I think that was the scariest thing, was like, oh my gosh, he can continue to, to harass me. And at the time there were all these revenge porn websites that were searchable by name and state. And if you typed in one of the victims names into Google, it would just populate page after page of Google results with links to the, the revenge porn, that's what we called it back then. And so I was just like kind of a transformed person after this breakup because I suddenly knew what fear really was. It went on and on. But I was so transformed after I finally got my order of protection and he also had me arrested for false charges and I finally got all of that stuff removed and, and I just kind of assessed my life and none of it made sense anymore. And I sort of needed to be working on this issue that I was still really so traumatized by. And I just, in this moment of, of courage and chaos and stupidity, I quit my job at the Vera Institute of Justice and started my law firm when I was still really, really freaking out about all this. And I created a little website. I Had no staff, no money, just this tiny windowless office in Dumbo. And, but I said that I was an Internet privacy attorney. And then suddenly like, that caught on, like, like I started getting calls to be on panels and, and little profiles about me and people calling me the revenge porn lawyer. And I was spending most of my time just like trying to get legislation in New York State and working with, with other sort of national advocates and I didn't have a client and it was just totally having imposter syndrome, being called the revenge born lawyer of the country. But then I kind of looked around and I was like, well, I guess no one else is doing this, so even me, clientless, I guess is. And I just started to get clients. I represented most people for free that first year, just trying to get their nude images off the Internet and learning how to do that. And in the meantime, I'd also figured out that the websites that were hosting them were immune from liability because of section 230. And so that's when that law finally got on my radar. And it was the, the end of the, the year of November 2014 when I got this young client who, whose nudes had circulated all over her eighth grade school and then went across the borough. She lived in Brooklyn. And it was through an app that she trusted would disappear her images. And I was like, my God, you know, I don't know anything about product liability, but you relied on that product to disappear your images and instead people were able to screenshot them and circulate them and that's, you know, illegal child pornography.
- [07:38]
Justin Hendricks
So that's the first time, you know, the phone rang with a direct client. Is that right?
- [07:43]
Carrie Goldberg
I'd had other clients needing orders of protection and whose images I could just, you know, needed, you know, DMCA content removal. But this was the first like, heavy, hearty case where I was like, this child has a real problem and I need to figure out how to resolve it. And so I sent this demand letter for an ungodly amount of money to, to the CEO and all the angel investors of this company the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. And I was like terrified because I was just like this one woman operation and it was just me and my 8th grade client against this multi, multi billion dollar company. And two days later they, you know, they had hired sort of a legendary Silicon Valley lawyer to, to contact me. And, and we took it from there. And the case, the case resolved very quickly and I was able to use that momentum to grow my law firm.
- [08:40]
Justin Hendricks
So I now understand you're representing is it, over a thousand victims at this point.
- [08:47]
Carrie Goldberg
Over the years, it, yeah, it's, it's been over a thousand victims. And, and it's everyone from, you know, people who's nude images are online without their permission and us just doing content removal to people who have been sexually assaulted at their school and were suing the school. And maybe nude images have been involved in, in those cases and then huge cases against big corporations like Amazon for selling suicide kits to kids.
- [09:16]
Justin Hendricks
And I know we want to talk a little bit more about that Amazon case in addition to some others, but of course I have to ask you about the most immediate news which ties very much. I think you could see it as a point in the secession of cases that you've been involved in. But two weeks ago this, this lawsuit filed by the mother of one of Elon Musk's sons suing over Grok, generating explicit images involving her. Of course, this Grok controversy we've talked about on this podcast in the, in just the last couple of weeks. It's been, since the turn of the year, one of the big stories in tech. This type of thing seems to be exactly what you'd been warning about in your op EDS and testimony over the last couple years. What were you thinking when the phone rang this time when it was this particular client?
- [10:08]
Carrie Goldberg
Wow. So I spent about five years trying to shrug off this Persona as a revenge porn lawyer. And I was like, no, you know, I've, I've been doing all these very intense product liability cases against apps and a lot of them involve wrongful death cases. And I'm like, I'm not just this revenge porn lawyer. Over the last six months, we've seen more and more situations where artificial intelligence is undressing victims, innocent people who, whose images are being created and manufactured by AI and then posted online. And we have a bunch of cases involving kids doing it to kids and stuff. But in, in the last couple months, this technology was implemented into one of the world's biggest social media companies, X and and so suddenly there was this ability for the public to generate sexually explicit images, you know, that are digital forgeries, and to then basically publish them at scale. So when I got, I'd been talking a lot up to the press about, about the incidents of Grok and how we'd never really seen this, this weaponizing of, of AI and certainly not published at this scale. And that's when I got connected with Ashley, who nobody had really born the brunt of these deepfakes more than Ashley. She's a particular Target on X because so many of Elon Musk's 233 million followers also despise her. You know, he has publicly said some, some very nasty things about her and it has, it has motivated his followers to, to villainize her as well. So as soon as this new technology was, was rolled out, a lot of people were experimenting with it using her, her body. So they would request that Grok undress her, put her into sexually explicit poses, you know, on all fours with her ass cheeks spread. They would put a semen like substance on her and Grok would just manufacture these images and publish them on Grok's own handle on, on X. So, you know, our first thought was she needs a temporary restraining order to get Grok to stop producing and distributing these explicit images of her. And this was actually similar to how I began my first large big tech case against Grindr, where a Grindr user was maliciously pretending to be my client and then sending all these anonymous people to his home to, to sexually assault him. And so in both these cases, I tried to get a temporary restraining order against the platform to stop this heinous use. So we actually, you and I had to, to postpone this interview once and then again today because I had a hearing today on it. But basically it's, it's, it is sort of like this case is the culmination of, of everything that I've been doing for the last 12 years, which is representing people who've been victims of image based sexual abuse, also representing people against like platforms that have released defective and dangerous products into the stream of commerce. This is where it's all suddenly blending together.
- [13:40]
Justin Hendricks
Let me ask you about some of the claims in this suit. Various causes of action, you talking about design defects, manufacturing defects, failure to warn, deceptive practices, a range of different claims of wrongdoing against the firm. You go on to make claims around unjust enrichment, infliction of emotional duress, and you know, effectively, you know, you're seeking damages here. I think one of the things I kind of want to understand is how your kind of theory of product liability around digital products has come together. I mean, these are the types of claims that I feel like I read all the time now in claims against tech firms. Have things changed? Are these kind of product liability ideas, are they working in court? Are you seeing more success in the law than you did in past?
- [14:35]
Carrie Goldberg
So the first case ever to, to use these types of claims was in our case against, against Grider, where Matthew Herrick's ex was, was sending all These, all these strangers to his home to sexually assault him. And we used almost identical claims in this case and we have over the last eight or so years that we did in Hair v. Grindr, which is just basically, you know, saying that whatever various tech product we're suing is a defective product because of that defect. It caused our clients harm. And our first time, it was decided by Valerie Caproni in, in, in the Grindr case, there was no precedent, there was no other case where the theory had been used. And she just sort of, just sort of adopted this really, really broad approach to section 230 saying well, okay, but everything stems from user content. If not from, you know, if not for this malicious user, none of this would have happened. And therefore everything you're suing about is the content of a third party. Section 230 immunizes Grindr totally. The truth was that we were very careful in that complaint, explaining that we were not suing Grindr for any of its publication functions and that our claims were treating it as a product, not, not a service. The theory crashed and burned in that case. That case though has, has been very influential across the country. And it's the exact same theories that succeeded in our case against Omegle over in the district of Oregon that ultimately resulted in a settlement agreement requiring that Omegle, which is a product that matches users for streaming, but is used primarily by children and adults and for sex streaming, and our 11 year old client in that case got matched with a child predator and who made her his sex slave for three years. These theories now have been successful in the multi district litigation against Snap, TikTok, Google Meta, relating to child addiction. It's been successful for us in our cases against Snap involving dealers selling counterfeit fentanyl laced pills to children. You know, it's sort of sweeping the country at this point. And we're now using it of course against X using this dangerous and unsafe product, Grok, which it was, you know, knowingly, I mean, knowingly for X undressing people and creating sexually explicit images. So it's an old, old theory that typically is used intangible product cases that lends itself perfectly to, to tech companies, which also are our products, despite what they try to claim in court.
- [17:29]
Justin Hendricks
I just want to press a little bit more here about the kind of standard of proof you do need to overcome Section 230 immunity. What you found, what is it that tends to push things over the line, get you past that hurdle?
- [17:43]
Carrie Goldberg
Well, it's different for every judge and there's really no uniformity around the country because the Supreme Court has not ruled about Section 230 in a substantive way yet. It depends somewhat on where you're filing the case and whose desk it lands on. And, and I found it to be very arbitrary which, which cases survive a motion to dismiss and which don't. But, but my rule of thumb is to always figure out what specific features contributed or caused the harm that my. That injured my client. So I make it, you know, I really, really drill down to the. The technology. So, for instance, we have a case against Match Group because a serial predator was on Hinge and Tinder drugging and raping women throughout the. The Denver metropolitan area. And Hinge told its users who'd reported the guy that they had removed him, and they hadn't. They continued to let this guy use their product for two more years, which created God knows how many victims. We, we represent nine. There are another 15 who have sued. But in that case, you know, like, we sued for the algorithm that was matching these women with him, and we sued for the, you know, the fact that this technology was recommending this, this abusive abuser. There were all these gamification strategies on the app. Um, the app failed to warn users about this known predator and the fact that Hinge and Tinder can't actually remove known predators. So really, it's like, you know, and we got, we really got down into the specifics, even what the particular algorithm that Hinge uses for its, its recommendations.
- [19:36]
Justin Hendricks
And, and stuff, and we could go through a kind of, like, laundry list of some of the other specific cases and, you know, questions around accountability. And you've, you've already mentioned many. The Snapchat cases, Fentanyl cases, Grindr, you mentioned Amazon, there's Band Lab, there's other attempts at Meta, at Google. You call some of these firms, these big tech firms, your. Your quote, unquote, favorite adversaries. You know, at this point, you know, do you think of them as all alike, or do you see differences in the behavior of some firms versus others? Are you able to spot kind of distinctions amongst these adversaries, or do you still sort of see them as following, you know, somewhat similar patterns across the board?
- [20:22]
Carrie Goldberg
Oh, it's interesting because there's kind of two things that I think, you know, that, like, differentiate them. There's the, like, what did the company do? And then what is their legal strategy? So there are some companies that severely injured what, you know, a client, but then they were remorseful and jumped to help my client, and they weren't all about abdicating responsibility and, and you know, trying to, to compel arbitration or these bullshit claims that I see all the time for forum non convenience or, or you know, right now I'm contending with X claiming that it's robots output is free speech. So it's, it's sort of like you know, is the comp. The company that did harm, are they making product changes now that they know about how they harmed and are they recognizing and apologizing and making my client whole or are they not? So Amazon for instance, you know it's in my top tier of horrific companies in terms of like both these things. I, it was selling a suicide chemical to the general public. I had one client at the time, about four years ago, I contacted Amazon's legal chief legal officer. I said you are selling a chemical that is being promoted on all these suicide forums and there are links to Amazon and there's no other household use for this product and you're selling it for $20. You don't want to be doing this, you don't want to be be involved in, in, in suicide and death. And I thought, I thought that particular case was just. I was going to send this letter, I was going to show my client, this grieving woman who lost her only child that Amazon had complied with, you know, her information that it removed this product and we'd be done. It was just going to be a pro bono case. Instead they hired a law firm that told me that there was no world where Amazon could ever be responsible for the intentional misuse of one of their products and to please update them if there's a change in the law. After that getting that letter, I then started, I then ultimately filed a lawsuit in February of oh my God, 2022. And then I started getting case after case after case because all these other parents who thought that this only had happened to their child realized that there were all these other families that this had happened to. I went 10 more months after I filed that case where Amazon was continuing to sell the product. So a total of 18 months from when I notified them that they were continuing to sell the product. The majority of my clients kids who died died after I had already personally been in contact with Amazon's lawyers. They continue to knowingly sell a product to the general public and deliver it to households that had no use besides suicide. That is to me that is murder.
- [23:39]
Justin Hendricks
The worst type of corporate behavior.
- [23:41]
Carrie Goldberg
It's the worst type. And then they, you know, take no responsibility in court and you know, it's been years of them us winning every motion to dismiss, and then them appealing it and appealing it and just, you know, they're. They're like. Their lawyers are just like, at the rodeo, just, like, having a ball.
- [24:01]
Justin Hendricks
Is there possibly another example that's more egregious than what you just described?
- [24:06]
Carrie Goldberg
I'd say that another example I have is sort of on par where a humongous tech company invited seven of my grieving clients who all had lost young children because of. Because of harm, like, egregious harm on this platform. It invited them all to basically come to their corporate office. And this was in the midst of all these settlement negotiations. And so I took all my clients to their corporate office with the, you know, understanding and belief that this was in furtherance of our settlement negotiations. Our clients then poured their heart out to these corporate officers, the chief legal officer, a room full of their staff members, many of whom were crying. The company's own employees were crying, hearing from our clients. And then we got back a week or two after, and their lawyer told us that they decided that their counteroffer to our clients offer was $0.00.00.
- [25:11]
Justin Hendricks
So you're in the trenches with these victims. You're representing their interests. You're also now trying to kind of change the overall system, the circumstances in which you operate. You're doing more legislative advocacy. You think Section 230 should be amended? I think a lot of folks in the tech policy space, lots of folks who are maybe more free speech maximalists or concerned about the possible implications of reform to section 230 on speech, you know, have criticized you over the years. I don't want to hash out every single one of those critiques, but I thought I might ask you the question of what perhaps you've learned from your critics over the years. How have your views changed on. On these issues?
- [25:58]
Carrie Goldberg
I would say that the most helpful people, in terms of, like, sharpening my arguments and my lawsuits are my critics. I learn a lot from Tector and Eric Goldman about what they hate about my claims. And. And so it. It's always sharpening. I learn a lot from people on Twitter who criticize my claims. And so it's really the best. The best jury imaginable are the. The ones who are rooting against me because, you know, how else. How else am I gonna really be able to argue around? But I would say that I've always kind of been a Section 230 abolitionist. Section 230 has been interpreted by judges way more broadly than the black letter of the Law.
- [26:48]
Justin Hendricks
A lot of folks think things shifted a lot in the last couple of years. Are we perhaps within some view of an appropriate middle place where the kind of intermediary liability that a lot of folks do believe is valuable in terms of preserving, you know, user speech and protecting companies from frivolous lawsuits and you know, all those types of things. Are we, are we closer based on some of the even successes you've had to getting to a place where, you know, even without Additional Reform, Section 230, you know, may not be quite the impenetrable wall that it once was.
- [27:27]
Carrie Goldberg
So I'm in favor of reform through litigation. I don't particularly hate section 230 as it's written, which really should, you know, as it's written it should really apply to defamation and speech based claims. And that was what existed back in 1995 when it was first introduced. You know, in, in cases like against Prodigy and CompuServe where people were being defamatory toward other people on those websites. I don't have an issue with, with that kind of use of section 230. But the problem is that the cases that I bring where there's really significant harms, sometimes death, those have to do not with user content, but with the platform's own misconduct. The infrastructure of, of the product, the features of, of the product that the company has knowingly introduced. You know, these are decisions that are made not within content moderation but within, in a boardroom. And they should be responsible for those kinds of things. And I think that there has been so much progress and I'm, you know, like I have spent these last 12 years kind of with nothing more important in my life than handling these, these types of cases because I think that they are influential to the entire world because everyone is, is using the, these products. I think the scary thing for me as, as a lawyer who still has clients come to me all the time is that I still don't know if a case is going to survive a Section 230 motion to dismiss. I can never tell. Some of my strongest cases have been dismissed even recently. And some of the cases that, you know, where I think that there is a better argument for the platform to be claiming that it was content based. Those have gone through. And so, you know, it's hard to deal with a client who, and not be able to tell them whether their case is going to be thrown out of court in a preliminary motion or if we can actually seek, you know, try their case in front of a jury. So we may Be, you know, getting closer to a middle ground in terms of the cases that do actually succeed, because those cases really are just succeed, succeeding past a motion to dismiss. They're succeeding on the right ground, you know, where we're looking at the defects of the product, the failure to warn infrastructure. So that's great, but it's, it's. We're still in a terrain where there's a lot of unpredictability at the moment we file the case. And, and the tech companies relish in that. They will gladly, you know, take their chances on a section 230 motion then. Then settle with a client.
- [30:19]
Justin Hendricks
So I mentioned the idea that you're involved in advocating for various legislative reforms to section 230. One of the most recent is the Algorithmic Accountability Act. You know, you mentioned Mike Masnick earlier. This is another one that he's been quite critical of, and in particular making a couple of arguments about it that are probably somewhat similar to arguments you've seen against section 230 reforms from Mike and from others over the years. But basically, you know, arguing that on the one hand, if even if you were to reform Section 230 in this way, there's still the First Amendment right behind it, which is something we hear a lot around Section 230 reforms. But then basically kind of taking on the sort of language that the two senators in this case, Republican John Curtis and the Democrat Mark Kelly, they put forward this particular bill, this idea that they are making these comparisons to physical products. And effectively critics of this bill are saying, in fact, this would do perhaps the opposite of what these folks want to accomplish. I don't know. When you look at the criticisms of this type of bill, this type of reform, how do you kind of contend with those types of arguments?
- [31:39]
Carrie Goldberg
Well, I, you know, I think that the whole issue of whether something is a product or a service, I feel like most judges don't want to engage with that. You know, there's the Restatement of Torts, which basically says that if something's product, like, analogous to a product, then you can still use product liability claims on those cases. So, you know, I think, I think the Algorithmic Accountability act is great in terms of clarifying that and making it unambiguous, but it's probably not the most essential thing. I think what we always need is unambiguous guidance for judges to know that, you know, that a cause of action can proceed.
- [32:21]
Justin Hendricks
One of the things I find myself thinking about a little bit lately, and I'll just put this to you and see if it resonates in any way is the extent to which, you know, especially these Silicon Valley firms and some of the large ones that we've talked about here are seen as more or less not caring about the consequences of their products, not certainly acting fast enough or putting enough resources into trust and safety. And of course, we've seen even more profound rollbacks this year. The Grok case, I don't even know where to start. There's no way to look at that and just not question how the adults who earn their paychecks there can sleep at night, at least from my perspective. But the other thing I wonder about sometimes, especially when it comes to the kind of free speech question, is the extent to which these types of abuses are also feeding into the hands of authoritarians and despots around the world who want more severe surveillance, you know, systems. And I've, I often wonder about that, the extent to which because Silicon Valley firms have not addressed some of the liability issues that you are aimed at, or because they've been shielded from that in many cases, if it has not created a situation where in fact the real sensors are able to make an easy case. You know, these are dangerous products, dangerous platforms, you know, run by executives who can't be trusted.
- [33:53]
Carrie Goldberg
I think that it's kind of twofold. I think what you're saying is, is absolutely right that we already have countries banning X, you know, like, and, you know, I think like our country protects the tech industry, our courts protect the tech industry, legislation protects them. And so it's easy for the, the rest of the world to say, oh my God, like the United States just lets these companies run amok and now.
- [34:25]
Justin Hendricks
Is willing to tariff us to make.
- [34:27]
Carrie Goldberg
Sure that we, and it's, you know, and everything that these tech companies are doing to American people, it's also doing to people in these other countries. There's treaties that require litigation be in the United States or that countries have the equivalent of Section 230 in order to, to trade with the United States in these companies, you know, American companies are, they're doing so much surveillance. So it would be terrifying. Just like, you know, the United States didn't want a Chinese TikTok. You know, how can these other countries be comfortable with these American products that have so much power and are abusing people, you know, and in addition to that are creating this mounting case law to protect themselves. I feel that there is no product bad enough for lawyers to not defend. Amazon had and one of the most prestigious law firms, it still has it Defending its right to continue to sell a household product with no use besides suicide. And because of that advice that it gave to its client hordes, more people died. Like, the lawyers are not infusing any morality into this situation when it comes to, like, the ones that the. These defendants choose.
- [35:57]
Justin Hendricks
This is hard work. You mentioned that it started with a trauma for you, and you are perpetually, you know, looking into the minute details of many people's trauma. How do you keep yourself going? How do you sort of sustain yourself in this work? I mean, I, I realize you, you know, you, you say it's a vocation and you clearly very animated on behalf of your clients, but it must have some corrosive effect.
- [36:23]
Carrie Goldberg
You know, a lot of times I'm just like, oh, my lot of exercise and adorable dogs just keeps me going. But things can get really dark, particularly when you're in front of a judge who isn't sympathetic to a client's plight. And. And so it's like when we're dealing with really horrific cases like child rape and child abduction and suicide, it gets really hard on the days where we're not only representing the clients, but we're also dealing with a loss in court. It got really hard when Amazon continued to sell this product. And I was getting client after client during this interval of time, and I was going insane a little bit because, like, no one cared. Like, no one would. Would write about it. Like, mainstream media started developing new stories twice and then killed those stories because higher editors said that they didn't want to produce it. Meanwhile, Amazon was continuing to sell the product. So it got really hard, and it gets really hard sometimes. But I don't know, I just, I come to work every day. I love this job. I'm doing my life's work. I do have really good coping strategies. Nothing in this job is ever going to be as hard as, like, my first job out of college, which I did for five and a half years, working with Holocaust survivors every day. So, like, that always puts things in perspective, you know, and also, like, getting to take a client's trauma and alchemize it into a way to get them justice. It's like, very relieving for the client. And so I'm not, like, just constantly immersed in a client's pain. I'm like, how do we transform this to make it so that this doesn't happen to another, another family? And that's usually what my client's goal is. I mean, we sue for money, but their biggest money is never going to satisfy them. I could get them a billion dollar judgment and they will go home miserable because they won't have their child who died because of that harm. You know, they're, it won't bring back the tragic loss that they're, that they're dealing with, but what they do care about is making sure that, that, you know, this doesn't happen to another family. So the fact that, you know, Amazon finally in October of 2022, removed sodium nitrite, and I've gotten almost no cases of dead kids from that interval on, like, shows that, that the work that we did with our clients really mattered. I mean, this, this suicide chemical that killed thousands of people during this period of time between 2017 and 2022 is almost obsolete now. And that's because of, of these cases and my clients being brave enough to, to sue the biggest corporation in the history of the universe.
- [39:25]
Justin Hendricks
It's more about for you reclaiming their power.
- [39:28]
Carrie Goldberg
It is. And it's just like, it's really rewarding. It's just absolutely, it's exhilarating. You know, like, there have been times when I get fueled by my hatred for the enemy and I have to really remind myself and I do a bunch of different sort of exercises and rituals and we do them as a group in my office to make sure that we are. That the engine that's fueling us is one of like, our clients love for their deceased child. And as long as I'm like on that side of the line where we are like fueled by our clients love and not hate toward the enemy, I can keep going. And it's weird because it's just like a perceptual twist. But it like makes it a lot, it makes it joyful because it's like we're doing this in the name of their child. And I get to know, I get to know these kids.
- [40:27]
Justin Hendricks
Harry Goldberg, thank you very much.
- [40:29]
Carrie Goldberg
Thank you, Justin.
- [40:42]
Justin Hendricks
That's it for this episode. Hope you'll send your feedback. You could write to me at Justin at TechPolicy Press. Thanks to my guest, thanks to my co founder, Brian Jones, and thank you for listening.
- [41:00]
Carrie Goldberg
Tech policy press.