Whistleblower Protection Blog : Whistleblower Lawyer & Attorney : National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund : Whistleblower Protection, Fraud Claims : Washington DC

Oranges and Sunshine is a new feature film scheduled for limited release this Friday, October 21, 2011. It is based on the book Empty Cradles by Margaret Humphreys (portrayed by Emily Watson), a social worker in Nottingham, England. Earlier in her career, it was her job to remove babies from loving parents. By 1986, she was leading a group therapy for adults coping with issues arising from their adoptions. Some wanted to find their parents or siblings. One discovered a brother living in Australia. Then another young woman contacted her claiming that she had been taken from her parents in England and transported to Australia where she grew up.

Connecting these two cases, Humphreys begins research that uncovers a decades-long British practice of exporting dependent children. In the 1950's and 1960's, upwards of 130,000 children were deported under the program, about 7,000 to Australia. Humphreys used her personal vacation to travel to Australia with that one woman who so treasured meeting her brother. While there, Humphreys continues her research into the child deportations.

Were this a typical whistleblower story, Humphreys would have received a hostile reaction from her superiors when she started raising concerns about a massive fraud and conspiracy by government officials. Instead, when Humphreys explains her concerns to her supervisor, the supervisor is upset that Humphreys had to use her personal vacation time for her investigation in Australia. The supervisor arranges to assign Humphreys to investigate her own concerns, full time, and starts raising the money to cover her salary and expenses for two years. This is a whistleblower fantasy. Our hero also has a supportive husband, and children who share only a few words about missing their busy mother.

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Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo (pictured with Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy) celebrated the release of her new book at Busboys and Poets last night. Her book is called, NO FEAR: A Whistleblower's Triumph Over Corruption and Retaliation at EPA. 

The event began with a short documentary film produced and directed by Tylon Washington and Shawna Glover. The film began with interviews in South Africa of victims of vanadium mining. They explained how they worked without protective equipment. The vanadium pentoxide entered their lungs, came out of their pores, and damaged their bedsheets and bodies. Some interviews were with their widows. The American company that ran the vanadium mine took x-rays of their workers' lungs, but would not share those x-rays with the injured workers. Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo sacrificed her career at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to speak out against the poisoning of South Africa. NO FEAR tells the story of these workers, Dr. Coleman-Adebayo's efforts to protect them, the retaliation she suffered, her historic jury verdict against EPA, and the campaign that led to the NO-FEAR Act.

Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy introduced Dr. Coleman-Adebayo. He called her a Rosa Parks for the 21st Century.

Hosts of the event were Teaching for Change, TransAfrica Forum, National Whistleblowers Center (of which Dr. Coleman-Adebayo is a Board member), No FEAR Coalition, Alliance for Justice in the Workplace, and USDA Minority Committee.

You can order her new book from the NWC store.

For more information about her current campaign to remove one EPA retaliator, follow this link. You can also visit Dr. Coleman-Adebayo's own web page. Follow the continuation of this blog post for more photos.

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