The movie ends in 2000 with a cheque and a smile. The real story didn’t end there — and almost none of it went the way the film let you believe it would.
Erin Brockovich was born in 1960. She never was a lawyer, and she still isn’t one. Right now she’s running a national campaign against AI data centres that landed her on the TIME100 AI list. And Hinkley — the little desert town she won $333 million for — has more or less been wiped off the map.
Updated September 2026
What is Erin Brockovich doing now?
She’s doing the same thing she did thirty years ago, with a different opponent.
She founded Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting, a crowdsourced map of data centres — proposed, under construction and already humming — across nearly every state in the country. Residents file what’s happening near them, and the map turns a thousand local fights into one visible pattern. It had around 4,000 community reports by June 2026. By the time TIME named her to its TIME100 AI list, it had more than 9,000.
And the complaint she hears most isn’t the one you’d expect. It isn’t the noise, or the water, or the power bills.
“The single most common concern — more than noise, more than water usage, more than rising utility bills — is the one word that keeps appearing in submission after submission: transparency.”
Here’s what she means by it: “Transparency means notifying residents before decisions are made, not after. It means public hearings with real, complete information about energy consumption, water use, noise levels, and effects on local infrastructure.”
Which is, almost word for word, the argument she was making against PG&E in a California desert in the early 1990s.
Who was the real George in Erin Brockovich?
His name was Jorg Halaby — a long-haired biker she met in a Southern California bar in the early nineties.
On screen, played by Aaron Eckhart, he’s the gentle neighbour who ends up minding her children while she chases the case. In real life he helped her move to Los Angeles and introduced her to Ed Masry’s law firm, which is how the whole thing started in the first place.
What happened to the real George?
This is where the film and the record go their separate ways, and it isn’t pretty.
On 26 April 2000 — months after the movie opened, while Julia Roberts was collecting awards for playing his girlfriend — Halaby and Brockovich’s first ex-husband, Shawn Brown, were arrested and charged with extortion. Prosecutors alleged they’d tried to get more than $300,000 out of Brockovich and Masry by threatening to sell tabloid claims of an affair. She denied the claims. The charges were dropped later that year, and nobody explained why.
Halaby also filed a $3 million palimony suit against her. It was reported to have been settled for $40,000 and a custom Harley-Davidson.
What became of him after that isn’t clear. A report that he died of a brain tumour gets repeated everywhere, but it traces back to a single hedged source, with no obituary and no date attached. Anyone telling you confidently that he’s dead is guessing.
What happened to Hinkley, California?
It was bought, and then it was bulldozed.
PG&E began buying up threatened properties in November 2010, and now owns roughly two-thirds of the town — demolishing most of what it purchased so nobody could squat in it. The population is less than half what it was in 2012. The elementary school is shut. By 2016 the New York Times was calling it a ghost town.
The $333 million settlement in July 1996 — around $684 million in today’s money, divided between more than 600 plaintiffs — didn’t save the place. Two more settlements followed, $295 million in 2006 for roughly 1,100 additional people, and $20 million in 2008. None of them saved it either.
Is Hinkley still contaminated?
Yes. That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud.
The chromium-6 plume was about two miles long when the case was brought. By 2015 it was roughly eight. A second plume, found around 2010, affected more than a hundred additional property owners. Near the compressor station, readings still run above 1,000 parts per billion — something like a hundred times California’s legal limit of 10 ppb, which was only set in July 2014.
A 2015 order requires 80 per cent clean-up by 2032. PG&E’s own 2014 study put the job somewhere between 11 and 50 years. The company had spent more than $750 million by 2013, and filed for bankruptcy in January 2019.
How much money did Erin Brockovich get?
A $2.5 million bonus out of the 1996 settlement — about $5.1 million in today’s money. The figure everyone quotes is the right one. What the film leaves out is that the money arrived before the hard part did.
How many children does Erin Brockovich have?
Three. Matthew and Katie, with her first husband Shawn Brown, and Elizabeth, with her second husband Steven Brockovich. She’s a grandmother now.
Is Erin Brockovich married now?
She married Eric L. Ellis in 1998; records indicate that marriage ended in divorce in 2012. She hasn’t remarried publicly since.
What else has she done since the film?
Rather a lot, and almost none of it made the news.
She’s president of Brockovich Research & Consulting and consults for Weitz & Luxenberg in the United States and Shine Lawyers in Australia. She’s written two books, Take It from Me in 2001 and Superman’s Not Coming in 2020. In July 2024 she wrote a New York Times essay about PFAS and the quiet unwinding of environmental regulation. And in February 2026 she came out against sinking the SS United States as an artificial reef, because of the hexavalent chromium aboard it.
Which is the same chemical that made her famous in the first place. Thirty years later, she’s still following it around.
Erik Brockovich cameo
While many fans know Erin Brockovich herself makes a cameo in the film, here’s a lesser-known twist: her real-life lawyer, Ed Masry, also appears.
In the same diner scene where Erin plays a waitress, the actual Ed Masry —portrayed in the movie by Albert Finney — can be spotted sitting in the background.
Erin Brockovich clevage
The real Erin Brockovich-Ellis once claimed that the film was 98-99% accurate.
However, while the movie does a great job telling Erin’s story, there are a few things they left out. For example, the real Erin Brockovich-Ellis has said that while her cleavage may have caught some attention, she never intentionally used her appearance to manipulate anyone, as the movie suggests.
Is the film Erin Brockovich a true story?
Broadly, yes. The case was real, the settlement figure was real, and the chromium-6 contamination at Hinkley was real and is still there.
What the film compresses is everything that came after. The 1996 settlement was not the end of the litigation, and the clean-up it was meant to pay for is still unfinished thirty years on.
Does the real Erin Brockovich appear in the film?
She does. She has a cameo as a waitress, and the name on the uniform is Julia R. — the film’s one joke at its own expense, with Julia Roberts sitting at the table being served.
What happened to the Hinkley settlements after 1996?
There were three in total. $333 million in July 1996, divided between more than 600 plaintiffs. Then $295 million in 2006, for roughly 1,100 more people. Then a final $20 million in 2008.
PG&E had spent more than $750 million on the site by 2013, and filed for bankruptcy in January 2019. None of it put the town back.
What else has Erin Brockovich campaigned on?
PFAS — the so-called forever chemicals — which she wrote about for the New York Times in July 2024, arguing that regulation was being quietly unwound. And in February 2026 she came out against sinking the SS United States as an artificial reef, because of the hexavalent chromium aboard it.
That is the same chemical as Hinkley. Thirty years later, she is still following it around.
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