In Your Neighborhood
The girl they tried to bury came back with a shovel: How I became Kait Justice
For most of my life I thought my story was ordinary. Then I learned how many people profit when we believe that.
Photo courtesy of Kait Justice’s Substack, “Downwind of Truth.”
Kait Justice, an independent journalist on Substack, was photographed at her local “no Kings” rally on March 28. Her Substack posting is entitled “Downwind of Truth.”
By Kait Justice
Posted 6/8/26
Kait Justice retells the narrative of her life, learning how her life and the lives of her family have been scarred by exposure to “forever” chemicals such as PCBs, which have pollluted the land, air, and water around her since early childhood. In response, she assumed the character of “Kait Justice,” fighting to seek Justice for her family, neighbors and community. Her Substack is named, “Downwind of Truth.”
How can the years of advertising promoted by General Electric, which was responsible for the saturation pollution of PCBs in Pittsfield, be played back, with a twist: “GE. We bring good things to life.” How can Kait Justice serve as an empowering model for other mothers in the Pittsfield community? What is the relationship between convicted pedophiles such as Jeffrey Epstein and corporate polluters such as GE? Wiil the Berkshire Eagle feature the writings of Kait Justice on its editorial pages?
Here in Rhode Island, the prevalence of cancers potentially related to jewelry manufacturing and printing industries is a well-known suspicion. For me, personally, the mention of Kearny, N.J., as a Superfund site by Kait Justice brings with it the personal knowledge that my grandfather purchased land for his plastics factory from DuPont, which had once been the original manufacturing site of forever chemicals, a fact uncovered by science writer and investigator Rebecca Altman. The work by researchers at Brown Health on personalized cancer vaccines might find fertile fields of exploration in many of the former industrial factories in Woonsocket, Central Falls, Pawtucket and Providence.
Editor’s Note: Here is the initial chapter in the autobiography of Kait Justice, first published on Substack on June 1, 2026, and now being “restacked” and “shared” in the June 8 edition of ConvergenceRI.
Kait Justice, together with Ellie Leonard, have created a compelling voice of new citizen journalism, stitching together a narrative of accurate, honest reporting and storytelling. It is the narrative of all of our lives.
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — As children I think we all believe that what we go through on a daily basis is normal. We see how different our friends’ homes are from our own, and we notice things, but for whatever reason we can’t imagine that everyone else isn’t dealing with the same challenges we are. I grew up learning early on that everyone had to work a job they hated, that every adult around me was constantly worried about bills, and that complaining was the main form of communication at any get-together. It was always a competition over who had the worst broken bone, the worst breakup, the worst version of whatever life had just handed them, like some sort of battle scar that made you seasoned and qualified. I believed all of this more than anyone I know. I truly believed my experiences were ordinary, that this was just what life looked like, and I carried that belief for a very long time. So imagine my surprise when I found out just how wrong I was.
I grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and if you’ve been following my work for longer than a year, you know the name. You know it for the Housatonic River, for General Electric, for the PCBs that have made this small city in the Berkshires one of the most contaminated communities in America. But before I knew any of that, before I knew what a PCB was, what a Superfund site meant or why the rivers we fished in had signs telling you not to eat what you caught, Pittsfield was just home. It was where I rode my bike, where my mother made dinner out of whatever she could afford that week, where my father lived in a trailer with his mother across the street from the one we lived in when I was born.
I spend my nights now reading federal documents about systems designed to keep people in the dark. I try to understand financial networks, map the corruption and failures of our systems, and write about how power protects itself while the people who get hurt are told the hurt is their own fault.
How I ended up at my desk, reading these documents at two in the morning, starts in the same place all my stories start. It starts with something that seemed normal until I found out it wasn’t. I grew up poor and anxious and convinced I was not smart enough for any of this, and some days I still feel that way. I know better now, and this is the story of how I got here.
My parents met when they were young, my mother was barely into her twenties when she had me, and they married while she was pregnant with me. Both of them came from big families of six kids each, but from completely different worlds. My mother was the youngest in hers, and in my eyes she came from a good family, a stable one. My grandfather on her side never liked my father, though. He could probably see what was coming.
My father came from poverty and abuse. His father was brutal, and the impact on my dad has been lifelong. I remember my mother telling me about my grandmother, his mother, and all the creative ways she would cook fried cabbage when there was nothing else in the house.
My father’s mental illness, his addiction, the choices he made because of both, all of it contributed to my parents splitting up when I was still little. My brother had just been born and shortly after that we moved into government housing with our mother.
She worked twelve hours a week at the hospital and before we moved she would clean our landlord’s house to help keep a roof over our heads. I remember her telling me how she would have to budget for things like new toothbrushes. She’d set aside a quarter here, another one there, saving up until she could afford them. My mother has an incredible story of her own, and what she did with almost nothing was extraordinary. But I thought this was how everyone lived. I thought every family worked like this, that everyone’s mother was counting quarters and figuring out how to stretch a dollar into a week’s worth of meals. I actually thought we were pretty well off compared to a lot of my friends. And honestly, we were.
My mother had a way of making something beautiful out of very little. Our home was immaculate, always, and she had OCD, though of course she was never diagnosed, so everything was spotless. Our clothes were ironed even when the knees had been patched more times than I could count, and we always had a safe place to play. Dinner was always on the table, made from whatever combination of WIC benefits and her own creativity she could pull together that night. She gave us stability in a life that didn’t come with much of it, and I didn’t appreciate how remarkable that was until I became a mother myself.
What I Thought Was Normal
We still spent time with my father who loved us, and he still does. He lived with his mother back in the trailer, directly across the street from the one we’d lived in when I was born, and on the weekends we’d go see him.
Some of it was pretty standard, fishing and the occasional fishing derby. He would always put the worm on the hook for me while my brother handled his own, but I was the one who dug the fat nightcrawlers out of the bucket of fresh black dirt. You could find those styrofoam containers in plenty of gas stations and shops around the Berkshires. My dad didn’t usually pay for a fishing license, but we didn’t need one as kids, not until we hit twelve or so, and he’d just help us fish instead.
We still spent time with my father who loved us, and he still does. He lived with his mother back in the trailer, directly across the street from the one we’d lived in when I was born, and on the weekends we’d go see him.
Some of it was pretty standard, fishing and the occasional fishing derby. He would always put the worm on the hook for me while my brother handled his own, but I was the one who dug the fat nightcrawlers out of the bucket of fresh black dirt. You could find those styrofoam containers in plenty of gas stations and shops around the Berkshires. My dad didn’t usually pay for a fishing license, but we didn’t need one as kids, not until we hit twelve or so, and he’d just help us fish instead.
We had good times but underneath those good times were things I tucked away in the back of my brain because I didn’t know what else to do with them. My father was often on heavy medication, things he’d been prescribed as a kid when they put him in special education and forgot about him. He also drank, which is why I grew up thinking that going to AA meetings with your dad was just something you did. His brothers were in the program, other people in my life were in the program, and it was just another part of the routine. I had no idea until I was an adult that not everyone even knows what these meetings are for, never mind attending them when they were only 7.
Then there was the gambling. I think my father truly believed the universe owed him something more. He’d been handed such a terrible start in life that he was convinced there had to be a payout coming, something that would make it all make sense. He was so damaged by the things from his past and so haunted by the idea of how things could have been that he was always looking for the next thing that confirmed the world had cheated him. Seeing anything else would have forced him to realize he may have had more control over his own life than he was willing to admit, and that kind of reckoning is hard for anyone, let alone someone carrying what he was carrying.
That’s probably why so many of my memories of weekends with him take place in gas station parking lots, sitting in his car, scratching scratch tickets. He would buy them, collect ones he found on the ground, and he even went through a phase of going to gas stations around town and pulling tickets out of the trash, going through bags of them looking for a winner that someone had thrown away without checking. He never found one.
I had fun, honestly. The tickets have all kinds of little games on them, matching numbers and symbols, and there was a real thrill when you got a winner, even if it was just a dollar. It meant pride, and it meant we could buy more tickets. But it always seemed silly to me to win something and spend it all over again, especially when I knew my mother was at home saving quarters for toothbrushes. Thank god for that bit of balance, I had my mother’s survival instinct even then. Like when I was no older than 10 and my dad would decide to take us on an “adventure” to Boston, except he couldn’t read to follow the signs home. So I would have to ask at the gas stations and navigate home to western Mass. I somehow understood the odds weren’t in our favor, and I knew there were a hundred things more worthy of our last five dollars, even when I was so young.
I had fun, honestly. The tickets have all kinds of little games on them, matching numbers and symbols, and there was a real thrill when you got a winner, even if it was just a dollar. It meant pride, and it meant we could buy more tickets. But it always seemed silly to me to win something and spend it all over again, especially when I knew my mother was at home saving quarters for toothbrushes. Thank god for that bit of balance, I had my mother’s survival instinct even then. Like when I was no older than 10 and my dad would decide to take us on an “adventure” to Boston, except he couldn’t read to follow the signs home. So I would have to ask at the gas stations and navigate home to western Mass. I somehow understood the odds weren’t in our favor, and I knew there were a hundred things more worthy of our last five dollars, even when I was so young.
When I was in early elementary school, my mother managed to get us into Section 8 housing in Dalton, a nice small town right next to Pittsfield. It was a real blessing for her, and I know that now, knowing what some of our other options would have been. Being the poor kid in a more well-off town came with its own challenges, but I was young and I didn’t really know the difference yet. I had kids to play with, a place to ride my bike, and I felt safe most of the time.
What I didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that Dalton was another company town. Crane and Company had been there for over two centuries, making the paper that every dollar bill in America is printed on. Their mills sat along the same Housatonic River that ran down to Pittsfield, carrying with it toxins that may never go away. The housing development where we moved was built right next to one of those old mill buildings, which had been converted into an assisted living facility by the time we got there. The river ran right past us, and we thought it was beautiful. While the mill building was no longer in use, the pond behind it that connected branches of the river held onto the forever chemicals. And the next town over, things were getting worse in ways I wouldn’t begin to understand for decades.
It Never Made Sense
From the time I was in first grade, I had headaches. Not the kind you get from skipping lunch, but the kind that sat behind my eyes and didn’t leave, and by third grade they had turned into sinus infections so constant that I went to school with my arm wrapped to cover the port they put in for IV antibiotics. I would go to the doctor every day after school to get hooked up. I was eight years old with medical equipment taped to my body, and the thing I remember most is that nobody really believed me at first. I was an anxious kid, so when I said my head hurt they mostly assumed I was trying to get out of class.
From the time I was in first grade, I had headaches. Not the kind you get from skipping lunch, but the kind that sat behind my eyes and didn’t leave, and by third grade they had turned into sinus infections so constant that I went to school with my arm wrapped to cover the port they put in for IV antibiotics. I would go to the doctor every day after school to get hooked up. I was eight years old with medical equipment taped to my body, and the thing I remember most is that nobody really believed me at first. I was an anxious kid, so when I said my head hurt they mostly assumed I was trying to get out of class.
The strange part, the part that made it so easy to wave me off, is that I never ran a fever. Not even with a raging infection. And a fever is one of the ways a doctor decides whether you’re actually sick, so without one I could never quite prove it. How could I really be that sick if my temperature was normal? My mother would rub my temples and the spot between my eyebrows because for some reason the pressure helped, even though the doctors told me it shouldn’t, and somewhere in there I learned the word hypochondriac. I learned it from the adults around me, the way you learn any word that gets used about you often enough, and I believed it. If I was just a girl who worried too much about every little ache, then at least everything made sense. I learned early on to ignore my body.
By the time I got to middle school, the years of being sick and anxious and depressed caught up with me all at once. My seventh grade year, the last one before we moved back to Pittsfield, I went to school crying every single day. It was the law that I had to be there, so my mom would bring me in sobbing, and the school would put me in the guidance counselor’s office because there was no version of me that could sit in a classroom like that, and I would cry there until they gave up and called her to come get me. I realize now that they kept be long enough to “count” for the day, then sent me home. I would cry at home until I fell asleep, and then the alarm would go off the next morning and we would do the whole thing again. That lasted about three months. To this day the sound of an alarm clock makes me sick to my stomach.
The day finally came when I told my mother I couldn’t do it anymore, that I didn’t want to fight this hard just to exist. She took me to the emergency room that night. By then I had already been labeled, already had a CHINS officer which is a more acceptable way of saying a probation officer for chldren, already been the troubled kid in every file that had my name on it, so I think the doctors saw what they expected to see instead of what was in front of them. They kept me for a few hours, asked me questions while I cried, and I told them the truth, which was that I didn’t want to die but I didn’t want to live anymore either. They didn’t have a bed for me in the psychiatric ward, so they had me sign a piece of paper promising I wouldn’t hurt myself, then they sent me home.
This part is honestly a blur, all of these years are. From what I can remember, the next day I broke that promise. I will tell that whole story another time, but the part that matters for this version is that the first thing I thought, was that I didn’t want my mother to believe it was her fault. So I walked next door, where she was visiting the neighbor before leaving for work, and I told her what I had done. She got me to the hospital in time, I am here, writing this, because some part of me even at the very bottom knew I was made for more.
Somewhere I knew my story wasn’t over. Needless to say, they found that bed.
Recovery did not come with much help from the systems that were supposed to provide it, but somewhere in the weeks after, I woke up and made a decision. I was either going to really live or I wasn’t, and I chose to live. I dropped out of high school as soon as I turned sixteen, took the tests, got my GED within a couple of weeks, and signed up for a class at the community college just to see if I could. Looking back on all of it now, as a mother, I am horrified. My mom was doing her best with a world of things I knew nothing about, but a whole group of trained adults looked at a child in that much pain and decided she was a problem to manage instead of a kid who needed help. And I was one of the lucky ones. I came from one of the more stable homes among the kids I grew up with, most of whom were fighting the same things I was.
Recovery did not come with much help from the systems that were supposed to provide it, but somewhere in the weeks after, I woke up and made a decision. I was either going to really live or I wasn’t, and I chose to live. I dropped out of high school as soon as I turned sixteen, took the tests, got my GED within a couple of weeks, and signed up for a class at the community college just to see if I could. Looking back on all of it now, as a mother, I am horrified. My mom was doing her best with a world of things I knew nothing about, but a whole group of trained adults looked at a child in that much pain and decided she was a problem to manage instead of a kid who needed help. And I was one of the lucky ones. I came from one of the more stable homes among the kids I grew up with, most of whom were fighting the same things I was.
The thing that may have saved me, honestly, was a computer. When I was around eleven, we were living in section 8 housing and the neighbor got a computer, with internet. I started babysitting at night just so I could use it after the kids went to bed. My mom would settle in next door in case I needed her, and I would spend hours teaching myself how the whole thing worked. I built my first websites on AOL Page Builder, Expages and Angelfire.
I was not a well kid, and the internet was the one place that felt like an outlet for everything in my head and a buffer against the parts of the world I couldn’t handle. I spent years building fan sites for the Backstreet Boys (the obsession was real), designing layouts in Paint Shop Pro, and teaching myself HTML, PHP, and WordPress by right-clicking to “view source”.
There was a whole community of us back then, before social media existed, finding each other through comment sections and plug boards, applying for the privilege of being hosted by someone who actually paid for a domain. None of us knew we were learning anything. By the time Facebook rolled out Business Pages and the rest of the world started catching up, I was so far ahead of it that not having a degree barely mattered.
That is the part about school I still can’t get over, now that I’m a parent. How does something that is supposed to be a gift, something I was genuinely good at, a place that was supposed to help me become something, end up being the thing that nearly broke me? I always loved to learn, that was never the problem. I just needed to do it in a way the system wasn’t willing to bend for, and the internet gave me what the classroom couldn’t.
That is the part about school I still can’t get over, now that I’m a parent. How does something that is supposed to be a gift, something I was genuinely good at, a place that was supposed to help me become something, end up being the thing that nearly broke me? I always loved to learn, that was never the problem. I just needed to do it in a way the system wasn’t willing to bend for, and the internet gave me what the classroom couldn’t.
I met my husband Tom when I was young, and somehow he still hasn’t gotten sick of me. He became the person who told me I could go after things people had spent my whole life telling me I’d never have, like a career without a degree. I talked my way into an unpaid internship at a little nonprofit theater, trading PR work for experience, and I started a blog about the Berkshires that was really just a living resume in disguise, full of my photography and writing and the places I was discovering for the first time as an adult. A man who ran a branding agency saw it and hired me on the spot, because he understood that social media was about to matter and I already spoke the language. And just like that, the random pile of skills I’d taught myself in the dark became a career.
There is more to this story too, but after I had my second daughter I went on to run my own company, Pierce Social, for more than seven years. I invented a product called Binka Bear because my daughter needed it and it didn’t exist, raised twenty thousand dollars on Kickstarter, won a pitch competition, and ended up on The Mel Robbins Show. None of that was supposed to be possible for someone like me, and every time it happened anyway, it made me wonder what else I was capable of that I’d been told I wasn’t.
I didn’t know it then, but even though none of those things worked out how I’d dreamed, I was building the exact toolkit I use now. Teaching yourself to find the answer when nobody will hand it to you, sitting with something confusing until it finally makes sense, learning whatever language a new world requires, none of that cares whether you’re building a website or reading a federal court filing at two in the morning. It all works the same way.
Then, There Was a Reason…
Then I became a mother of three girls, and motherhood brought me to my knees in a way nothing else ever had. The first time I stopped blaming myself for how hard it felt and started asking why it had to be this hard, the answer looked exactly like every system I would later spend my nights investigating. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
One morning in August of 2024, I was drinking my coffee and half-listening to my kids argue about breakfast while I scrolled the local news.I saw a headline that took my whole life apart and put it back together and into focus in a way I had never seen. An air monitor sitting between GE’s old Building 12 and the land where my mother’s house sits had registered PCB levels more than double the federal action level. They had stopped the demolition it said. I sat there realizing that I had grown up hearing about PCBs my entire life, hearing the stories about how General Electric used to give the contaminated soil away and tell people it was clean, and I had never once actually asked what it meant. Didn’t they say they cleaned it up already? What does this old poison do to a person? Is it still here? How does something they dumped before I was born make me sick now?
So I did what I always do. I started looking it up.
What happens when someone the system was designed to bury shows up with a shovel?
The first thing I learned when I began researching is that PCBs are immunotoxicants, which means they go after your immune system and keep it locked in a state of low, constant inflammation. Let me just tell you, your body was never built to sustain a state of inflammation. The more I read about what chronic inflammation actually does over a lifetime, the more I felt the floor tilt, because it kept describing things I had lived with since I was a child and things I was watching my own kids struggle with now.
The first thing I learned when I began researching is that PCBs are immunotoxicants, which means they go after your immune system and keep it locked in a state of low, constant inflammation. Let me just tell you, your body was never built to sustain a state of inflammation. The more I read about what chronic inflammation actually does over a lifetime, the more I felt the floor tilt, because it kept describing things I had lived with since I was a child and things I was watching my own kids struggle with now.
This is where all of my pattern recognition and slightly neurodivergent logic comes in. The science already accepts that long term inflammation causes a meaningful share of cancers and the science already accepts that PCBs cause long term inflammation. A peer reviewed study published in 2022 found that people in Pittsfield were walking around with PCB levels in their blood at least four times higher than the average American.
So how has no one ever screened my community or the thousands of others just like ours for the cancers the science would expect to find? How has no one ever offered to treat the inflammation underneath them?
So how has no one ever screened my community or the thousands of others just like ours for the cancers the science would expect to find? How has no one ever offered to treat the inflammation underneath them?
Could This Explain It?
Pittsfield has the highest rate of bladder cancer in Massachusetts and I have listened to my neighbors describe burying the people they loved to glioblastoma, to pancreatic cancer, to the rare adrenal cancers that are not supposed to cluster in one small city. I’ve buried a loved one due to glioblastoma. Michael was only in his early 30s and we will honor one year since his passing on Friday, June 5, 2026.
Pittsfield has the highest rate of bladder cancer in Massachusetts and I have listened to my neighbors describe burying the people they loved to glioblastoma, to pancreatic cancer, to the rare adrenal cancers that are not supposed to cluster in one small city. I’ve buried a loved one due to glioblastoma. Michael was only in his early 30s and we will honor one year since his passing on Friday, June 5, 2026.
If we know how this works, and we know the exposure is there, then the fact that nobody has bothered to look for the predicted result begins to look less like an accident and more like a decision somebody made on purpose.
The same chain runs straight into autoimmune disease, where the science is just as strong. Autoimmune diseases happen when your immune system gets confused and starts attacking your own body instead of protecting it. The thing that confuses it, again and again in the research, is long term inflammation. Doctors can test your blood for something called antinuclear antibodies, which is the immune system’s earliest warning sign that it has started turning on you. The presence of those antibodies goes up in people exposed to chemicals like PCBs.
The same chain runs straight into autoimmune disease, where the science is just as strong. Autoimmune diseases happen when your immune system gets confused and starts attacking your own body instead of protecting it. The thing that confuses it, again and again in the research, is long term inflammation. Doctors can test your blood for something called antinuclear antibodies, which is the immune system’s earliest warning sign that it has started turning on you. The presence of those antibodies goes up in people exposed to chemicals like PCBs.
Lupus in particular is understood through what scientists call a second hit model. A person is born with a genetic risk for it, and then somewhere later in life an environmental exposure flips the switch and turns the disease on. So the question repeats in a slightly different way; If the science already knows how chemical exposure leads to autoimmune disease, and the exposure in my community is documented, then how is nobody testing the people here for the early markers that would tell us whether it is already happening? Why am I the one connecting the dots that some specialist somewhere should have been paid to connect a long time ago?
The piece that really kind of haunts me though is what the research shows about pregnancy. PCBs cross the placenta, which scientists have known for decades. They have seen a specific cluster of outcomes in children exposed to PCBs before birth and in their earliest years.
Attention difficulty shows up in patterns that look like ADHD, along with the impulsivity and the trouble sitting still that adults tend to interpret as a behavior problem in a child. I don’t know that exposure causes ADHD, but it shows that it causes the same symptoms.
Immune dysfunction shows up as compromised immunity, higher rates of respiratory infections, and the kind of chronic illness that keeps a kid home from school over and over again. The research also describes endocrine disruption, which is the scientific term for chemicals interfering with the hormones that quietly run everything in a developing body, from growth to mood to the immune response itself.
Immune dysfunction shows up as compromised immunity, higher rates of respiratory infections, and the kind of chronic illness that keeps a kid home from school over and over again. The research also describes endocrine disruption, which is the scientific term for chemicals interfering with the hormones that quietly run everything in a developing body, from growth to mood to the immune response itself.
I thought a lot about my own body while I read all of this. I have ADHD, and I have had serious issues with my immune system my entire childhood. Both of them show up in the research on PCB exposure and would make complete sense in a body that has likely been inflamed since before it was born.
Then I learned that the same inflammatory messengers that drive cancer also tell your liver to make a hormone called hepcidin. Hepcidin’s job is to lock down the iron in your body. It does this by closing the one tiny doorway your cells have for moving iron out of storage and into your blood.
In a healthy person, this lasts a few days, while you are fighting off an infection. It is supposed to be temporary. But if your body never stops being inflamed, because the chemical causing the inflammation is in your air and your water and the dust on your floors, then your hepcidin never shuts off either. Your iron stays trapped inside your cells, where your body cannot use it. You can eat perfectly, take every supplement, and still end up anemic, because the problem was never how much iron you were eating. The problem is that your body refuses to let the iron move where it needs to go. And if your blood can’t carry enough iron, doesn’t that mean it can’t carry enough oxygen?
A brain and a body that are running short on oxygen produce exactly the fatigue, the fog, and the trouble concentrating that followed me through my entire life. My bloodwork always does show low iron, though I’m always told to take supplements that just hurt my stomach. I’m not claiming any of this is proven about me specifically, but I certainly can’t understand why none of the scientists who knew exactly what was buried in our town ever once thought the question was worth asking.
Are you someone with MCAS or a problem with mast cells which are basically your immune system’s first responders? When they sense a threat they squirt out histamine and other chemicals to start an immune reaction. In a healthy person, the response fires up and then shuts down, but researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center have found that when your mast cells keep getting hit with what they call xenobiotics, meaning foreign chemicals that have no business being inside a human body, the mast cells can hit a tipping point and just stop shutting down. They call this toxicant induced loss of tolerance. After it happens, even tiny exposures to almost anything can set the whole system off again and the mast cells get stuck in the on position.Most medical schools still do not teach about the condition this causes, called MCAS.
What makes this so heavy in a place like mine is that PCBs and other Superfund site chemicals are forever chemicals. They do not break down, ever. They settle into soil, water, house dust, and human fat. They stay there for decades or more while every new exposure stacks on top of the last one.
I think about the lupus, the MS, the POTS, all the so called rare conditions that are not rare here at all, every one of them treated in isolation by doctors who were never trained to ask whether the common thread might be the ground their patients are standing on. I think about my own daughters, who have been dealing with immune reactions that do not add up, sensory struggles, joint pain that fits no clean diagnosis. I have spent years driving them from one specialist to the next. Not one of those specialists has ever once asked me where we live.
I think about the lupus, the MS, the POTS, all the so called rare conditions that are not rare here at all, every one of them treated in isolation by doctors who were never trained to ask whether the common thread might be the ground their patients are standing on. I think about my own daughters, who have been dealing with immune reactions that do not add up, sensory struggles, joint pain that fits no clean diagnosis. I have spent years driving them from one specialist to the next. Not one of those specialists has ever once asked me where we live.
For my entire life I had been asking what was wrong with me. That morning, for the very first time, I started asking what had been done to me. It was that question that turned me from a worried mother into an investigator.
This Is Justice
I sent my first email to the EPA in August of 2024 to ask whether anyone had tested my property or the ones near it for the contaminated fill GE had handed out for years. I asked how I could possibly know whether my own home was safe and why the long term health risks were being ignored when families like mine were living with chronic illness and autoimmune conditions no one could explain. I told them, in writing, that I had grown up believing that as long as I did not touch the stuff I was mostly fine, and that it was being dealt with.
I sent my first email to the EPA in August of 2024 to ask whether anyone had tested my property or the ones near it for the contaminated fill GE had handed out for years. I asked how I could possibly know whether my own home was safe and why the long term health risks were being ignored when families like mine were living with chronic illness and autoimmune conditions no one could explain. I told them, in writing, that I had grown up believing that as long as I did not touch the stuff I was mostly fine, and that it was being dealt with.
I now understood that to be untrue, especially as I had come to realize that my chronic childhood illness, the IV antibiotics, and the debilitating mental illness were very likely the result of being poisoned, or at the very least made worse. I asked them to offer testing to everyone in the city because people here are sick, dying and disabled, and it feels like a direct result of GE.
I waited weeks for a reply and I followed up more than once. When an answer finally came, the EPA official said that the agency does not sample individual homes for PCBs upon request, and pointed me toward the local Board of Health, which they acknowledged would itself have to escalate the matter to the state. When I pushed and asked again about the contaminated fill that had been spread through this community for years, they pointed me to investigations done between 1997 and 2006, and described them as thorough and, to the best of their knowledge, complete. They were offering me twenty year old testing, they THOUGHT was complete, as proof that everything today was fine. Then, placed the burden on me to come up with what they called “specific and credible evidence” before anyone would check.
So I decided that if the officials weren’t going to listen to me or help me, I would do it myself. I started building, because building is the thing I have always known how to do. I made a Superfund Site Locator so that people in contaminated towns could find out what was buried in their own backyards. I built a Health Justice Map so that residents could add their own stories, and we could start gathering the evidence no agency was willing to gather. I went on local radio stations and said all of it out loud.
I challenged the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s 2024 cancer study in public and I filed a formal complaint with the EPA’s Office of Inspector General before filing a complaint against the EPA with the Massachusetts Attorney General. I sat in a community meeting with my Apple Watch buzzing heart rate warnings at a hundred and sixty two beats a minute because I was so angry, asking the EPA’s project manager why he was still leaning on a risk assessment written in 2004, and why not one doctor in my city could even define a PCB, while a room full of sick people listened to him explain that monitoring their health simply was not his agency’s job.
Under the Superfund law, success is defined in parts per million of chemicals in the sediment, and cubic yards of soil removed, rather than in whether the human beings living on top of it are getting sick. That is how you end up with a cleanup that is fully legal and still leaves an entire community marinating in the thing that is hurting them. It is the system working exactly the way it was built to work.
I started posting what I was finding on Tiktok and Threads, and people listened. In February of 2025 I made a TikTok almost without thinking, laying a trending sound over a plain list of the diseases that are not supposed to be common in a town this small. Within two days, more than a million people had watched it. The comments that came back were recognition, writing that it sounded exactly like where they grew up. People asked whether this might be why their whole family had cancer. People said they had lived in these places their entire lives and had never once been told. One woman in Anderson, Indiana, watched that video, realized she lived on top of one of these sites too, and started filing petitions and organizing her own neighbors.
Since then I have made videos about Kearny, New Jersey, Antioch, Illinois, Topeka, Kansas, and Seattle, Washington, which sits on a Superfund corridor and happens to carry one of the heaviest multiple sclerosis burdens in the world. Every single time, the same thing happens. Somebody who was never supposed to know finds out, and starts asking the questions nobody ever wanted them to ask. Before I ever started investigating Jeffrey Epstein, I was investigating the dirt in my own backyard, and what I have learned in the time since is that the systems are the same.
I started posting what I was finding on Tiktok and Threads, and people listened. In February of 2025 I made a TikTok almost without thinking, laying a trending sound over a plain list of the diseases that are not supposed to be common in a town this small. Within two days, more than a million people had watched it. The comments that came back were recognition, writing that it sounded exactly like where they grew up. People asked whether this might be why their whole family had cancer. People said they had lived in these places their entire lives and had never once been told. One woman in Anderson, Indiana, watched that video, realized she lived on top of one of these sites too, and started filing petitions and organizing her own neighbors.
Since then I have made videos about Kearny, New Jersey, Antioch, Illinois, Topeka, Kansas, and Seattle, Washington, which sits on a Superfund corridor and happens to carry one of the heaviest multiple sclerosis burdens in the world. Every single time, the same thing happens. Somebody who was never supposed to know finds out, and starts asking the questions nobody ever wanted them to ask. Before I ever started investigating Jeffrey Epstein, I was investigating the dirt in my own backyard, and what I have learned in the time since is that the systems are the same.
I am a Buddhist, or at least I am trying to be, and the practice of sitting still with something painful without looking away turns out to be the same muscle this work depends on. Once I understood how the whole system actually works, how the people with the power to protect us had no real plan to use it, and how the agencies built to shield us had quietly been built to shield the people who harmed us instead, I could not stop seeing it repeated everywhere I turned.
I saw it in the financial filings I started reading after the girls were asleep. I saw it in the officials who spin endlessly through the revolving door between the agencies and the companies they are supposed to be watching. I saw it in the way an entire federal case can be steered so carefully that the biggest questions never get asked out loud, and the most powerful names never get spoken.
The rigged system that protected General Electric in my hometown is the same rigged system protecting people I never imagined I would find myself investigating. The playbook never really changes, because the goal is always the same. Make the harm difficult to see and always blame the people getting harmed. Wear down anyone who keeps asking questions and protect whoever happens to be making the money at all costs.
I investigate the Epstein network because the money, the intelligence connections, the Kushner corridor, the Treasury Department, and the press that highlight what they want us to know while ignoring the actual parts holding it all together, run on the exact same framework.
I am writing The Motherhood Heist, a series tracing how every support a mother used to be able to count on was dismantled and then sold back to us at a price most of us cannot pay. That investigation began the way every one of mine begins, with me underwater and asking why, and arriving at the same answer I always arrive at, which is that someone, somewhere, is making money off the drowning.
What Comes Next
I filed my LLC in March, after years of building companies for other people, after being recruited into a role and then laid off, and after doing this work for free in the smallest hours of the morning because I could not stop. This is officially the thing I do now, however absurd that sounds coming from a high school dropout with a GED, far too much coffee in her system. Who would have imagined I’d be running independent investigations into some of the most heavily protected networks on earth from a desk in Massachusetts?
There are still days when I am certain I am not smart enough for any of it. Then I open one more document and find one more connection that somebody with a salary, a title, and an entire institution behind them never bothered to look at, and I remember that the whole thing depends on people like me believing we do not belong in the room to begin with.
Kait Justice is my way of holding a mirror up to the systems that survive by keeping people too tired, too isolated, and too ashamed to look closely. It doesn’t matter if the harm comes dressed as environmental injustice, poverty, addiction or simply the lie that life is supposed to hurt this much. I question everything I was ever told was normal and I will continue to use my voice. I have finally stopped waiting for anyone’s permission to ask for better.
If you have made it all the way to here, I am genuinely glad you came. I hope that somewhere in all of this you found the thing I finally found on the day I stopped blaming myself for everything that had gone wrong, which is the strange and enormous relief of seeing clearly, perhaps for the very first time, that you were never the problem.
The girl this system was built to bury showed up with a shovel, and she has no intention of putting it down. If you would like to dig alongside me, then you are exactly where you need to be, because there is so much more I still have to show you.
- Kait Justice
