CINCINNATI — Stan Chesley, who rose from humble roots in Avondale to become one of the nation’s most powerful class-action lawyers, died Sunday after a long battle with dementia. He was 89.
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Chesley worked three jobs to put himself through the University of Cincinnati law school, according to his daughter, Lauren Chesley Miller.
“He worked tirelessly. He was a maniac. But he believed in what he was doing,” said the former TV anchor, one of two children born in Chesley’s first marriage. “He was charismatic and charming and he just got stuff done.”
WATCH: Learn more about Chesley and his legacy
Chesley rose to national prominence in 1977 by representing victims of the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, in a case that led to national building code reforms and reshaped legal strategies for class-action lawsuits.
Then, he embarked on a 30-year run of landmark settlements that raised billions for victims of industrial accidents, plane crashes, breast implants and tobacco smoke.
Chesley leveraged his legal success into charitable gifts and political clout, including a personal relationship with former President Bill Clinton — who made Chesley’s second wife, Susan Dlott, a federal judge in 1995.
At the top of his game, Chesley lived in an Indian Hill mansion and worked in an opulent downtown office with a gold leaf ceiling.
But it all came to an end in 2013 when the Kentucky Supreme Court disbarred him for violating ethics rules and taking $7.5 million more in fees than he was entitled to receive from a $200 million settlement in a Boone County case involving the diet pill, fen-phen.
“That was a period when people had a different view of him,” said former Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory. “But as someone who knew him as well as I did, I can safely say that the entire man is a fantastic person.”
Mallory remembers how Chesley raised money to keep city pools open for a few weeks longer in the summer, a tradition that started when Chesley won a case for the city and donated his $80,000 fee to the effort.
“I have lots of pictures with him presenting checks for $200,000 here, $250,000 there. And I think over the years he contributed and raised more than a million dollars,” Mallory said. “Stan Chesley equals good heart and generous activities and commitment.”
Chelsey was known for his random acts of kindness.
“Oh, he loved the grand gesture,” Chesley Miller said. “He would walk into The Precinct on prom night and pick up the check for a table of eight.”
Many attorneys do pro bono work. Chesley did it with style.
“Sometimes he would read the newspaper and read about a person who was wronged in some way and he would call them up and say ‘I want to represent you. At no cost to you. I don’t want any part of the settlement. I just think what happened to you is wrong and you need good representation. I want to be that for you,’” Mallory recalled.
Chesley saw himself as a champion of the underdog, taking on cases that others would not.
“I’ve always considered myself a people’s lawyer,” he told UC Magazine in a 2010 profile. “When I did the Fernald case … I felt like I was the unsung David taking on Goliath, the U.S. government.”
In that case, David forced Goliath to pay $100 million to people who suffered health problems from the Fernald Nuclear Processing Plant in Crosby Township. Other big wins included a $3.2 billion settlement for people harmed by Dow Corning breast implants and $200 million for Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange. In 1998, Chesley was on a team of litigators who secured a $206 billion settlement from the tobacco industry.
“He was a bully. But not always in such a bad way,” Chesley Miller said. “He was clever. He was smarter. He dug deeper.”
That approach was never more evident than on his first big case: the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire. Chesley was a little-known personal injury lawyer when the Southgate, Ky. night club caught fire during a packed-house concert — killing 165 people.
Other attorneys filed lawsuits on behalf of individual fire victims. Chesley organized a class-action lawsuit with hundreds of plaintiffs who sued more than a thousand defendants, including the entire aluminum wiring industry. Legal scholars called it the nation’s “first mass tort class action lawsuit,” while his approach to the wiring industry helped him generate nearly $50 million in settlements for fire victims.
“Industry liability was a strategy that he invented, and I think it’s still being taught in law schools,” said Rick Christman, a Lexington author who studied Chesley’s career for his 2021 book: “Fat Chance: Diet Mania, Greed, and the Infamous Fen-Phen Swindle.”
Christman said Chesley had many gifts as a lawyer, but his greatest may have been his skill as a negotiator.
“He was just very good at convincing people that he really had them,” Christman said. “He intimidated people, and that’s how he won these cases. It was through his own personality, not necessarily the facts.”
In the fen-phen case, Christman said other attorneys were amazed that Chesley was able to secure a $200 million settlement from Covington-based American Home Products in the Boone County case that led to his disbarment.
“It wouldn’t have been $200 million absent Stan Chesley,” Christman said.
The problem was that attorneys involved in the case ended up with more than 60% of the settlement. Two Lexington attorneys were convicted of fraud, while Boone County Judge Jay Bamberger was disrobed and disbarred. Chesley spent years fighting judgments to reclaim his fees from the case, ultimately reaching a $23.5 million settlement in 2018.
“I called it Icarian ambition,” Christman said. “He just got too close to the sun, and it ruined him. He wanted too much, and that was his demise.”
His twilight years were anything but restful. In 2016, Chesley and Dlott were victims of a home invasion in which both were threatened at gunpoint and Chesley was pushed down the stairs, fracturing several vertebrae.
Chesley’s final years were spent in a nursing home, battling dementia.
“It’s a terrible way to go out. You know, a terrible disease with no end,” Lauren Chesley Miller said. “It breaks my heart because I remember all the good stuff. You know, like all the hilarious, hilarious adventures we would go on.”
There was the shopping trip where Chesley and his daughter, clutching bags of new clothes, raced through a downpour to catch a train. Or the time he bought “great seats to a play that was like, the play to see. And then we would just fall dead asleep. Like embarrassingly so.”
Cincinnati might remember Chesley for his legal exploits or his charitable pursuits, but Chesley Miller will remember him as a grandfather who loved deeply.
“He would show up at a swim meet and sit there for six hours, sweating to death, to wait to watch Lilly, his granddaughter, swim for 30 seconds,” Chesley Miller recalled. “And he would cheer and scream, and he was just so into it. He wasn’t like that as a father, but as a grandfather, he was just special. And my kids have the best memories of him.”
