Charlotte Dennett with her husband Gerard Colby, president of the National Writers Union.
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Charlotte Dennett is an author and attorney who resides in Cambridge Vermont. She and her husband, Gerard Colby, have lived in Vermont since 1984. Charlotte has been practicing law since 1997, representing injured Vermonters in negligence, medical malpractice and wrongful death cases, as well as civil rights litigation and family law, and has argued before the Vermont Supreme Court.
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Throughout her career, she's been tough on powerful corporations and irresponsible government entities.
She helped sue one of the worst polluters of the country, Du Pont Company, for suppressing her husband's 800 page, widely-hailed unauthorized biography of the company and the family.
She spent over a decade documenting the role of Big Oil in destroying the Amazon rain forest and its peoples (Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon, HarperCollins, 1995) and has continued to expose the role of Big Oil in shaping and misshaping American policy in the U.S., Middle East, and Latin America.
In Vermont she sued the Office of Child Support after it failed to turn over support payments to her client for years, and then tried to prevent her from getting her records.
Charlotte served both on the board and as President of the Franklin County Family Center, a St. Albans-based non-profit organization which specializes in helping families with parenting classes, child care, and while she was serving provided advice and assistance to abuse and rape crisis victims.
For two decades she has been active with the National Writers Union, both locally and nationally, advising writers how to protect their livelihoods through contract and copyright advice. She is currently co-chair of the NWU Book Division.
She has served as Volunteer in Politics on the Executive Board of the Vermont AFL-CIO, with an emphasis on getting women in the labor union involved in politics and assuming leadership positions.
Ms. Dennett in a strong supporter of women's rights, and chaired the ERA Task Force for the Vermont chapter of the National Organization for Women in 1986.
Charlotte has been an investigative reporter for over 30 years. Her writings have covered a broad spectrum of social issues: the genocide of Indians in Latin America; the struggle of a community to save its “People’s Firehouse” from cutbacks; the ordeals of U.S. State Department families during the Iranian Hostage Crisis; the efforts of Vermont women to win a Vermont Equal Rights Amendment; the unanimous vote by national labor leaders to end the U.S. war in Iraq; and removing stereotypes of women in the Middle East. She was also a lead contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press with an essay entitled “The War on Terror and the Great Game for Oil: How the Media Missed the Context.”
Dennett has also argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, in an effort to recover documents about her father from the CIA through a Freedom of Information lawsuit. Daniel C. Dennett was a diplomat and head of counter-intelligence in the Middle East during and immediately after WWII, and died under mysterious circumstances with five other Americans following a top secret mission to Saudi Arabia. Her Petition for a Writ of Certiorari is before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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