I Sent Lead Safe Mama $145,000. An Investigation.

On the conference where nobody engaged with the question, on what happened to the money, on nine felony counts that were dropped when the prosecutor died of cancer, and on why I am still in this.

By Eric Ritter · founder of DetectLead and FluoroSpec

The Conference.

I went to my first lead industry conference in March of 2024. I had a booth. In a bowl on the table I kept lead dust — actual lead-based paint chips ground to powder, the form in which it poisons children. On a microscope slide I had the same dust treated with my reagent, glowing bright green under a UV light. One speck. Visible. I had been showing it to people one at a time all morning.

A senior EPA official came by. Large backpack, a lot of equipment. She looked at the glowing speck. Her question was: is it EPA certified?

There is no EPA certification for consumer lead tests. There is an EPA recognition program under the Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, which is not the same thing and barely means what most people think it means. She had confused “recognition” with “approval.” She then told me about a time, years ago, when she had walked through a lot of lead dust on the job. I said that sounded bad. She said it really was.

During the main panel I took the microphone. Three hundred people in the room. Ron Pike of Alpine Environmental was discussing the new clearance levels following EarthJustice’s lawsuit against the EPA, which had brought the threshold down to any detectable, under five micrograms per square foot. I said: I have a booth where you can see a single speck of lead-based paint dust glow green under UV light. Maybe we should be talking about primary prevention. Tom Neltner — PhD in chemistry, law degree, runs a nonprofit called Unleaded Kids — said: let’s give a round of applause for primary prevention.

The room clapped. I went back to the booth.

I should mention I had taken LSD before the conference. I was doing it semi-compulsively before things that seemed important. What I can say is that I was observing that room from a vantage point none of those three hundred people had had. Whether it was working for me is a different question.

How I Got There.

In 2018 I started a company called Scitus — Latin for to know — selling two-part reagents so that people who were going to ingest something would at least know what it was. Amazon pulled the listings because consumer drug-testing reagents are illegal in some states. While searching for adjacent chemistry that wasn’t subject to that preemption, I found the colorimetric reaction for lead: sodium rhodizonate, an organic dye that turns red on contact with the lead ion. I worked out a coating protocol for swab tips. From 2019 to 2025 I sold lead-testing swabs. The EPA eventually determined that sodium rhodizonate, while a recognized lead-detection compound, required FIFRA pesticide registration to be sold in consumer products. I disagreed with aspects of that position and did not have the legal budget to litigate it.

Between the swabs and the conference, I had sold a brand of smelling salts called Atomic Rhino, which performed well until the FDA wrote a letter to the category and Amazon pulled those listings too. The money from that funded what came next.

In 2023 a Dutch researcher at Columbia who had read my product copy told me about a paper out of the Netherlands demonstrating the use of a perovskite quantum dot as a lead detector. The reagent is methylammonium bromide dissolved in isopropanol. When the alcohol carries the salt onto a surface with exposed lead ions, a perovskite crystal nucleates around each ion and emits bright green fluorescence at 525 nanometers under UV. The chemistry has been in the materials science literature since approximately 2014. It cannot be patented, because you cannot claim ownership of a natural recrystallization reaction under US patent law. Any patent attorney will confirm this in five minutes. I will come back to this.

I reached out to the Dutch group commercializing the chemistry, a company called Lumetallix. I told them they could not patent what they were trying to patent. I also told them their product was genuinely good and offered to share three things: my reagent formulation work, which had solved a stability problem they had not yet encountered; my Controlled Substances Act compliance methodology, because methylammonium bromide and some of its precursors appear on lists that affect how you can sell them; and my customer base, which was by then roughly ten thousand parents of children who had already been diagnosed with elevated blood lead levels. They had data and good chemistry. They did not appear to have a strategy for explaining it to a worried parent on a Tuesday night.

They took some of what I offered and ignored the rest. The CSA compliance methodology I described to them appeared months later in a paper they published on perovskite-emission detection of gunshot residue. My name is not on it. The bottle of their consumer reagent I subsequently purchased to characterize the formulation had degraded before it reached me. There is now a federal lawsuit between us in the Eastern District of New York, Lumetallix B.V. v. Ritter. The pleadings are public.

I called my product FluoroSpec. By the time of the conference described above I had been selling it for about a year and had approximately ten thousand customers, nearly all of them parents of children who had already been poisoned, trying to find the source.

Tamara.

Tamara Rubin operates LeadSafeMama.com. She has since 2009. She is, by her own brand description, the mother of lead-poisoned children. Approximately five thousand blog posts. She tests consumer products with an XRF gun and publishes the results. Her readership is composed mostly of mothers of lead-exposed children, and she is trusted by them the way you trust someone who has been through the same thing.

In the spring of 2023 she posted a warning about a brand of lead test swabs she said were giving false positives on a wide range of household surfaces. The photograph she included was of my product.

The chemistry she was describing was not mine. The false-positive pattern — turning colors on almost any surface wiped with a slightly alkaline cleaner — is characteristic of an ordinary acid-base indicator, the kind used in high school chemistry labs. It detects pH. The product that used that chemistry was a Chinese counterfeit called AA Wipes, which had copied my packaging nearly exactly. I am currently suing AA Wipes in federal court for false advertising, trade dress infringement, and deceptive practices. The defendants have admitted on the record that some of their swabs contain the correct chemical and some do not, and that they began selling the correct version after the suit was filed.

I emailed Tamara to clarify. She was friendly. She wrote a correction naming me as someone who cared about getting this right. She then invited me to schedule a consultation at three hundred and fifty dollars for ninety minutes. I paid it. At the end of the call she offered to fix my Amazon listings.

For seven thousand dollars she would audit my Amazon product pages and recommend rewrites to bring my advertising claims in line with what she considered defensible. I paid. She returned with revised listings that significantly narrowed the use cases: do not use on dishes, do not use on glass, do not use on jewelry. I asked her to walk me through the reasoning. She had a position about colorimetric tests on ceramics. She did not, when I pressed, have leach-test data on the dishes she had been XRF-scanning — meaning she did not know how much lead was actually migrating out of a given dish under eating conditions, because measuring that requires acetic acid extraction and ICP-MS, a separate set of methods entirely. The new listings stayed up.

That summer my Amazon sales declined. Competing products, including the AA Wipes counterfeit, were not encumbered by the same conservative use-case restrictions, because their owners had not paid anyone to encumber them. They claimed, falsely, to test dishes. I could not claim, accurately, to test dishes. I had paid seven thousand dollars to hand my competitors an advertising advantage on the largest sales channel in the category.

I did not, at that point, fully understand what was happening.

In the late summer of 2023 she asked if I knew anyone who could loan her eighty thousand dollars for a New York City subway advertising campaign — banners inside cars directing people to her site. I proposed instead an advertising arrangement: she would promote FluoroSpec on her platform, keyed to a measurable number of visitors over a defined period, with a refund clause if the product failed her quality standards. She agreed. The contract priced it at ninety thousand dollars. I wired the ninety thousand.

She wanted to run banners across the entire subway system at once. I suggested split-testing first. She insisted on the full run. Some weeks later she asked me to pick up extra banners from the printer. I drove to Outfront Media, the company that handles the MTA advertising contracts, and collected approximately eighty pounds of printed banner paper. That volume was not consistent with the full run having been deployed inside subway cars. I did not do the math at the time.

That fall and into early 2024 she traveled extensively in Europe. Italy, Spain, France, Greece, the Netherlands. She filmed XRF videos in Airbnb rentals she did not own, scanning furniture that was not hers. The volume of European travel content was not consistent with the budget profile she had described at the start — approximately two hundred thousand dollars per year from display advertising on her site.

The advertising for FluoroSpec, which was the consideration the ninety thousand dollars was paid for, did not happen. Not a single article. Not a single banner. Not a single newsletter mention. Not a single video. When I asked, she said she could not advertise the glowing lead test because Lumetallix had told her they held an international patent and any party advertising a competing perovskite product would expose themselves to liability. They did not have an international patent. They had a published US patent application that had not been granted, on chemistry that cannot be granted as a patent, for the reasons already stated. I told her this. She did not respond.

Across late 2023 and into 2024, she invoiced me for additional services. Thirty thousand dollars for editorial deliverables that did not, by my count, get delivered. Fifteen thousand for three sponsored video collaborations — she produced one, uploaded it, deleted it, refused to send me the file, and counted the deleted video as five thousand dollars of work delivered. Nine thousand six hundred for a newsletter sponsorship. At some point during the run she unsubscribed me from the newsletter and unsubscribed every email address in my contact list she could find, so I could not verify whether the sponsorship was running.

Seven thousand five hundred for a set of lead-safety educational PDFs that, to my knowledge, were not produced. On December 31, 2023, she wired me five thousand dollars. No memo, no contract reference, no explanation. I have not received an explanation in the two years since.

By February of 2024, the running total I had sent her, net of the five-thousand return, was approximately one hundred and forty-five thousand dollars.

The running total of work delivered, by my accounting: approximately seven thousand dollars in overly conservative Amazon listing edits, one deleted YouTube video, an unverifiable newsletter run, eighty pounds of printed but not verifiably deployed subway paper, and a ninety-thousand-dollar advertising contract that produced no advertising.

The Block.

In the winter of 2024 I started making short-form lead awareness videos on Instagram and TikTok, demonstrating FluoroSpec on dishware and toys. The visual is simple: a clear drop touches a painted decoration on a plate, the decoration flashes green under UV, you can see where the lead is. The videos accumulated several million views in aggregate. People shared them. People bought the kit.

Tamara, who had been making her own perovskite videos in parallel, stopped. She placed an Amazon affiliate link for Lumetallix’s product on her site. She allowed a principal at Lumetallix to function as a quasi-moderator inside her private Facebook readership group, fielding member questions about the test. She removed mentions of my name from moderated spaces she controlled. She deleted comments referencing my product. She deleted the 2023 correction post explaining that the false-positive swabs her readers had reported were the Chinese counterfeit, not mine. In approximately three months I went, in her audience’s mental model, from a colleague to a non-person.

She blocked me on every platform she could reach. She has not responded to a message from me in approximately two years.

The Public Record.

When her behavior changed I went looking for context. I made Freedom of Information Act requests. I read the Oregon Department of Justice charity-division file, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s file, the State Farm investigation file from a 2002 house fire, IRS audit correspondence from 2017, and the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Rubin v. Oregon (22-35640, decided 2023).

Beginning around 2013 she ran a 501(c)(3) called Lead Safe America Foundation. She was the executive director. Her mother was treasurer. Her husband was secretary. Donations came in. Per the public records, money moved out of the charity’s account into accounts in her personal name, with memo lines reading via TR. The transfers were retroactively characterized in auditor submissions as loans from the charity to her personally. There were no W-2s, no 1099s, no salary drawn, no records kept in the ordinary course of business. When auditors arrived she submitted approximately 2,300 pages compiled after the fact. The IRS issued a no-change letter. The Oregon Department of Justice separately charged her with nine felony counts of theft of public services in 2017. The charges were dropped when the lead prosecutor on the case died of cancer during the proceedings. The charity was dissolved. The XRF gun and a storage shed treated on the charity’s books as a leased facility were transferred to her personal control during dissolution. She subsequently formed Lead Safe Mama LLC, the for-profit successor that operates the website today.

The State Farm file from the 2002 house fire is its own document. Their investigators concluded the house was substantially empty at the time of the fire — closets empty, kitchen empty, no furniture to speak of in the principal rooms. State Farm declined to pay the claim. She filed a federal casualty loss of approximately four hundred thousand dollars in personal property and carried it forward on her taxes for fifteen years. I have read the file. What is in the public record is sufficient.

I am leaving out almost everything I cannot personally attest to or document with public records. What I am willing to say in print is the floor, not the ceiling.

The Cease and Desist.

In the spring of 2024 her counsel sent a letter demanding I stop discussing her, her former charity, the State Farm matter, the Oregon DOJ proceedings, and the contractual arrangements between us. I retracted certain statements. A second letter arrived demanding six hundred thousand dollars in settlement, a permanent non-disparagement agreement, and that I destroy the FOIA documents I had lawfully received from the State of Oregon and Multnomah County.

I do not destroy public records. This essay is, in part, a response to that letter.

It will also likely appear in discovery in whatever litigation she is preparing. She is a public figure under New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, having spent seventeen years on a publicly-monetized platform. The standard she would need to clear in a defamation action is accordingly high. I have her own filings in front of me. I have not identified a path she could take that does not require her, in discovery, to produce the records she is asking me to destroy.

The Lawsuits.

There are three federal cases I am party to touching the consumer lead-testing space. Ritter v. Rubin, Eastern District of New York, alleging fraud in the inducement, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment in connection with the contracts described above. Ritter v. AA Wipes, also Eastern District, for false advertising, trade dress infringement, and deceptive practices. Lumetallix B.V. v. Ritter, in which I am the defendant on their initial complaint and the plaintiff on a counterclaim for false advertising and tortious interference. The dockets are public. They will, with enough time, write a clearer story than this essay can tell. I will update this page as material developments occur.

The Thesis.

Everyone involved with the lead thing is missing something. I suspect it has to do with the lead.

The largest study to date on the personality consequences of childhood lead exposure — Schwaba et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021, over one and a half million participants across 269 US counties and 37 European countries — found that adults raised in higher-atmospheric-lead environments scored significantly lower on agreeableness, lower on conscientiousness, and higher on neuroticism. The 1970 Clean Air Act provided a natural experiment anchoring the direction of causality. Reuben et al. (2019, JAMA Psychiatry) followed a New Zealand birth cohort for thirty-one years from infancy and found the same trait shifts, with the additional finding that the effect did not correlate with socioeconomic status — which removes the standard counter-argument that it is a poverty effect in disguise.

I am not saying that any specific person’s specific behavior in the events above is causally explained by their childhood blood lead level. I am making the considerably weaker and more defensible claim that the population I have been doing business with for three years is, on aggregate, the population Schwaba and Reuben measured across more than a million people, and that the experience of doing business with that population is, on aggregate, the experience the literature predicted. Lower agreeableness and higher neuroticism produce, in a professional context, exactly the refusal-to-engage, in-group-versus-out-group, retaliation-and-silence pattern I have found myself in, from multiple directions, in the same calendar year.

I want to be careful here. I have my own contribution to the disconnect. I was on LSD at a professional conference. I was, at various points in this story, in no position to do what I thought I was there to do. I assumed, for a long time, that everyone could engage clearly with a well-made argument if they just tried harder — an assumption that turned out to be the most expensive belief I have ever held.

The thesis of DetectLead, as it has emerged from all of this, is not just that lead exposure is a public health problem. It is that lead is the substrate of a civilizational behavior pattern, propagated through the cohort that absorbed it as children and that now occupies most of the senior seats in most of the institutions. The people arguing over whether to open the hatch on the spaceship, the ones who won’t engage with why opening it would kill everyone, the ones who leave and then send a demand letter — they are operating intelligently within their constraints. The constraints are the problem. And the constraints cannot be argued away. You can only reduce the load on the next generation, which is largely free of it if we act correctly, and wait.

This is not a comfortable thesis. It is an inconvenient one.

Why I Am Still Here.

I was born in 1992. By the cohort arithmetic I came out relatively clean — the streets I grew up on were not being sprayed daily with tetraethyl combustion residue the way the streets of 1970 were. That is a piece of luck I did not earn.

I have extended trust forward to people who turned out to be inside a frame I could not see. This is not unique to the lead industry. A person I knew in an earlier part of my life sold heroin off the Metropolitan Avenue exit of the BQE out of a Nissan Maxima. I was always polite with him, he was always courteous with me, and the friend who made the introductions was almost certainly stealing a cut of what I was paying on every transaction. The man in the Maxima was murdered in 2014. The friend overdosed and died some years after that. I mention them because the pattern — extend trust, discover later that the person was operating inside constraints you could not see — is the same pattern I ran with Tamara Rubin at a different scale.

The reason I am still in this is that I am in this. There are ongoing cases. There are children whose blood lead levels are elevated right now because their grandmother’s favorite serving dish was glazed in 1962 and nobody has told her. The work is not finished and there is no clean exit from a situation you are inside of.

Lead poisoning is also not only a matter of preventing individual exposures, important as that is. The consequences of the lead generation are still landing. The people running most of the institutions were children during the peak exposure years. This will not be fixed in my lifetime. It can be made noticeably better in the next ten years if enough people who can think clearly about it choose to act. That is the entire pitch.