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Kelly Duda, an Arkansas native, received his bachelor's degree in Film Studies & Broadcasting and Political Science from California State University, San Jose, and attended the university's MBA program, with an emphasis in marketing. Factor 8: The Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal is Kelly Duda's first feature-length documentary film. It has taken more than five years to make. |
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In late 1998, when Mark Kennedy of the Ottawa Citizen used Kelly Duda's investigative work to break the Canada-Arkansas angle of the tainted blood story internationally, Duda had no idea how much hard work still lay ahead. It would take more than seven years for the whole story to be told. During this time, Kelly was followed, sued, burglarized, his tires slashed and his rear window smashed. Early coverage in the Canadian press, The Economist, Salon, Investor's Business Daily and other media outlets all can be traced back to the muckraking efforts of this one man. Kelly has worked with CNN, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.), APTN (Associated Press Television News), Channel 9 (Australia), and the BBC in their coverage of the use of tainted prison plasma in blood products. He was also part of the team for Fuji-TV that produced The Hepatitis C Epidemic: A 15-Year Government Cover-up. This program won a George Foster Peabody Award in 2003 and was watched by more than 12 million viewers in Japan. Recently, Kelly was a consultant in two major class-action lawsuits in Europe and Japan where plasma from Arkansas' prison system appeared. Evidence he uncovered helped bring a $1b settlement for approximately 5,500 Canadian victims with hepatitis C. Kelly also provided information to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in its investigation of the Arkansas prison plasma sales. He has also been in talks with the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI about a possible investigation in the United States. In Australia, Kelly was involved in selecting questions put forth in a Senate inquiry on tainted blood. Evidence he uncovered linking Arkansas prison plasma to its use in the U.K. was presented to the Queen's Council in Britain's High Court and to the Ministry of Health. This information is also in the hands of the Scottish Parliament as well as the European Parliament in Brussels. Previously, Kelly was a legal researcher for several major law firms in the San Francisco Bay area and worked on various independent film projects. In 2005, he was the go-to contact in Arkansas for controversial filmmaker Robert Greenwald's (Uncovered: The War on Iraq) documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.
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