‘Stop Giving Him the Water!’: Inside the Real Water Lawsuit

Last fall, Casey Aiken’s dog began vomiting, and he had no idea why.

Aiken, 40, a Las Vegas resident with a rasping voice and piercing green eyes, took his 2-year-old Chihuahua to the vet.

“I didn’t know what it was,” he recounted in a deposition. “(The vet said) it was an issue with his liver. We got him some pills. A $300 vet bill later, my wife figured it out.”

Aiken’s wife, a vet tech, had zeroed in on the only change in the dog’s diet: “The water!” she exclaimed. “Stop giving him the water!”

Aiken’s wife was referring to the 5-gallon jug that Aiken had brought home from his new job; he had just been promoted to lead water technician at the Real Water plant in Henderson, Nevada. A former warehouse loader for the company and strip-club promoter, he freely admits he had no experience qualifying him for the role. 

“I got a phone call from (the company’s president Blain Jones) asking if I wanted to continue employment with them. I said, ‘Why not?’”

Jones granted him the position, which primarily involved testing for contaminants in the company’s eponymous water product, and gave him a couple of hours of training as well as a modest pay raise.

“One conversation?” the attorney asked Aiken in the deposition. “That was it?”

Aiken nodded.

Aiken’s dog was lucky — as soon as it stopped drinking Real Water, the animal recovered. At the same time, all across the country, similar cases were popping up — with far more tragic consequences, and not just for pets, but for people, too. 

Real Water, which was sold at megastores like Whole Foods and Costco, apparently induced cases of “fever, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, jaundice, liver failure, and hospitalization.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported illnesses tied to the product that sounded like a tragic retelling of the The Twelve Days of Christmas: “severe illnesses in young children, one man’s liver transplant, a woman’s stroke, a former UFC fighter’s hospitalization, at least two miscarriages, and three dead dogs.” 

Last October, an avid Real Water consumer, 67-year-old Kathleen Ryerson, began struggling to get out of bed. Her sister observed that she continued to drink 64 ounces of Real Water a day. 

Ryerson died on Nov. 11, 2020, of aspiration pneumonia and liver failure. Her family is now one of many suing Real Water and its parent company, Affinity Lifestyles.com Inc.

Why would somebody drink the stuff, literally, to their deathbed? It turns out, there’s an entire industry built on peddling this type of water to the public, replete with claims about “powerful antioxidants” and “reversing aging.” 

Real Water proponents like Dr. James Chappell believe the water we drink is damaged by pipes and filtration systems, rendering it acidic and stripped of negative ions, or, in other words, “positive-ionized acidic water” (bear in mind that the highest “credential” Dr. Chappell has is being a “board-certified chiropractor”). The solution, Chappell and others believe, is to drink its polar opposite, “positive-ionized alkaline water,” with a high pH level. 

While most doctors would state alkaline water has no tangible benefit, a few studies have suggested that drinking naturally carbonated artesian-well alkaline water may help with acid reflux, high blood pressure, diabetes, and blood flow. Hear Real Water tell it, and they have been selling “the healthiest drinking water today.”

While the health benefits of products like Real Water are disputed, there’s no argument about the profitability of the enterprise. Unlike the artesian-well water used in the studies cited above, Real Water sourced its product from Las Vegas tap, which can cost less than 1 cent a gallon, and then sold it back for $9 a gallon — nearly a thousand-fold price increase. The company also had products like Real Water Concentrate™ — just one 4 oz bottle could apparently “treat” more than 6 gallons of tap water! — and Real Plant Maximizer™, a fertilizer that the company claimed could cause “up to 30% faster plant growth and up to 20% larger fruit yield.”

All that is no more. In March, after receiving several alerts about acute non-viral hepatitis cases linked to Real Water, the FDA officially warned consumers, restaurants, and retailers “not to drink, cook with, sell or serve the product.” The agency later announced that Real Water — which had already asked retailers to pull the product and put “it in the back rooms or return it to…distributors” — was not cooperating with their investigation. On June 1, a court order signed by U.S. District Judge Jennifer Dorsey finalized a settlement with the Department of Justice  in which Real Water agreed to stop distributing the product and destroy any in its possession.

Real Water may no longer flow, but the many lawsuits against it continue to move downstream. Attorney Will Kemp has filed complaints on behalf of at least 45 people who were hospitalized after drinking Real Water, and his law firm is bringing a civil negligence and deceptive trade practices case against the company. 

On March 25, Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman PLLC filed a class action lawsuit against Real Water that proposed a nationwide class of all persons who “purchased the product for personal, family, or household use,” and also includes “a subclass of California residents who purchased Real Water.” 

The effects of these lawsuits threaten to engulf the entire alkaline water industry. Collen Clark, a lawyer and founder of Schmidt & Clark, LLP, said the Real Water cases “possess the promise to hold the whole system accountable, including product manufacturers, distributors, and even retailers (such as Whole Foods and Costco), for all forms of harm they’ve caused.”

While the exact cause of the Real Water disaster remains to be determined — was it the alkaline water? The mixing process? Something else? — one answer may be hiding in plain sight. 

Kemp’s lawsuit referenced a “superbad” batch of Real Water in October 2020 made by its newest lead water technician who “knew little about the tool used to measure contaminants in the product” — Casey Aiken. 

“Real Water failed at any time to inform customers that the ‘superbad’ October 2020 batch was toxic,” the suit said, displacing the blame onto the company’s presidents. “(They covered-up) the fact that Real Water had just made and distributed the ‘superbad’ October 2020 water batch.”

The irony of the whole sordid affair was noted by one of the class action lawyers at Milberg PLLC. “Affinity makes a lot of impressive-sounding claims about Real Water’s health benefits and innovative technology. It goes out of its way to deride the dangers of tap water when, ironically, drinking tap water appears to be far safer than drinking Real Water.”

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