The latest trial involving the company declaring that its talc products cause cancer resulted in a Los Angeles court. The jury has ordered Johnson and Johnson to $966 million to the family of a woman who succumbed to mesothelioma.
In the same year, the company was sued by the family of Mae Moore, who lived in California and died at 88 in 2021, alleging that some of her talc baby powder products included asbestos fibers that had led to her getting a rare cancer.
According to court filings on Monday, J&J (JNJ) has been ordered by the jury to pay damages of about 16 million as compensatory damages and 950 million in punitive damages.
The verdict may be lowered during the appeal process since the US Supreme Court has determined that the punitive damages are usually less than nine times the compensatory damages.
J&J’s worldwide vice-president of litigation, Erik Haas, stated that the company will appeal immediately, terming the decision “egregious and unconstitutional.”
He further said, “The plaintiff lawyers in this Moore case based their arguments on ‘junk science’ that never should have been presented to the jury.”
The company has indicated that its products are safe, do not contain asbestos, and do not cause cancer. J&J discontinued the sale of its talc-based baby powder in the United States and replaced it with a cornstarch product in 2021. Asbestos exposure has been associated with Mesothelioma.
One of the attorneys who represented the family of Moore, Trey Branham, replied to the verdict by stating that his team was “hopeful that Johnson & Johnson will finally accept responsibility for these senseless deaths.”
There are over 67,000 lawsuits against J&J in which the plaintiffs alleged that they were diagnosed with cancer following the use of baby powder and other talc products, as per the court filings.
The cases of lawsuits based on allegations that talc led to mesothelioma represent a small fraction of such cases, with the majority being cases of ovarian cancer claims.
J&J has attempted to solve the litigation by declaring bankruptcy, a case which the federal courts have dismissed three times.
The final bankruptcy proposal did not include lawsuits that allege that talc led to mesothelioma. Some of those claims have already been settled by the company, but it has not yet reached a nationwide settlement, and thus, several mesothelioma lawsuits have spent the last few months in trial in state courts.
J&J has suffered numerous substantial verdicts in mesothelioma cases in the past year, but last Monday’s is one of the largest cases. The company has succeeded in some of the mesothelioma trials, and it won the case last week in South Carolina, where a jury declared the company is not guilty.
The company has thus been effective in removing some of the awards on appeal, as in one case in Oregon, a state judge allowed J&J to obtain a motion to dismiss a $260 million and hold a retrial.
