Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay $40m to women who said talc to blame for cancer | US news

A jury in California on Friday awarded $40 million in damages to two women who blamed Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder for their ovarian cancer.

The jury in Los Angeles Superior Court awarded Monica Kent $18 million and Deborah Schultz and her husband $22 million after finding that Johnson & Johnson knew for years that its talc-based products were dangerous but failed to warn consumers.

Erik Haas, Johnson & Johnson’s vice president of worldwide litigation, said in a statement that the company plans to “immediately appeal this decision and expect to prevail as we typically do with abnormal adverse rulings.”

A spokesman for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kent was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2014, according to court records. Schultz was diagnosed in 2018. Both women are California residents and say they have used J&J’s baby powder after bathing for 40 years. Treatments for ovarian cancer include major surgery and dozens of rounds of chemotherapy, they testified at trial.

Johnson & Johnson had known since the 1960s that its product could cause cancer, the women’s lawyer, Andy Birchfield, told the jury in his closing argument, seen by Reuters on the Courtroom View Network.

“They certainly knew, they knew, and they were doing everything they could to hide it, to hide the truth about the dangers,” Birchfield said.

Allison Brown, an attorney for Johnson & Johnson, said Kent and Schultz were only told by their attorneys that their cancers were caused by talc, because the alleged link is not supported by any major U.S. health authority and there are no studies showing that talc can pass from outside the body to the reproductive organs.

“They don’t have evidence in this case and they hope you’ll be okay with it,” Brown told the jury.

J&J is facing lawsuits from more than 67,000 plaintiffs who say they were diagnosed with cancer after using the baby powder and other talc products, according to court filings.

The company said its products are safe, do not contain asbestos and do not cause cancer. In 2020, J&J stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the U.S. and switched to a cornstarch product.

J&J attempted to resolve the case through bankruptcy; This proposal has been rejected by federal courts three times, most recently in April. Bankruptcies had put most cases on hold. Brown and Kent’s cases were the first to go to trial since the last Chapter 11 attempt was rejected.

Before its bankruptcy attempts, J&J had a mixed record in talc litigation; Judgments of up to $4.69 billion were given to women who said baby powder caused ovarian cancer. The company won some cases outright and other decisions were reduced on appeal.

The majority of cases involve ovarian cancer allegations. Cases alleging that talc causes a rare and deadly cancer called mesothelioma make up a smaller portion of the claims J&J faces. The company had previously resolved some of these claims, but not a nationwide settlement; For this reason, many cases related to mesothelioma have begun to be heard in state courts in recent months.

In the past year, J&J has been hit with several landmark verdicts in mesothelioma cases, including a verdict in Los Angeles in October that awarded more than $900 million.