Johnson & Johnson has been ordered to pay $966m to the family of a woman who died from mesothelioma, with a Los Angeles jury finding the company liable in the latest trial alleging its talc products cause cancer, Reuters reports.
The family of Mae Moore, who died at 88 in 2021, sued the company the same year, claiming J&J’s talc baby powder products contained asbestos fibres that caused her rare cancer. This week the jury ordered J&J to pay $16m in compensatory damages and $950m in punitive damages, according to court filings.
The verdict could be reduced on appeal as the Supreme Court has found that punitive damages should generally be no more than nine times’ compensatory damages.
Erik Haas, J&J’s worldwide vice-president of litigation, said the company planned to immediately appeal, calling the verdict “egregious and unconstitutional”.
“The plaintiff lawyers in this Moore case based their arguments on ‘junk science’ that never should have been presented to the jury,” he said.
The company has said its products are safe, do not contain asbestos, and do not cause cancer. J&J stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the US in 2020, switching to a cornstarch product. Mesothelioma has been linked to asbestos exposure.
Trey Branham, one of the attorneys representing Moore’s family, said his team was “hopeful that Johnson & Johnson would finally accept responsibility for these senseless deaths”.
J&J is facing lawsuits from more than 67 000 plaintiffs who allege they were diagnosed with cancer after using baby powder and other talc products, according to court filings. The number of lawsuits alleging talc caused mesothelioma is a small subset of these cases, with the vast majority involving ovarian cancer claims.
J&J has sought to resolve the litigation through bankruptcy, a proposal that has been rejected three times by federal courts.
Lawsuits alleging talc caused mesothelioma were not part of the last bankruptcy proposal.
The company has previously settled some of those claims but has not struck a nationwide settlement, so many lawsuits over mesothelioma have proceeded to trial in state courts in recent months.
In the past year, J&J has been hit with several substantial verdicts in mesothelioma cases, but Moore’s case on Monday is among the largest.
The company has won some of the mesothelioma trials, including last week in South Carolina, where a jury found J&J not liable.
It has been successful in reducing some of the awards on appeal, including in one Oregon case where a state judge granted J&J’s motion to throw out a $260m verdict and hold a new trial.
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