Johnson & Johnson has been ordered to pay $966m to the family of a woman who died from mesothelioma, finding the company liable in the latest lawsuit alleging its baby powder products cause cancer.
The court in Los Angeles handed down the ruling late on Monday.
The pharmaceutical giant has to pay the family of Mae Moore, who died in 2021. The family sued the company the same year, claiming Johnson & Johnson’s talc baby powder products contained asbestos fibres that caused her rare cancer. The jury ordered the company to pay $16m in compensatory damages and $950m in punitive damages, according to court filings.
The verdict could be reduced on appeal as the United States 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 in a statement that the company plans 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,” Haas charged.
The company has said its products are safe, do not contain asbestos and do not cause cancer. This isn’t the first time Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay damages to a family after a lawsuit that alleged a link between cancer and its baby powder products.
In 2016, a Missouri court ordered the company to pay $72m to the family of Jacqueline Fox, who died of ovarian cancer.
In 2024, Johnson & Johnson was also ordered to pay $700m to settle lawsuits alleging it misled consumers about safety after an investigation brought by 43 state attorneys general.
J&J stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the US in 2020, switching to a cornstarch product. By 2023, it had ended talc-based baby powder sales as well.
Trey Branham, one of the attorneys representing Moore’s family, said after the verdict that his team is “hopeful that Johnson & Johnson will finally accept responsibility for these senseless deaths”.
Thousands of lawsuits
J&J is facing lawsuits from more than 67,000 plaintiffs who say they were diagnosed with cancer after using its 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 Monday’s 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.
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