Johnson & Johnson was ordered by a jury to pay $4.69 billion to women who claimed asbestos in the company’s talc products caused them to develop ovarian cancer, marking the sixth-largest product-defect verdict in U.S. history.
The award of $4.14 billion in punitive damages on top of the $550 million meant to compensate each of 22 women and their families for their losses sent the company’s shares down by as much as 1.4 percent in after-hours trading.
The verdict Thursday by jurors in St. Louis city court came in the first test of plaintiffs’ claims of an asbestos-ovarian cancer link in use of J&J’s iconic baby powder. The asbestos cases are part of more than 9,000 claims alleging that J&J’s talc products cause cancer.
The company will appeal, Carol Goodrich, a spokeswoman, said in an email. The verdict “was the product of a fundamentally unfair process that allowed plaintiffs to present a group of 22 women, most of whom had no connection to Missouri, in a single case all alleging that they developed ovarian cancer,’’ she said.
That each plaintiff and her family members were awarded $25 million for their losses “irrespective of their individual facts, and differences in applicable law, reflects that the evidence in the case was simply overwhelmed by the prejudice of this type of proceeding,’’ Goodrich added.
‘Multiple Errors’
The company’s products don’t contain asbestos and don’t cause ovarian cancer, she said. Goodrich predicted the verdict would be reversed. “The multiple errors present in this trial were worse than those in the prior trials which have been reversed.”
J&J “will appeal till the cows come home, or until all the plaintiffs die,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Mark Lanier said in an interview Thursday. J&J should pull its talc-based products from the market or “mark it with a serious warning,” he said.
The women also sued a unit of Imerys SA, which supplied the talc to J&J. Imerys Talc America settled before trial on confidential terms. The company agreed to pay at least $5 million to settle the claims, according to two persons familiar with the matter.
While the largest verdict in a U.S. jury trial so far this year will grab the headlines, the jury’s decision that asbestos in J&J’s Baby Powder caused the women’s ovarian cancer may be a bigger, long-term concern, said Jean Eggen, a Widener University law professor who teaches about mass-tort cases.