J&J Talc Jury Awards $1.56 Billion to Asbestos Cancer Victim (1)

Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay about $1.56 billion to a Maryland woman who blamed the company’s talc-based baby powder for causing her asbestos-linked cancer, the largest such jury verdict for an individual in 15 years of litigation.

Jurors in state court in Baltimore late Monday concluded that J&J, two of its units and spinoff Kenvue were liable for failing to warn Cherie Craft that its baby powder was tainted with asbestos, which researchers have linked to mesothelioma, a form of cancer. J&J officials say the parent company is responsible for covering the entire verdict since it agreed to indemnify Kenvue for all baby powder liabilities.

The verdict comes as J&J has been pummeled by a recent spate of baby powder verdicts after it failed this year to use bankruptcy court to force a settlement of more than 70,000 lawsuits accusing the company of hiding the product’s cancer risks. The Maryland verdict eclipses a $966 million damage award in October to the family of a California woman who died of mesothelioma after using J&J’s talc-based baby powder for most of her life.

J&J steadfastly maintains talc doesn’t cause cancer and there’s never been any asbestos in the product. The company also contends it has appropriately marketed its baby powder for more than 100 years.

‘Patently Unconstitutional’

“We will immediately appeal this egregious and patently unconstitutional verdict that is the direct result of the gross errors made by the trial court that allowed plaintiff’s counsel to pervade the record with improper and prejudicial statements and assertions,” said Erik Haas, J&J’s head of litigation.

Representatives of Kenvue, which spun off from J&J in 2023, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment outside regular business hours.

“The jury heard evidence that J&J kept from regulators, doctors and it customers decades of evidence that its baby powder contained asbestos,” Jessica Dean, a Dallas-based lawyer representing Craft, said in an emailed statement. “J&J continues to deny this evidence and refuses to do the right thing by those who were hurt by their actions.”

While J&J already has spent more than $3 billion settling lawsuits alleging asbestos in its baby powder harmed users, the company still faces more than 70,000 claims the product caused mesothelioma and ovarian cancers. Many of those cases have been consolidated before a federal judge in New Jersey for pre-trial information exchanges. J&J pulled its talc-based version of baby powder off the worldwide market in 2022 and replaced it with a cornstarch alternative.

Verdicts Reduced

More than a dozen juries have held J&J and Kenvue responsible for baby powder users’ cancers and awarded billions of dollars in damages in total. Some of those awards later were reduced or thrown out on appeal.

The largest trial verdict against J&J was a $4.7 billion jury award in 2018 to 22 women in state court in Missouri. An appeals court cut the verdict to $2.1 billion. J&J wound up paying $2.5 billion with interest.

J&J unsuccessfully tried three times to use the US bankruptcy process to force a settlement of the baby powder cases and now faces a wave of trials in the regular court system.

This month, a state-court jury in Los Angeles ordered J&J to pay $40 million to two women who alleged their baby powder use caused their ovarian cancers. It was the first verdict in an ovarian cancer case since 2021 because those cases have been delayed by repeated Chapter 11 filings by J&J subsidiaries. Meanwhile, a Minnesota jury hit J&J with a verdict of more than $65 million in another mesothelioma case.

Jurors in the Baltimore case awarded Craft $60 million to compensate her for injuries and losses, plus punitive damages of $1 billion against J&J and $500 million against Pecos River Talc LLC, a unit of J&J set up as part of its bankruptcy efforts.

40 Years

Craft’s lawyers argued the 54-year-old woman used J&J’s talc-based baby powders for more than 40 years before being diagnosed with mesothelioma.

Talc and asbestos are similar minerals and often found together when mined. Internal J&J documents stretching back to the early 1970s show J&J executives knew about the presence of asbestos in its talc and didn’t alert government regulators or consumers.

The Baltimore jury found evidence that J&J, Kenvue and the other units engaged in “fraudulent misrepresentation or concealment” about the powder’s cancer risks and used “unlawful means” in selling their product and awarded punitive damages.

The case is Craft v. Ahold Delhaize US Inc., 24-X-000005, Baltimore City Circuit Court.

(Updates with plaintiff lawyer’s comment in seventh paragraph)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Jef Feeley in Wilmington, Delaware at jfeeley@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Ben Bain at bbain2@bloomberg.net

Peter Blumberg

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