J&J on the hook for $966m damages in latest talc lawsuit

Johnson & Johnson has suffered a setback in its long-running legal defence against claims its talc products cause cancer.

A jury in a Los Angeles, California court has ordered the company to pay an eye-watering $966 million to the family of Mae Moore, who died from the rare lung cancer mesothelioma aged 88 in 2021, after concluding that J&J's Baby Powder talc products were at fault.

The judgment in the case – which J&J will almost certainly appeal – includes $16 million in compensatory and $950 million in punitive damages and, according to lawyers for the family, is the largest verdict ever against J&J in a mesothelioma case linked to talc.

After two days of deliberations, the jury found that J&J had acted with malice or oppression by failing to protect consumers.

The punitive damages represent a near-60-fold increase of the compensation figure, and massively exceed the usual multiple in such cases. In fact, the Supreme Court has previously said that punitive damages should not exceed nine times compensatory damages.

"We will immediately appeal this egregious and unconstitutional verdict that is directly at odds – in result and amount – with the vast majority of other talc cases wherein the company has prevailed," said Erik Haas, J&J's global head of litigation, in a statement.

He pointed out that just a week ago, a jury in South Carolina rejected a similar lawsuit brought by the same law firm, and claimed that the strategy is to "roll the dice in search of jackpot verdicts, fuelled by litigation-funded junk science, without regard to the fact that most claimants recover nothing in the tort system."

Litigation over talc has hung over J&J for many years, and earlier this year the company failed in a third and final attempt to put the issue behind it through a 'Texas two-step' bankruptcy plan, in which it hoped to hand the liability to a separate company called Red River Talc, with $9 billion set aside to settle all outstanding cases.

J&J has consistently denied the controversial allegations that trace levels of asbestos in talc led to cancers, but took all its talc-based products off the market as of 2023 and is now using cornstarch instead. In its second-quarter results, the company said it had taken a charge of $3 billion in the first half of the year for "talc matters."

"The company is confident that the Moore verdict will be reversed on appeal, for the same reasons as virtually all the other plaintiff verdicts rendered by juries similarly misled by the false narratives fed by experts on the plaintiff's payroll," said Haas.

"The punitive damages amount also on its face is unconstitutional and cannot stand."