Billion Dollar Jury Award to be Settled This Week

Plaintiffs hoping to collect the record-setting $4.69 billion from Johnson & Johnson look to the company's unforgivable and "reprehensible" behavior

Monday, November 19, 2018 - The big news in the legal community this week will be a Missouri judge deciding whether or not the record-setting $4.69 billion dollar talcum powder ovarian cancer jury award against Johnson & Johnson and in favor of 22 women, dying or who have died from ovarian cancer will be overturned or reduced. Johnson & Johnson was accused of exhibiting "reprehensible behavior" in targeting women and their babies with Johnson's talcum powder advertising going as far as to label and brand the product "baby" powder. Attorneys for the named plaintiffs in the case argue that Johnson's Baby Powder was unsafe and that JNJ executives and their talc supplier, Imreys Inc., both knew that talc contained cancer-causing asbestos and did nothing to warn consumers. JNJ's only concern was the levels of asbestos in their talc and whether or not the amount was legally acceptable according to internal memos dating back to the 1970's that were unveiled in court. Plaintiff attorneys argue that JNJ's reprehensible behavior after finding out just how unsafe talcum powder was justified the sizeable punitive damages.

The defense, on the other hand, argues that the verdict against them should be reversed on the grounds that each of the 22 plaintiffs had individual and unique health experiences and should not be lumped as one. Some plaintiffs, for example, were smokers, lived around second-hand smoke, or had a family history of cancer. Others had different life histories of exposure to cancer-causing agents and each plaintiff was in a different stage of battling the disease. Six of the 22 plaintiffs died before hearing the jury's verdict in their favor. JNJ attorneys claim that there were no cancer claims against their baby powder for decades and that this case and the thousands of other that await them is based on faulty "attorney-driven" science.

The most recent case alleging that Johnson's Baby Powder contains asbestos and was responsible for causing cancer was decided in the favor of the defendant Johnson & Johnson in a retrial of a previously hung jury mistrial. The estate of Bertila Boyd-Bostic, the deceased plaintiff, failed to convince a jury that particles of talc from Johnson's Baby Powder she inhaled were the cause of her terminal mesothelioma, a rare and asbestos-related form of lung cancer. Her previous trial ended in a hung jury (8-4 in favor of the plaintiff) and declared a mistrial. Ms. Bostic's husband continued after her death in November. Other individuals lost three of five previous mesothelioma/baby powder cases. The two successful cases, one in New Jersey and the other in California, were awarded to plaintiffs for the total of $142 million in damages. The three cases that were overturned are awaiting a retrial. Over 10,000 cases await a trial date, most of which were filed after news broke of the hundred-million-dollar, and now billion-dollar jury awards.

Information provided by TalcumPowderCancerLawsuit.com, a website devoted to providing news about talcum powder ovarian cancer lawsuits, as well as medical research and findings.