May 7, 2025 - Attributable to Erik Haas, Worldwide Vice President of Litigation, Johnson & Johnson
“We will appeal this verdict, which emanated from multiple reversible errors. As the verdict itself recognizes, by awarding the significant share of the liability to Johns-Manville, the evidence affirmed the cause of plaintiff’s mesothelioma was her decades-long exposure living near the famous ‘Westbank’ area in Louisiana, a designated Superfund site. In this area in the 1950’s and 1960’s, a Johns-Manville plant disposed of production waste, replete with asbestos, to area residennts who used it to construct driveways and sidewalks, as well as fill dirt for residential lawns.
“As with virtually every other plaintiff verdict in this talc litigation, we fully expect the appellate court to reverse the award against the Company as predicated on ‘junk science’ that is refuted by decades of studies that demonstrate Johnson’s Baby Powder is safe, does not contain asbestos and does not cause cancer. The plaintiff lawyers’ business model is to roll the dice in search of jackpot verdicts, fueled by litigation-funded junk science, without regard to the fact that most claimants recover nothing in the tort system against the Company.
“Indeed, this result follows the unanimous defense verdict in favor of the Company recently rendered by a California jury in the Doomey case, which wholly rejected the plaintiff’s lawyers’ baseless talc claims. (More on the Doomey verdict here.) And just last week, the Company reopened a lawsuit against a so-called plaintiff’s ‘expert’ after a court ordered the disclosure of evidence that irrefutably establishes that the article she authored asserting that talc causes cancer is utterly fraudulent. (More on the Moline case here.)
“These talc lawsuits clog and impose extraordinary costs on the judicial system with contrived ‘scientific’ debates that should be presented to and decided by the scientific agencies authorized by Congress to evaluate such questions.”
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