January 5, 2026 - Attributable to Erik Haas, Worldwide Vice President of Litigation, Johnson & Johnson:
“The Court correctly decided that the Company is entitled to pursue its claims against plaintiffs’ expert who fomented junk science with false claims regarding the Company’s talc powder products.
The record—supplemented by the plaintiff experts’ own documents and sworn testimony—shows that the expert blatantly lied regarding the factual predicate of the opinion she published in a peer reviewed journal, which she and other plaintiffs’ experts thereafter cited as purported support for false product liability claims advanced by the mass tort plaintiffs’ bar. The expert concealed the facts demonstrating the falsity for years, until ordered to comply with discovery requests in related litigation.
Such documented defamation and deception are exactly why the Supreme Court deemed it necessary to revise the Federal Rules of Evidence to mandate that judges undertake a stringent gatekeeping function to hold plaintiffs to their burden of proving that the “studies” cited as support for their opinions are reliable, and are reliably applied.”