Judge throws out $950 million punitive damages award against J&J in talc trial

By Diana Novak Jones

March 16 (Reuters) - A California judge threw out a jury’s award directing Johnson & Johnson to pay nearly a billion dollars in punitive damages to the family of a woman who died from mesothelioma, a cancer they said was caused by the company’s talc products.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ruth Kwan on Friday granted J&J’s motion to set aside the jury's award of $950 million in punitive damages to the family of Mae Moore, saying they failed to prove that J&J acted with malice or hid information about its products that it had a duty to disclose.

The family of Moore, a California resident who died at age 88 in 2021, sued the company that year, alleging J&J's talc-based baby powder products contained asbestos fibers that caused her rare cancer. The jury ordered J&J to pay $16 million in compensatory damages and $950 million in punitive damages, one of the largest verdicts to date against J&J over a mesothelioma diagnosis, according to court filings.

The company has said its products are safe, do not contain asbestos, and do not cause cancer. J&J stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the U.S. in 2020, switching to a cornstarch product. Mesothelioma has been linked to asbestos exposure.

But Kwan said hundreds of test results showed J&J’s talc products did not contain asbestos, and the evidence presented at trial did not establish that J&J knew its products contained asbestos and therefore acted maliciously.

Kwan let stand the jury’s determination that the talc products were the cause of Moore’s cancer, saying the evidence supporting that finding was substantial. She did not address the compensatory damages award.

Trey Branham, one of the attorneys representing Moore’s family, said he disagreed with the court’s ruling and anticipated appealing it.

In a statement, Erik Haas, J&J’s worldwide vice president of litigation, said the court appropriately threw out the punitive damages, which he said were “devoid of evidentiary support and patently unconstitutional.”

Haas said the company will appeal the compensatory damages award and Kwan's decision on causation.

J&J is facing lawsuits from more than 67,000 plaintiffs who say they were diagnosed with cancer after using baby powder and other talc products, according to court filings. The number of lawsuits alleging talc caused mesothelioma is a small subset of these cases, with the vast majority involving ovarian cancer claims.

J&J has sought to resolve the litigation through bankruptcy, a proposal that has been rejected three times by federal courts.

Lawsuits alleging talc caused mesothelioma were not part of the last bankruptcy proposal. The company has previously settled some of those claims but has not struck a nationwide settlement, so many lawsuits over mesothelioma have proceeded to trial in state courts in recent months.

In the past year, J&J has been hit with several substantial verdicts in mesothelioma cases. It has won some trials over the claims, and has had success in reducing some of the verdicts on appeal.

The case is Moore et al. v. Johnson & Johnson et al., case number 21STCV05513 in the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles.

For J&J: John Ewald of Kirkland & Ellis

For Moore: Jessica Dean and Venus Burns of Dean Omar Branham Shirley