ST. LOUIS — Mark Lanier hopes a Missouri trial court judge’s recent decision affirming a $4.69 billion verdict against pharmaceutical giant Johnson &Johnson will propel the company to reach for higher levels of accountability.
“We hope this judgment will compel Johnson & Johnson to take responsible, effective action in acknowledging the inherent dangers of the use of talc, and specifically the use of Johnson’s Baby Powder and similar products,” Lanier, who served as counsel to all 22 of the women that first filed suit against the company last summer blaming their ovarian cancer on asbestos in Johnson’s baby powder and other talc products, said in a statement following the five-week long proceedings.
Reuters reports since the court’s initial July 12 ruling in the case, at least six of the women named as plaintiffs in the suit have perished.
In rendering his latest verdict on Dec. 18, Judge Rex Burlison of the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis was as forceful as he was succinct, asserting “The court finds there is no just reason for delay and hereby certifies this judgment as final for purposes of appeal.”
Even as Burlison blasted Johnson & Johnson’s actions over the years as “reprehensible,” the company vowed to fight on in hopes of clearing its name.
In a statement, Johnson & Johnson branded the proceedings as “fundamentally unfair,” and continued to insist its talc is safe while pledging to pursue all appellate avenues.
“The same judge has denied similar motions on prior verdicts in his court that were ultimately overturned by the appellate courts,” company officials added. “We are confident this verdict will also be overturned on appeal.”
As part of a public campaign to uphold the image it has spent over 132 years cultivating, the company has launched a Facts About Talc website and taken out full-page advertisements touting its commitment to health and safety in several national publications.
At the time of the initial verdict, the ruling against Johnson & Johnson was the largest ever in lawsuits against companies whose products were alleged to cause cancer. The jury’s award broke down to include $550 million in compensatory damages and a punitive award of $4.14 billion.
Throughout the proceedings before Burlison, attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that Johnson & Johnson had been fully aware that its products posed asbestos-related health risks for almost the last half-century and actively set out on a course to keep consumers in the dark on the matter.
In the wake of Burlison’s ruling, company stock prices quickly spiraled downward by as much as 10 percent.
In all, the New York Times reports Johnson & Johnson faces nearly 12,000 plaintiffs in talc-related cases where many of the victims make the same claims put forth in the case before Burlison. A group of others go as far as to allege they came to suffer from mesothelioma, a deadly cancer of the lining of internal organs that is associated with asbestos.
Though the company has been found to have been negligent in several previous cases that alleged many of the same dangers, Johnson & Johnson has yet to pay out any awards and has appealed in each and every instance where the ruling has gone against them.
Beyond insisting that all of its products have proven to be safe based on decades of studies and regulatory assessments, Johnson & Johnson officials have also taken the position the case before Burlison should have never been held in Missouri based on a 2017 Supreme Court decision curtailing where companies can be sued in cases where personal injuries are alleged to have occurred.
In quickly rejecting that argument, Burlison maintained that the case was rightfully litigated in the Missouri court system given Johnson & Johnson’s long-held connection to the state.