Johnson & Johnson slapped with $966 million verdict in California talc case

The legal blows just keep coming for Johnson & Johnson, providing a stark reminder for finance and risk leaders that product liability risk can get real expensive, real quick.

A jury in Los Angeles recently ordered the consumer products giant to pay $966 million to the family of a woman who died of mesothelioma, Reuters reported. The plaintiffs alleged, and the jury agreed, that J&J’s talc products were to blame. This amount includes $16 million in compensatory damages and $950 million in punitive damages.

The company said it plans to appeal. In a statement, Erik Haas, J&J’s worldwide VP of litigation, called the verdict “egregious and unconstitutional” and claimed the plaintiffs based their arguments on “junk science.”

This is far from the end for J&J’s talc troubles, as it still faces more than 90,000 pending lawsuits, according to the New York Times.

In March, a federal judge blocked J&J’s attempts to settle its talc lawsuits through a scheme that involved the company transferring all its talc-based liabilities to a newly created subsidiary and having that subsidiary declare bankruptcy, the Times noted.

J&J stopped selling talc-based products globally in 2023, but even in announcing that decision, it maintained that talc-based products were free from asbestos and did not cause cancer.