Johnson & Johnson filed motions for a new punitive damages trial after a jury deemed four plaintiffs in a talcum powder lawsuit deserved $750 million in punitive damages.

The plaintiffs alleged Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder caused them to develop mesothelioma, a rare cancer that affects the lining of a bodily organ, most often the lining of the lungs. Mesothelioma takes anywhere from 20 to 50 years to develop and is almost exclusively linked to asbestos exposure.

The $750 million in punitive damages already was reduced to $186.5 million because of a New Jersey state law that limits punitive damages to be no more than five times the compensatory award, which was a total of $37 million in a separate trial.

Johnson & Johnson released a statement saying both trials contained “numerous legal errors that subjected the jury to irrelevant information and prevented them from hearing meaningful evidence.”

Alex Gorsky, the company’s chief executive, testified for the first time in a jury trial involving allegations Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder was to blame for cancer diagnoses. During the course of the trial, the plaintiffs’ lawyers presented evidence that Gorsky sold shares of his stock in November 2018 because he knew Reuters was working on an investigative report about Johnson & Johnson covering up tests that showed asbestos had contaminated its talc products for decades.

Johnson & Johnson submitted court papers saying the sale of the stocks was not relevant to the case and only served to entice jurors to increase the amount of punitive damages.

The plaintiffs argue that Gorsky’s timing of placing the sale of the stock is pertinent because the jury can decide whether he is trustworthy.

Reuters did release an investigative report in December 2018 that concluded Johnson & Johnson researchers and executives knew its talcum powder products were sometimes tainted with small amounts of asbestos.

In September 2019, a private lab found asbestos in a sample of Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder. The sample was unmarked at the time it was tested, and later revealed by the FDA to be Johnson’s Baby Powder. An entire lot of the famous talcum powder was recalled as a result.

The private lab was AMA Analytical Services Inc, which is overseen by lab director Andreas Saldivar, who Johnson & Johnson has turned to as an expert to testify that the company’s cosmetic talcum powders do not contain asbestos. Johnson & Johnson argued with its expert witness and said another lab found no asbestos in the same bottle Saldivar tested.

Talcum Powder Lawsuit Sparks Criminal Investigation

Last summer, the U.S. Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into Johnson & Johnson to see if the company had covered up potential carcinogenic risks of using any of its talcum powders.

The company faces more than 16,000 lawsuits alleging the company knew it was selling asbestos-tainted talcum powders and never warned consumers.

The Reuters investigation and some of the talcum powder lawsuits already filed refer to internal communications among Johnson & Johnson researchers and investigators from the 1960s and 1970s that mention asbestos found in talc could become a hot button topic for the company’s legal department.

In its investigation, Reuters uncovered a 2013 version of Johnson & Johnson’s Safety & Care Commitment webpage that included markups. The original said, “Our talc-based consumer products have always been asbestos-free, as confirmed by regular testing since the 1970s.” Someone had crossed out “have always been” and replaced it with “are” so that the claim of asbestos-free products didn’t refer to the past. In parentheses, the editor wrote “we cannot say ‘always’” in reference to the asbestos-free claim.

Johnson & Johnson used a mine in the Italian Alps to obtain most of the talc for its American products back in the 1950s. Late in that decade, the company determined the talc was tainted with tremolite, a type of asbestos that naturally occurs in and around talc deposits. A decade later, tremolite also was found in a Vermont talc mine purchased by a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary.

Reuters found evidence that Johnson & Johnson was being questioned by pediatricians about its talcum powder’s safety in the early 1970s. One doctor wrote a letter to Johnson & Johnson’s Talc Manager William Ashton and said he should speak with Johnson & Johnson’s attorneys because “it is not inconceivable that we could become involved in litigation.”

The U.S. began regulating asbestos in 1972 with OSHA limiting the amount of asbestos particles workers could be exposed to while on the job.