The Supreme Court on Tuesday shut down Johnson & Johnson’s appeal in a $2.1 billion case over whether asbestos in the company’s talc powder products, including its baby powder, had caused ovarian cancer in female users.
The court rejected hearing the case in an unsigned order. Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh recused themselves from the decision-making process.
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Johnson & Johnson appealed to the court last year after the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the penalty in 2018. A previous state appeals court had set the amount at a minimum of $4 billion. The company is facing more than 21,000 lawsuits over its talc powder products.
The company said it stopped selling these products in the United States and Canada last year because of a dip in demand “fueled by misinformation around the safety of the product and a constant barrage of litigation advertising.”
In a brief to the Supreme Court, former Whitewater investigator Ken Starr urged the court not to hear Johnson & Johnson’s appeal because the company allegedly “knew for decades that their talc powders contained asbestos, a highly carcinogenic substance with no known safe exposure level.”
“They could have protected customers by switching from talc to cornstarch, as their own scientists proposed as early as 1973,” Starr added. “But talc was cheaper and petitioners were unwilling to sacrifice profits for a safer product.”
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Six women died from ovarian cancer before the case began, and three more have died from it since, Starr wrote in a brief to the court.
Johnson & Johnson in its appeal had claimed that the Missouri ruling was unfair because many of the women involved in the suit did not live in the state.
