Johnson & Johnson is turning the tables and launching its own lawsuits against several doctors who conducted studies on the company’s talc-based products.
According to Reuters, Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary LTL Management, which the company transferred its talc liabilities to in a highly controversial move, filed two lawsuits in New Jersey federal court last week asking three researchers to “retract and/or issue a correction” of a study stating the company’s asbestos-contaminated consumer talc products sometimes caused mesothelioma among users.
The drugmaker is facing more than 38,000 talc-related lawsuits, mostly over its iconic baby powder which plaintiffs claim was contaminated with asbestos that caused ovarian cancer and mesothelioma.
Johnson & Johnson is suing a total of four doctors: New Hampshire-based retired pulmonologist Richard Lawrence Kradin and Virginia pathologists Theresa Swain Emory and John Coulter Maddox. In a separate lawsuit filed in May, Johnson & Johnson sued New York physician Jacqueline Miriam Moline.
Asbestos is naturally found in talc when it’s mined. Johnson & Johnson has been accused of knowing about, and covering up, the higher-than-acceptable amounts of asbestos in some of its final talc products since the 1970s.
The company has also come under fire for targeting their baby powder to low-income and marginalized communities like Black women, which Johnson & Johnson has denied.
Related: Johnson & Johnson Offers $8.9 Billion in Talc Lawsuits But Not Enough Says a Plaintiff Group
Although Johnson & Johnson maintains its talc products do not contain asbestos and are safe, the company has taken its baby powder off shelves in the US and Canada and plans to do the same globally this year.
The company now offers a cornstarch version of the baby powder. The company says it had to pull its talc baby powder off shelves because of the growing number of lawsuits and “misinformation” about its safety.
Moline published an article in 2019 on a study involving 33 patients who said their only exposure to asbestos came from Johnson & Johnson’s talc products. In 2020, Emory, Kradin and Maddox followed up with a study of 75 similar patients.
In its most recent lawsuit, LTL claimed that at least six of the 75 patients in the 2020 study had potentially been exposed to asbestos in other ways. The Johnson & Johnson subsidiary went on to say that overall, the researchers hid the fact that all of the patients involved in their studies had been exposed to asbestos from other sources.
The company made a similar claim in its May lawsuit against Moline’s study.
LTL is also asking the court to force the researchers to disclose the patients’ identities, according to Reuters.
All of the doctors have provided testimony in lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson, and the company said their research has been cited in lawsuits where they did not even testify.
“The Emory article demonstrates plaintiffs’ experts’ tactics to pollute the scientific literature,” Johnson & Johnson wrote in its complaint. “They publish their junk litigation opinions in scientific journals. They use their credentials to instill their publications with false credibility. They then build from that fraudulent foundation by citing each other’s work.”
In a statement, the company’s legal chief Erik Haas said the three doctors in the latest lawsuit “were paid millions by the plaintiffs’ bar to deliberately defame our products.”
In the formal complaint, LTL said they have made “careers and small fortunes” testifying for plaintiffs in talc trials.
“The safety of our talcum powder products is supported by decades of evidence by independent experts, governments and regulatory bodies,” Haas said.
Johnson & Johnson so far has had mixed results in its litigations. Out of 41 trials, it has either won, had a mistrial, or won appeals for 32 of them.
It also ended up getting a 2018 Missouri court verdict of $4.7 billion reduced to $2.1 billion after appeals. That was awarded to 22 women who said their ovarian cancer was caused by asbestos in the company’s talc products.
The drugmaker has come under intense scrutiny for its bankruptcy plans through LTL. In April, a US appeals court denied Johnson & Johnson’s first Chapter 11 attempt, saying the company was not facing the financial distress that would qualify it for bankruptcy protection.
Arguments for the company’s second bankruptcy attempt were heard by New Jersey bankruptcy judge Michael Kaplan last month. That attempt involves an $8.9 billion settlement offer from Johnson & Johnson to resolve tens of thousands of talc lawsuits.
In bankruptcy court filings in April, Johnson & Johnson said the costs of its talc-related verdicts, settlements and legal fees have reached about $4.5 billion.
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