$417 Million Talc Verdict for Ovarian Cancer Plaintiff in California Bellwether Trial
After trial: The trial court granted judgment notwithstanding the verdict months after trial; the ruling was affirmed on appeal and the verdict never stood.
Won by Ashcraft & Gerel, LLP.
An L.A. jury awarded Eva Echeverria $417 million after finding that decades of Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder use caused her ovarian cancer, though the trial judge later vacated the verdict and the Court of Appeal affirmed the vacatur.
What happened
Eva Echeverria used Johnson and Johnson Baby Powder for personal hygiene for decades. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and her attorneys argued that talc particles in the product migrated to the ovaries and caused the disease. Her case was chosen as the first bellwether trial within California's coordinated talc litigation, JCCP 4872, a consolidated proceeding in Los Angeles County Superior Court that eventually encompassed thousands of similar claims.
Trial ran from July 26 to August 21, 2017. The plaintiff's team presented internal J&J documents, scientific literature, and expert testimony aimed at showing the company knew of a potential cancer link but did not warn consumers. Michelle Parfitt of Ashcraft and Gerel LLP was among the plaintiffs' trial counsel alongside attorneys from Robinson Calcagnie and Beasley Allen.
The jury returned a verdict of $417 million: $70 million in non-economic compensatory damages split between J&J and its subsidiary J&J Consumer Products, and $347 million in punitive damages. At the time it was the largest talc verdict in the California litigation.
In October 2017, Judge Maren Nelson vacated the verdict and ordered a new trial. Her ruling identified several grounds: the compensatory damages were excessive, the evidence of causation was insufficient to support the award, three jurors who opposed liability were improperly excluded from the damages phase, and the evidence did not support a finding that J&J acted with the malice required for punitive damages. The judge also found J&J could not be held liable for failure to warn on products it did not manufacture or market.
In 2019 the California Court of Appeal upheld the outcome that the $417 million verdict could not stand. It affirmed judgment for Johnson and Johnson, the parent company, and affirmed the order granting the subsidiary a new trial, so the award was set aside as to both defendants. The case returned to the broader coordinated proceeding. Echeverria died after the verdict but before the appellate ruling. Her case remains one of the most closely watched early trials in the national talc ovarian cancer litigation, both for the scale of the jury award and for the trial-court and appellate decisions that followed.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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