Jury Awards $34 Million After Prempro Hormone Therapy Causes Breast Cancer and Double Mastectomy
Won by Jacoby & Meyers, LLP.
A Philadelphia jury awarded Donna Kendall $6.3 million in compensatory damages and $28 million in punitive damages after finding that Wyeth's Prempro hormone-replacement drug caused her breast cancer and the double mastectomy that followed; the Pennsylvania Superior Court restored the full punitive award in 2012 after the trial judge had cut it to $1 million.
What happened
Donna Kendall, a woman from Decatur, Illinois, took Prempro, a combination hormone-replacement therapy manufactured by Wyeth, from 1992 through 2002. By the time she stopped, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. Kendall was one of roughly 10,000 women who filed claims alleging the drug's synthetic hormones stimulated abnormal tissue growth that turned malignant.
The case went to trial in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court in November 2009. Trial counsel for Kendall included Tobias Millrood of Pogust Braslow and Millrood and Ron Rosenkrantz of Finkelstein and Partners, the New York firm affiliated with Jacoby and Meyers. Plaintiffs argued that Wyeth, later acquired by Pfizer, had known about a link between prolonged Prempro use and breast cancer but actively worked to obscure that link, including by sponsoring ghostwritten medical journal articles that downplayed the risk.
Evidence at trial showed that Wyeth paid outside consultants to prepare articles appearing under other authors' names, designed to reassure physicians that the hormone therapy was safe. Those articles, the plaintiffs argued, reached the prescribing doctors who kept Kendall on the drug for a decade.
On November 25, 2009, the jury returned a verdict of $6.3 million in compensatory damages and $28 million in punitive damages, a 4.44-to-1 ratio. Pfizer called the award unsupported by the evidence. The trial judge subsequently reduced the punitive award to $1 million.
Kendall appealed. In 2012, the Pennsylvania Superior Court reversed the reduction and restored the full $28 million in punitive damages, finding the 4.44-to-1 ratio constitutionally sound given the evidence of deliberate concealment. The total award stood at approximately $34.3 million. A parallel case tried the same week resulted in a $75 million punitive award for a second plaintiff, Connie Barton, bringing combined punitive damages in the two trials to $103 million.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Philadelphia Inquirer: Prempro plaintiffs' lawyers sold their story to the jury (Nov. 25, 2009)·Archived copy
- 2.ABA Journal: Juries award $103M in punitives in two Prempro cases·Archived copy
- 3.Inner Circle of Advocates: Court Restores $28 Million Punitive Damages Award in HRT Case (2012)·Archived copy
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