Philadelphia Jury Awards $57.1 Million Against J&J's Ethicon for Pelvic Mesh That Eroded Into a Woman's Urethra

In 2007, Ella Ebaugh, a mother of five from Manchester, Pennsylvania, had two polypropylene mesh slings implanted to treat stress urinary incontinence: Ethicon's TVT and its TVT-Secur. Ethicon is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. The devices were supposed to support her urethra. Instead the mesh eroded into it. She went through three revision surgeries to cut the material out, and surgeons still could not remove all of it. Some remains embedded in her tissue. She was left with chronic pain and permanent incontinence, and the condition the slings were meant to fix never went away. "My urethra is mangled and I will suffer for the rest of my life," she told CBS News. She was 51 when her case reached a jury.

Kila Baldwin of Kline & Specter tried the case in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, part of the court's pelvic mesh mass tort program. It was the sixth Ethicon mesh case to reach a Philadelphia jury, at a time when more than 130 similar cases were waiting behind it. Testimony ran nearly a month. Baldwin argued that Ethicon designed both slings in a way that let them degrade and erode once implanted, and that the company knew the risk and pressed ahead anyway. "The company was reckless and the company totally ignored the real serious risk," she said. Ethicon countered that mesh slings for stress urinary incontinence were supported by medical societies, physicians, and regulators around the world.

The jury deliberated for two days. On September 7, 2017, it found Ethicon negligent and both devices defectively designed, and it returned $57.1 million: $7.1 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages. The punitive figure reflected a finding that the company had shown conscious disregard for patient safety. It was the largest award in the Philadelphia mesh program to that point, nearly three times the $20 million verdict that had set the record only four months earlier, and the fifth plaintiff win in the program's six trials.

Ethicon called the verdict inconsistent with the science and appealed to the Pennsylvania Superior Court. The appeal moved slowly. Briefing was still under way in January 2020, when Ebaugh's lawyers filed their brief as appellees. The appeal was never decided in a published opinion. No ruling reversing, reducing, or affirming the award appears in Pennsylvania's public case records, and no court set the verdict aside. Other Philadelphia mesh verdicts against Ethicon from the same program, including awards of $12.5 million and $13.5 million, were affirmed on appeal during those years; the Ebaugh appeal simply ended without a reported ruling.

The $57.1 million stood as the program's record until April 2019, when another Kline & Specter client, Susan McFarland, won $120 million in the same courthouse. Ethicon had stopped selling the TVT-Secur in 2012, five years before the Ebaugh jury spoke. The TVT, the other sling implanted in her, was still on the market when the verdict came in.