Kline & Specter Wins $78 Million Roundup Cancer Verdict for Abington Man
Won by Kline & Specter, PC.
A Philadelphia jury awarded William Melissen $78 million, including $75 million in punitive damages, after finding that Monsanto's Roundup weed killer was a cause of his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Kline & Specter, with co-counsel Arnold & Itkin, tried the case, the sixth Roundup trial heard by a Philadelphia jury and the fourth to go against the company.
What happened
William Melissen, a 51-year-old from Abington, started using Roundup in 1992 and kept using it for close to three decades, at home and on the job. In 2020 he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. He and his wife, Margaret, sued Monsanto and its German parent, Bayer, in 2021. They argued that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, had caused his disease and that the company sold the product for years without warning users of the risk.
The case went to trial in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas in September 2024 and ran for nearly a month. Kline & Specter tried it with co-counsel Arnold & Itkin, and Thomas Kline and Jason Itkin led for the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs' theory was failure to warn. Monsanto knew, or should have known, that glyphosate carried a cancer risk, yet it marketed Roundup for everyday use without telling buyers to take precautions. Bayer's lawyers countered that regulators around the world have found glyphosate safe and that the science does not tie it to cancer.
On October 10, 2024, after less than three hours of deliberation, the jury sided with Melissen. It awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and $75 million in punitive damages, $78 million in all. The punitive figure reflected how the jury judged the company's conduct. Kline & Specter had argued that Monsanto and Bayer acted with reckless indifference to public safety.
"When a company fails to tell the truth about their products, and people get sick and die, the company needs to be held accountable," Kline said after the verdict.
The Melissen result was the sixth Roundup case decided by a Philadelphia jury and the fourth to go against Monsanto. The city had become a center for the litigation. Kline & Specter, again with Arnold & Itkin, had previously won a $175 million verdict in 2023 and a $2.25 billion verdict in January 2024 that a judge later reduced to about $400 million, though Monsanto had also prevailed in two Philadelphia trials, including one the month before Melissen's.
Bayer said it disagreed with the verdict, citing what it called the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence and the conclusions of regulators. The company said trial errors gave it strong grounds for appeal and signaled that it would seek to reduce the punitive award, pointing in part to a federal appeals court ruling on EPA warning label standards. As of the verdict, the $78 million award stood as the jury set it.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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