$10.55 Million Verdict Against a Talc Miner for a Man Who Got Mesothelioma From Three High School Summers at a Ceramics Plant

Richard G. Chisholm was a high school student in Ohio when he took a summer job at Maxfield Ceramics, working there in the summers from 1976 to 1979. One of the raw materials the plant used to make its ceramic products was industrial talc mined by R.T. Vanderbilt Company at Gouverneur, in St. Lawrence County in New York's North Country, where the Balmat mine had operated since 1948. Talc and asbestos form in close proximity underground, and the Gouverneur ore carried tremolite asbestos. Mr. Chisholm opened and handled the bags of talc as a teenager and thought no more about it.

In 2010, living in Indiana, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, the cancer caused by asbestos. He endured two years of pain and suffering and died in 2012, at 52, leaving a wife and three children. His family sued Vanderbilt in 2012 in Schenectady County, New York, where the Norwalk, Connecticut company could be reached. Donald P. Blydenburgh of Levy Konigsberg tried the case for the family.

The trial ran nearly three weeks. The family's evidence, according to counsel's account reported by the Watertown Daily Times, included test results Vanderbilt had received before Mr. Chisholm ever touched the product showing that its talc was contaminated with substantial amounts of asbestos fibers, and the bags carried no asbestos warning. Vanderbilt's own expert conceded that Mr. Chisholm's lung tissue, examined after he developed the cancer, contained the same type of asbestos found in the Gouverneur mine. Vanderbilt, which had spent decades insisting that the fibers in its talc were not true asbestos and had fought the point in regulatory proceedings, denied that its product caused the disease.

On Tuesday, February 10, 2015, the jury found that Vanderbilt was negligent in failing to warn of the asbestos in its talc, including the bags Mr. Chisholm used, and returned a verdict of $10.55 million for his family. It was reported as the largest verdict in the history of asbestos litigation in upstate New York. The company's president could not be reached for comment on whether it would appeal; the judge gave both sides 60 days to file post-trial motions, and the family's lawyer said he expected an appeal.

Those motions were argued on November 30, 2015. Vanderbilt asked the court to throw out the verdict entirely, and the parties also disputed whether punitive damages should have been allowed. We found no published decision on those motions and no appellate ruling in the Third Department, and no public report of a settlement. Vanderbilt later settled another Schenectady talc mesothelioma case, brought by a different family, on the day openings were to begin in 2018, and a Connecticut court added punitive damages to a $15 million verdict against the company in 2024.