Benedi v. McNeil: $8.85 Million Tylenol Verdict Over a Missing Liver Warning

In February 1993, Antonio Benedi, a former special assistant to President George H.W. Bush, came down with the flu. He took Extra Strength Tylenol at the doses printed on the box, never more than the maximum. He also kept his usual habit of three or four glasses of wine with dinner. Within days he was in a coma.

By February 10 he was in the hospital, near death, his liver shutting down. Surgeons performed an emergency transplant to keep him alive. The drug he had taken for ordinary aches, in ordinary amounts, had poisoned his liver because he was a regular drinker. The label said nothing about that combination.

Patrick Malone, then with Stein, Mitchell & Mezines, represented Benedi at the 1994 trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. The case turned on what McNeil knew. Evidence showed the company had collected scores of reports tying therapeutic doses of acetaminophen plus alcohol to liver injury, roughly 60 such reports by the end of 1992. McNeil argued that a virus, not its product, caused the failure, and that its warnings were adequate.

The jury rejected that defense. In October 1994 it awarded Benedi $7,855,000 in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages, $8.85 million in all.

Under Virginia law, punitive damages are capped, and the trial court reduced the $1 million punitive award to the state maximum of $350,000. McNeil's parent, Johnson & Johnson, appealed the verdict. In 1995 the Fourth Circuit affirmed, finding ample evidence for the jury's conclusion that McNeil had negligently failed to warn of the risk. It was the first reported decision in which that court approved punitive damages in a product-liability case.

Years later, federal regulators required a warning about acetaminophen and alcohol on over-the-counter pain relievers. The immunosuppressant drugs that kept Benedi's new liver alive went on to damage his kidneys, and he needed a second transplant.