Jury Awards Deborah Schultz $22 Million In Johnson & Johnson Talc Trial
After trial: Johnson & Johnson stated immediately after the verdict that it would appeal both the liability finding and the compensatory award. As of September 2026 no appellate ruling had been reported, no payment had been reported, and we could not confirm from public sources whether post-trial motions have been decided or a notice of appeal has been filed. The ranked figure is the $22 million the jury awarded, which has not been reduced by any court ruling we could find.
Won by Robinson Calcagnie, Inc..
On December 12, 2025, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded Deborah Schultz and her husband Albert $22 million after finding that decades of using Johnson's Baby Powder caused her ovarian cancer. The jury found Johnson & Johnson liable for negligence, failure to warn and concealing asbestos risk in its talc products, but declined to award punitive damages. The verdict came in the first bellwether trial of California's coordinated talc litigation, which also awarded a second plaintiff, Monica Kent, $18 million in a case tried alongside the Schultzes'. Dan Robinson of Robinson Calcagnie tried the case for the plaintiffs with Andy Birchfield of Beasley Allen; Johnson & Johnson has said it will appeal.
What happened
Deborah Schultz used Johnson's Baby Powder after bathing for decades before she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2018. Her treatment involved major surgery and rounds of chemotherapy. She and her husband, Albert Schultz, sued Johnson & Johnson in Los Angeles County Superior Court, arguing the company knew its talc could be contaminated with asbestos and sold it anyway without a warning.
The case was part of California's coordinated talc litigation, JCCP 4872, and was the first of six bellwether cases Judge Theresa Traber set for trial in pairs. It was tried alongside a second case brought by Monica Kent, who made similar claims after her own ovarian cancer diagnosis in 2014. Opening statements were heard in mid-November 2025 and the trial ran about four weeks. Aside from one 2017 trial, it was only the second time a California jury had heard claims that talc caused ovarian cancer, and the first anywhere in the country to reach a plaintiffs' verdict on those claims since 2021, after federal courts rejected Johnson & Johnson's repeated attempts to route the talc claims into a subsidiary's bankruptcy.
At trial, J&J's defense argued there was no reliable science tying talc to ovarian cancer and that no major U.S. health authority had drawn that link. Kirkland & Ellis partner Allison Brown told jurors the only people who had told Kent and Schultz their cancers were caused by talc were their own lawyers. The plaintiffs' side countered that the company's internal records showed it knew from the 1960s that its talc could carry asbestos and chose not to disclose it.
On December 12, 2025, the jury sided with both plaintiffs, finding Johnson & Johnson liable for negligence, failure to warn and concealment of the asbestos risk. It awarded Kent $18 million and awarded the Schultzes $22 million: $13.5 million in compensatory damages to Deborah and $8.5 million for loss of consortium to Albert. The jury declined to award either plaintiff punitive damages.
Dan Robinson of Robinson Calcagnie tried the case with Andy Birchfield of Beasley Allen. After the verdict, Robinson told reporters that Johnson & Johnson's only answer to decades of customer loyalty was silence about the risk in its own product: 'The only thing they did was be loyal to Johnson & Johnson as a customer for only 50 years. That loyalty was a one-way street.'
Johnson & Johnson said it would appeal. Erik Haas, the company's worldwide vice president of litigation, said the company had won 16 of the 17 ovarian cancer cases it had previously tried and expected to prevail again. No appellate ruling has been reported, and there is no public record that any part of the award has been paid.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Associated Press (via Yahoo News), Dec. 13, 2025: wire report naming Daniel Robinson of the Robinson Calcagnie firm in Newport Beach as counsel for the plaintiffs, the $18 million and $22 million awards, Robinson's post-verdict quote, and Erik Haas's statement that J&J would appeal and had won 16 of 17 prior ovarian cancer talc trials
- 2.Courtroom View Network, Dec. 2025: staffed gavel-to-gavel trial coverage confirming the Friday verdict, the four-week trial with openings in mid-November, the $18 million and $22 million compensatory awards, no punitive damages, Judge Theresa Traber, and J&J's statement that it would appeal
- 3.Courtroom View Network, Nov. 2025: opening-statement coverage naming Dan Robinson of Robinson Calcagnie and Andy Birchfield of Beasley Allen for the plaintiffs and Allison Brown of Kirkland & Ellis for J&J, and noting this was only the second California ovarian cancer talc trial
- 4.Reuters (via Claims Journal), Dec. 15, 2025: Schultz's 2018 diagnosis and Kent's 2014 diagnosis, the plaintiffs' decades of use after bathing, surgeries and chemotherapy, Allison Brown's argument that only the women's lawyers had told them talc caused their cancers, and Erik Haas's appeal statement
- 5.Newsweek, Dec. 2025: confirms Daniel Robinson of Robinson Calcagnie represented Kent and Schultz and J&J's stated intent to appeal
- 6.MesoWatch, Dec. 2025: the $13.5 million compensatory / $8.5 million loss-of-consortium breakdown of the Schultz award, the jury's negligence, failure-to-warn and concealment findings, and that this was the first plaintiffs' ovarian cancer talc verdict since 2021 following three rejected bankruptcy attempts
- 7.Top Class Actions, Dec. 2025: separate case numbers for the Kent (17CV318672) and Schultz (20CV0476) matters within JCCP 4872
More proven verdicts from Robinson Calcagnie, Inc.
All Robinson Calcagnie, Inc. proven verdicts →On July 9, 1999, a Los Angeles County jury found General Motors liable for the fuel tank design of a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu that caught fire after a drunk driver rear-ended the car on Christmas Eve 1993, severely burning Patricia Anderson, her four children and family friend Jo Tigner. The jury awarded $107.6 million in compensatory damages and $4.8 billion in punitive damages, at the time the largest personal injury award in the country. Superior Court Judge Ernest G. Williams later cut the punitive award to $1.09 billion, leaving the compensatory award intact for a total of about $1.2 billion, while backing the jury's finding that General Motors had positioned the tank to protect profit rather than passengers. General Motors said it would appeal the reduced judgment. No appellate decision in the case was ever published, and what General Motors ultimately paid was never made public.
On September 10, 2013, Faustino Torres Solorio was standing at the tailgate of a truck that had run out of gas and pulled onto the shoulder in San Bernardino County when a car driven by Gunnar Ayala, a parts delivery driver for Nissan of Fontana, struck him. Ayala was cited for an unsafe turning movement, and the officer at the scene concluded Solorio did nothing to cause the crash. He suffered multiple broken bones, deep lacerations, a lacerated spleen and an above-the-knee amputation of his left leg. The dealerships argued Ayala was an independent contractor, or at least outside the course and scope of his job at the moment of the crash. A San Bernardino County Superior Court jury found otherwise and awarded Solorio $46 million on August 9, 2016. No appeal has surfaced in the years since.
Gerald Barnett, a retired FBI agent from South Carolina, took Vioxx starting in 1999 for chronic neck and back pain and suffered a heart attack in September 2002 at age 58, followed by quintuple bypass surgery. His case was chosen as the second bellwether trial in the federal Vioxx multidistrict litigation, and on August 17, 2006 a New Orleans jury found Merck had negligently failed to warn his doctors of the drug's risks and had concealed information about those risks, awarding him $50 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages. The trial judge found the compensatory award excessive and ordered a new trial unless Barnett accepted a reduced award; Barnett accepted a remittitur of $1.6 million on June 20, 2007, and judgment was entered in that amount on June 28, 2007. Merck reported that it appealed that judgment, and no decision resolving the appeal has been published.
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