Livermore Retiree Whose Lymphoma Spread to Her Brain Holds a $56 Million Roundup Judgment Through the U.S. Supreme Court

Alberta Pilliod and her husband Alva bought Roundup for the first time in 1982 to keep weeds down at their home in Livermore, California. Over the next three decades they sprayed it on four properties: about a gallon a week, nine months a year, at their main residence, and more at rental and vacation properties they owned over the years. Alberta did roughly a quarter of the spraying herself. She wore flip-flops, shorts and a tank top, felt the mist settle on her hands, and did not wash it off because the label and the advertising told her the product was harmless to anything but plants. The Pilliods used both premixed Roundup and the concentrate, which Alva mixed in a sprayer.

Alberta had retired from teaching and school administration in 2004 and gone back to work as a substitute administrator. Her son described a social, active woman who went to the gym, walked, snorkeled and skied. In April 2015, at about age 70, she was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, an aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which in her case had taken hold in her central nervous system. She went through a punishing chemotherapy regimen with multi-day hospital stays, reached remission that September, then suffered a recurrence in her brain in July 2016 and more chemotherapy. By October 2017 she showed no evidence of disease, but the cancer and its treatment left her with permanent brain damage. Her husband had been diagnosed with the same lymphoma, in his bones, four years earlier.

The couple sued Monsanto in Alameda County Superior Court in 2017, alleging design defect and failure to warn. Monsanto asked to sever the two cases; Judge Winifred Y. Smith refused and tried them together over six weeks in spring 2019. The Court of Appeal's opinion names plaintiffs' counsel as Michael J. Miller, Jeffrey A. Travers and Curtis G. Hoke of The Miller Firm, R. Brent Wisner and Pedram Esfandiary of Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, and Mark E. Burton of Audet & Partners. Plaintiffs' experts included Dr. Christopher Portier, who had served on the IARC glyphosate working group, and pathologist Dr. Dennis Weisenburger, who testified that Roundup, the only pesticide the Pilliods used in any quantity over 30 years, was a substantial factor in causing Alberta's cancer. The jury also heard evidence that Monsanto knew of a 1983 mouse study suggesting a cancer link and of its ghostwriting of articles attributed to independent scientists.

On May 13, 2019, the jury found for both plaintiffs on every claim. For Alberta it awarded about $200,000 in past economic loss, about $3 million in future economic loss, $8 million in past noneconomic loss, $26 million in future noneconomic loss, and $1 billion in punitive damages. Monsanto moved for a new trial and for judgment notwithstanding the verdict. On July 26, 2019, Judge Smith rejected every liability argument, found clear and convincing evidence that Monsanto had made "continuous efforts to impede, discourage, or distort the scientific inquiry about glyphosate," but reduced the noneconomic damages to $1 million for each of the two years of intense treatment and $600,000 for each other past and future year, and cut punitive damages to a four-to-one ratio. She conditionally granted a new trial unless Alberta accepted judgment of $56,005,830, roughly $11.2 million compensatory and $44.8 million punitive. Alberta accepted while reserving the right to cross-appeal.

On August 9, 2021, the First District Court of Appeal, Division Two, affirmed in full, rejecting Monsanto's preemption, causation, instructional and attorney-misconduct arguments and the Pilliods' cross-appeal seeking restoration of the larger awards. The California Supreme Court denied review on November 17, 2021, and on June 27, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Monsanto's petition for certiorari (No. 21-1272), one week after refusing to hear the federal Hardeman case. The combined Pilliod judgments, about $86.7 million, were the largest Roundup award to survive appeal at the time.