A Los Angeles court orders the pharmaceutical giant to pay damages to the family of May Moore, who died of mesothelioma in 2021.
Released on October 7, 2025
Johnson & Johnson has been ordered to pay $966 million to the family of a woman who died of mesothelioma, and feels the company is liable for the latest lawsuit alleging that the baby powder product causes cancer.
A Los Angeles court passed the ruling late Monday.
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The drug giant must pay for May Moore’s family, who passed away in 2021. The family sued the company the same year, claiming that Johnson & Johnson’s talc baby powder products contain asbestos fiber that caused her rare cancer. According to a court application, the ju apprentice ordered $16 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
The verdict could be reduced on appeal as the U.S. Supreme Court has found that punitive damages should not generally exceed nine times the compensation damages.
Eric Haas, J&J’s vice president of global litigation, said in a statement that the company sued immediately, calling the verdict “severely unconstitutional.”
“The plaintiffs’ lawyers in this Moore case are based on discussions about ‘junk science’ that should never be presented to the ju judge,” Haas indicted.
The company says its products are safe, do not contain asbestos and do not cause cancer. This is not the first time Johnson & Johnson has been ordered to pay damages to his family after a lawsuit alleging a link between cancer and its baby powder products.
In 2016, a Missouri court ordered the company to pay $72 million to the family of Jacqueline Fox, who died of ovarian cancer.
In 2024, Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay $700 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging that consumers misunderstood about safety after an investigation brought on by 43 state attorney generals.
J&J stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the US in 2020 and switched to cornstarch products. By 2023, talc-based baby powders had also stopped selling.
Trey Branham, one of the lawyers representing Moore’s family, said after the verdict that his team “hopefully Johnson & Johnson will ultimately accept responsibility for these meaningless deaths.”
Thousands of lawsuits
J&J is facing lawsuits from more than 67,000 plaintiffs who say they were diagnosed with cancer after using baby powder and other talc products, according to court filings. The number of cases claiming that talc caused mesothelioma is a small subset of these cases, with the majority including claims of ovarian cancer.
J&J tried to settle the lawsuit through bankruptcy. This is a proposal that has been rejected three times by federal courts.
The lawsuit alleging that talc caused mesothelioma was not part of the last bankruptcy proposal. Many cases against Mesoterioma have been going to trial in state court in recent months as the company has previously settled some of these claims but never hit a national settlement.
Over the past year, J&J has suffered several substantial verdicts in mesothelioma cases, but Monday is the biggest. The company won several mesothelioma trials in South Carolina last week, and the ju judge determined that J&J is not responsible.
