Chemicals giant Bayer AG won’t appeal a $20.5 million jury verdict against it over Roundup, a weedkiller containing glyphosate whose use a California school groundskeeper said gave him cancer.
Dewayne Anthony Lee Johnson, who worked for the Benicia Unified School District, sued Monsanto Co., claiming he developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma after being soaked in Roundup, which has been on the market since 1976 and contains glyphosate, the most popular herbicide in the United States. Bayer acquired Roundup with its 2018 purchase of Monsanto.
“I washed up in the sink as best I could and changed my clothes. Later, I went home and took a good long shower but I didn’t think, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to die from this stuff.’ Then I got a little rash. Then it got worse and worse and worse. At one point, I had lesions on my face, on my lips, all over my arms and legs.”
In addition to its use in gardening and groundskeeping, glyphosate also is widely used by farmers in the United States and Brazil on crops genetically engineered to withstand its herbicidal effect.
Glyphosate has been deemed a probable human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is part of the World Health Organization.
In 2018, a San Francisco jury unanimously ruled against the former Creve Coeur, Missouri-based Monsanto, which Bayer Aktiengesellschaft, a multinational pharmaceutical and life sciences company based in Leverkusen, Germany, purchased and absorbed that same year for $63 billion.
The jury awarded Johnson $289 million, which a judge reduced to $78 million.
The California Court of Appeals further reduced the award to $20.5 million, and last year, the California Supreme Court refused to review that decision. The Johnson award set off a frenzy of lawsuits over Roundup.
Bayer told reporters its decision not to seek review from the nation’s highest court reflected a “strategic consideration” that a $25 million judgment in a separate lawsuit, Hardeman v. Monsanto, was better suited for Supreme Court review, Reuters reported. Bayer is currently appealing that judgment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The company is also appealing a third jury verdict in California.
“Bayer and Monsanto saw the writing on the wall—the Johnson verdict was grounded in science and careful application of California law, and the Supreme Court was never going to upset the verdict,” Johnson lawyer Brent Wisner told Reuters.
Glyphosate will stay on the market. Bayer has agreed to seek permission from the EPA to provide a reference link on product labels so consumers can locate scientific studies on the weedkiller.
About $8.8 billion to $9.6 billion will be paid to settle current lawsuits, while $1.25 billion will be set aside for a separate class agreement to cover potential future lawsuits.
Werner Baumann, CEO of Bayer, said at the time that the settlement “resolves most current claims and puts in place a clear mechanism to manage risks of potential future litigation.”
