The case involves Deborah Giannecchini, a 62 year-old hospital secretary from Modesto, California.
She says she started using baby powder for feminine hygiene as a teenager in 1967 and used it for the next 45 years. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2012.
She is among dozens of women who filed a single lawsuit in St. Louis in 2014. Two other women in the same lawsuit had their cases go to trial earlier this year.
St. Louis is known for fast trials and big jury awards, and the first two trials were no exception. In February, a jury awarded $72 million to the family of Jacqueline Fox. Three months later, another jury awarded $55 million to Gloria Ristesund.
In both trials, jurors were shown memos from the 1990s in which Johnson & Johnson acknowledged concerns about cancer. Rather than issuing warnings, those same memos recommended increasing marketing efforts toward black and Hispanic women.
The trial went ahead after a judge refused to let Johnson & Johnson change the venue at least 100 miles away from St. Louis.
Johnson & Johnson’s lawyers argued that the jury pool in St. Louis was unfairly tainted by an extraordinary amount of law firm advertising and media coverage of the two big jury awards in early 2016.
The lawsuit was filed on June 23, 2014 in the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis, Missouri — In Re: Tiffany Hogans, et al. vs. Johnson & Johnson — Case No. 1442-CC09012.
Source: Bloomberg