A Georgia jury has awarded a man $2.1 billion in damages from the parent company of Monsanto, finding that its Roundup weed killer caused his cancer.
The verdict, reached late Friday, awards $65 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the plaintiff’s attorneys said in a statement. The plaintiff, John Barnes, sued the company in 2021, alleging that Roundup had caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that the company should have issued warnings about its “defective and unreasonably dangerous products,” reported The Washington Post.
It’s one of 177,000 lawsuits that have been filed under similar claims.
Monsanto and its parent company, the German conglomerate Bayer, maintain that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the product is not dangerous when used as directed, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer found in 2015 that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
Monsanto said it will appeal the verdict.
The case’s lead trial lawyer, Kyle Findley of Arnold & Itkin, told The Associated Press that the verdict marked an “important milestone” in counteracting “another example of Monsanto’s refusal to accept responsibility for poisoning people with this toxic product” and would help Barnes access needed treatment.
“It’s been a long road for him,” Findley said of his client, “and he was happy that the truth related to the product (has) been exposed.”