A California jury on Friday found Monsanto liable in a lawsuit filed by a school groundskeeper who said the company’s weedkillers, including Roundup, caused his cancer. The company was ordered pay $289 million in damages.
The case of the groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, 46, was the first lawsuit to go to trial alleging that Roundup and other glyphosate-based weedkillers cause cancer. Monsanto, a unit of the German conglomerate Bayer following a $62.5 billion acquisition, faces more than 5,000 similar lawsuits across the United States.
Mr. Johnson’s lawyers said he developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after using Roundup and Ranger Pro, another Monsanto glyphosate herbicide, as part of his job as a pest control manager for a California county school system.
The jury in Superior Court of California in San Francisco deliberated for three days before finding that Monsanto had failed to warn Mr. Johnson and other consumers of the cancer risks posed by its weedkillers.
It awarded $39 million in compensatory and $250 million in punitive damages.
Monsanto said in a statement that it would appeal the verdict. More than 800 scientific studies and reviews “support the fact that glyphosate does not cause cancer, and did not cause Mr. Johnson’s cancer,” the company said.
The lawsuit, filed in 2016, was put on the fast track for trial because of the severity of Mr. Johnson’s cancer. His doctors said he was unlikely to live past 2020.
Brent Wisner, a lawyer for Mr. Johnson, said in a statement that jurors had seen for the first time internal company documents “proving that Monsanto has known for decades that glyphosate and specifically Roundup could cause cancer.” He called on Monsanto to “put consumer safety first over profits.”
in September 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded a decades-long assessment of glyphosate risks and found that the chemical was not likely carcinogenic to humans. But the World Health Organization’s cancer arm in 2015 classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
